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I decided to disable AMP on my site

alexkras.com

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Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#251

Post by [deleted] »

xiaoma wrote: post #180
matt4077 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The feature that defines a walled garden is the wall. AMP doesn't have that wall: it is perfectly usable by any other search engine/spider to replicate the experience. The website itself can link to the AMP version if that makes sense for users. Mobile browsers, or web servers, could check for and redirect to the AMP version. There's a slightly-higher wall for advertisers, I believe. But Google is rightfully afraid o…

Here's the wall: could any competitor to Google itself ever be on AMP? (E.g., a competitor to search, Gmail, YouTube, or adsense/adwords.) Or would it have to be something on the open web? And if only AMP pages get ranked well on Google in the future, how much harder would it be for such competitors to ever get noticed in the first place?

[deleted]

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#252

Post by accountyaccount »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #235
redial wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On that same metric good old plain HTML is faster.

Well, sure. But HN is one of the few major websites that uses plain old HTML. At other websites, developers have very little leverage. The people pushing for bloated websites are managers / executives, not devs. Hence, bloat. What can we do about this situation?

> At other websites, developers have very little leverage. The people pushing for bloated websites are managers / executives, not devs. Hence, bloat.

I found that AMP helps a lot in that marketing/exec teams see Google pushing AMP and think they need AMP.

My company built AMP equivalents, and honestly I wish we could ditch our entire React site for AMP.

Instead of an exec demanding a feature, we can now say "AMP doesn't support it." No matter how many times we've set performance budgets, management absolutely tears the budgets down the second we need to implement some flashy new feature (which for some reason is the perceived solution to every sales slump). A group of us has tried to use data against this at least a handful of times, but memories seem to be short lived.

Of course we need organizational change, but after pushing a stone up the hill over and over again you essentially just say "fuck it" and let it crush you. Bottom-up corporate change is a fool's errand.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#253

Post by type0 »

shawnz wrote: post #118
kuschku wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMP has the wall. Can I get the same display in the Google Search with or without AMP? No. That’s the wall.

Then is HTTPS also a wall, given that HTTPS results are favoured by Google search?

It would be if you had to use Googles as your CA, immediate or intermediate, whatever.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#254

Post by barsonme »

kavok wrote: post #214
sturmen wrote: post #201

There's a lot of backlash against AMP on principle, which I agree with and support. However, as a non-principled web consumer, I think AMP pages are 10x better than the ad-filled, slow as molasses, jump-around-as-JavaSript-loads, video autoplaying, 'stories you might like' suggested bullshit, auto-loading 20MB heaps of steaming garbage that current news sites are. I think that AMP is a stepping stone that shows the u…

On iOS I usually find AMP pages to be less usable. It forces a bar at the top and I can't easily share the link. Sometimes sites don't seem to work at all. For a long time any Reddit link on the Google Search results just didn't load on iOS for me. I run an adblocker and use reading mode frequently. I do not usually suffer any issues with ads even without AMP. It is solving a problem I do not have and creating more p…

Same here. Media (images, video, etc.) don't load at all and the site scrolls very quickly.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#256

Post by criddell »

untog wrote: post #199
criddell wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Google uses page load time as one of the ranking factors. If your non-AMP pages load quickly, you will be fine. I don't think they specifically reward AMP.

"I believe" "I don't think" Try looking for evidence instead. Do a Google search on mobile. Try to find a single carousel result that isn't an AMP page.

Not all of the carousel's are AMP. I just searched for Trump on Google news and the carousel didn't contain any AMP pages.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#257

Post by 0xffff2 »

forgotpwtomain wrote: post #231
sturmen wrote: post #201

There's a lot of backlash against AMP on principle, which I agree with and support. However, as a non-principled web consumer, I think AMP pages are 10x better than the ad-filled, slow as molasses, jump-around-as-JavaSript-loads, video autoplaying, 'stories you might like' suggested bullshit, auto-loading 20MB heaps of steaming garbage that current news sites are. I think that AMP is a stepping stone that shows the u…

> I think AMP pages are 10x better than the ad-filled, slow as molasses, jump-around-as-JavaSript-loads, Firefox on mobile supports extensions, so you can use UBlock Origin / UMatrix. Also the built-in reader mode makes most sites a much better experience.

>Firefox on mobile supports extensions

Unfortunately this isn't true on iOS as far as I can tell.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#258

Post by antisthenes »

torrent-of-ions wrote: post #133
klibertp wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've lived through different 90s then. Most of my early porn was loading for ages, first appearing partially, then slowly loading the rest, to finally display a 600x400 (full screen!) image. Well, I was rather young then, so one image was often enough, and the waiting time made it all the more... satisfying, but it sure as hell wasn't "loaded instantly" :)

I'm not talking about downloading images. I'm talking about web pages that contain information. Reading news, recipes etc.

Wouldn't you also say the modern web is being used for more than just reading text, though?

Online banking and shopping come to mind as 2 things that have greatly improved convenience for the average Joe user. Not to mention some interactive tutorials and complex calculators (is wolfram-alpha bloated? I honestly don't have the expertise to comment).

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#259

Post by kentt »

abritinthebay wrote: post #233
sturmen wrote: post #201

There's a lot of backlash against AMP on principle, which I agree with and support. However, as a non-principled web consumer, I think AMP pages are 10x better than the ad-filled, slow as molasses, jump-around-as-JavaSript-loads, video autoplaying, 'stories you might like' suggested bullshit, auto-loading 20MB heaps of steaming garbage that current news sites are. I think that AMP is a stepping stone that shows the u…

Speaking as someone who uses React: wut? My companies entire site JS, React and many other modules included, is 220kb over the wire (gzipped). Site bloat is a thing but it's due to bad developer practice not frameworks or libraries The single worst offender though for bloat are 3rd party ad networks - Google included/especially. The site often has minimal control over what is put in ad slots. Start pushing against go…

It sounds like you use React well and it's reasonably light and performant. The current project I'm on has a React frontend where typing in a text box is laggy due to how horrific the code base is. You're correct in saying that React is not to blame only it's misuse, however it is becoming a common cause of slowness.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#260

Post by dayjah »

jsnell wrote: post #142
dayjah wrote: post #72

There's a deep irony in AMP also, purely anecdotally it doesn't seem to help with slow connections. I'm traveling and as such my US carrier restricts me to 2G speeds while roaming somehow, which is resulting in me seeing a lot of butchered pages. As the author mentions: > AMP tries to load an image only when it becomes visible to the user, rendering a white square instead of the image. In my experience I’ve seen it f…

You're saying that AMP doesn't help with slow connections, based on AMP not loading all resources on 2G. But you're missing the data point for non-AMP pages on 2G. Are you sure it's not even worse? It's hard to believe how bloated many modern websites are, before trying to load them over 2G. We're talking megabytes of data and tens of connections to display what should be a 20kB of text.

Thanks for raising this. Anecdotally text in both cases appears to render first which makes sites workable. Images are consistently the laggards. In the AMP case the text content is always reasonable (i.e. formatted well) whereas in the non-AMP case you're beholden to whatever CSS the author applies which if it's lagged can cause re-draws - which are quite jarring.
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