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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

#261

Post by shostack »

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…

Can you elaborate on the Reddit issue? I experienced something similar (just a white page, no app opening, etc). Curious if this is the same thing.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#262

Post by mthoms »

vorpalhex wrote: post #172
acdha wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an over-simplification: 1. Users have no control: if you want real URLs or the full experience, you have to work around AMP or stop using Google. 2. It's technically true that publishers can choose whether to use AMP but Google rank is a make-or-break issue for many publishers and that means the decisions is made under the threat of losing out to competitors who use AMP even if your site is already just as fas…

1. Correct, I mean opt-in from the publishers, who seem to be the exclusive people complaining 2. Yes. As a user who really enjoys amp and really hates that every single text-based news source takes over a minute to load on a 100Mb/s+ connection, I feel not bad at all. Not even the tiniest bit. Publishers entirely brought this upon themselves. Internet speeds are faster than they've ever been, and websites are the sl…

>>1. Correct, I mean opt-in from the publishers, who seem to be the exclusive people complaining

There are all kinds of complaints on this very page about how AMP negatively alters the user experience (stupid urls, broken scrolling, bar covering 1/3 of the content, broken UI, inability to turn it off, etc).

Those don't sound to me like "exclusive" publisher complaints.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#263

Post by dexterdog »

CaptSpify wrote: post #224
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've always said: The problem AMP is trying to solve is very real. It's the way that Google is trying to solve it that is a problem. What Google should be doing is encouraging the right designs, instead of pushing their own walled-garden design.

Unfortunately encouraging better design won't do much to most of the web. You have to guide with a heavy hand.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#264

Post by RonanTheGrey »

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…

As a predominantly frontend developer, I sometimes (just for giggles) check to see the page load of pages I visit. It always dismays me to see a site's own resources only take 200-500kb of bandwidth... and then all the ads and associated requests take another 25MB. It's quite common and I keep thinking there must be a better way..

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#265

Post by CaptSpify »

dexterdog wrote: post #263
CaptSpify wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always said: The problem AMP is trying to solve is very real. It's the way that Google is trying to solve it that is a problem. What Google should be doing is encouraging the right designs, instead of pushing their own walled-garden design.

Unfortunately encouraging better design won't do much to most of the web. You have to guide with a heavy hand.

I'd strongly disagree. If you hit them where it hurts, they'll change. I'll even argue that we haven't really tried encouraging sites to be better.

If Google ranked load-time/page-bloat much heavier in their algorithm, and started punishing bad pages, then sites would adjust.

I currently see very little action from Google in this direction.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#266

Post by mikeash »

shostack wrote: post #261
kavok wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you elaborate on the Reddit issue? I experienced something similar (just a white page, no app opening, etc). Curious if this is the same thing.

I see it too. I think it's my content blocker (I use Firefox Focus). Easy enough workaround: tap the link icon at the top, then tap the link, and you'll open the page directly without Google's bullshit proxying. Still quite annoying, though. Any time I do a Google search and there's a choice of AMP and non-AMP results, I go for the non-AMP ones. I like having pages that load fast and aren't full of junk, but not as much as I like having pages that scroll properly.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#267

Post by valladanger »

I agree with most of the article, but I think that my browsing experience with news (and similar) websites has been improved overall by AMP in a way that I almost regret visiting websites that offer no support for it. On the other hand, I also think that publishers need more control over their content and how they serve it to their users. Having said that, if AMP were to be integrated with GCP it could improve the service for everyone involved, not only publishers and consumers (yes, even for Google itself); for example, a publisher could have an AMP Cloud Storage bucket configured under the domain of the publisher in order to use the its identity and not google's one. On the consumer's end it could be as simple as a switch to turn off amp results for a single session or for every single one. At the end of the day, lets not forget that it is a fairly new approach to improve the web experience (and not a bad one at all) and there are options and many paths that AMP could follow in order to become a better experience for everyone.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#268

Post by coldtea »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #196
coldtea wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have no desire to "click through" to anything. I want my piece of information, a raw fact. Do you also want the original content creators to starve and die off and the only competent content source left to be either Google's archive or Google's lacklustre service for the same thing?

As I said many times in discussions about ad-blockers - I think that content that can't exist in a non-ad-supported way can stop existing, we'll all be better off. Almost anything that's valuable on-line is either a marketing expense or done pro bono. Also, I didn't mean I want a Google-dominated reality. Only said that this particular feature - content in search results - is a step in the right direction; it showcas…

>Almost anything that's valuable on-line is either a marketing expense or done pro bono.

So, like Netflix?

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#269

Post by notadoc »

From a user perspective, the speed of AMP is nice but I absolutely hate not being able to see the original URL of a site.

I want to see the original URL, certainly not a CDN mirror URL that could obfuscate or muddy the source.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#270

Post by mthoms »

mikewhy wrote: post #244
w33ble wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If user were to click “x” in the screenshot above, they will be taken back to Google search results. > As a user, this is what I want. That's what the back button is for though. For me, I consider AMP pages a kind of in-between page. I searched on Google, and Google is showing me the AMP page, and not the real website's page. This is apparent by the URL in the address bar. I expect that clicking the close button w…

That's not what I would expect a close button to do, at all. It seems like you're expecting it to actually work like a forward button?

Every single site these days has a modal or overlay that obscures/distorts the content.

People have learned that clicking that little X gets rid of the obstruction so they can view the page as it was intended.

You probably dismiss hundreds of these EU cookie notices per week.

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