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AMP pages displaying your own domain

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Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#131

Post by jsnell »

andy_ppp wrote: post #126
jsnell wrote: post #119

This is such a strange reaction from HN. The AMP cache URLs have been a top 3 complaint about AMP here. "I can't copy-paste URLs, it's hard for users to understand which site they are on, it looks like the content is provided by Google rather than the real provider", etc. Now there's a solution that preserves the preloading and validation benefits of AMP caches but maintains the original URLs, in a way that's cryptog…

Fair enough but there is now zero need to load them from the AMP cache at all - this security model could allow News Carousel to load them from the originating site and still have access to the pre-rendering instant load magic/lies that AMP provides. It feels a little dodgy to me this standard and a bit embrace extend but I'll see how it plays out and reserve judgement until we see this happening in the wild and how…

If you're loading the content from the originating site, surely there's no benefit at all to signing. If you're loading the content directly from the site, the browser just needs TLS to verify the integrity of the content.

And you're also back to the situation where you can't preload the content in a controlled manner or privacy-preserving manner, nor have the page-speed guarantees since the version being served to the user is not the version that Google crawled.

It's kind of the opposite. The cache is where the actual benefits come from. That's not the part you want to get rid of. The AMP spec was just a vehicle for making the caching possible in a secure manner.

This model would theoretically allow the validation, caching and prefetching to be done for all (signed, so opt-in by the publisher) HTML pages. Which is another one of the historical top complaints about AMP: why can't light, fast-loading, mobile-friendly HTML get the same treatment in search results.

> Can you maybe see that people feel the browser is now lying to them about where the content is coming from?

I can see that they are feeling like that, I just don't understand how they arrived there.

How is this different from a e.g. company X's website being behind Cloudflare? The browser didn't contact the actual server that company X hosted the content on. Instead the browser contacted a server run by Cloudflare that could prove cryptographically (via TLS) that it was authorized to serve content on behalf of the actual site.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#132

Post by mrweasel »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #7

Let’s hope AMP, like most google products, is shut down within the next 2-3 years

What's wrong with it exactly... beside being weird. I'm not a fan of manipulating the URL the way they do with this change, but couldn't you just opt to not use AMP if you don't like it?

Ideally people would develop fast sites on their own, but apparently they need the help of Google.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#133

Post by lucideer »

gregable wrote: post #72
48309248302 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are legitimate (privacy/speed) reasons to not load AMP's JavaScript while still not turning of JavaScript entirely. Google does have the capability to know when you're on an AMP page, because the JS loads from ampproject.org, which is registered by Google. An 8-second delay seems like an intentional "bug" to coerce users to turn on JavaScript (and advertising).

The javascript is heavily cached, so will not give a request on every page load. That is not the intention. If javascript is disabled entirely, Google Search won't even load AMP pages. The scenario you describe of a user loading an AMP page directly without javascript enabled is somewhat rare.

I don't use Google Search, and I frequently get sent to Google's AMP cache via other link sources (e.g. HN).

I don't have javascript blocked, but I do have Google's tracking blocked via standard tracking protection (which is now a built-in feature in most non-Google browsers), which means tags are not triggered, and I get the 8 second delay due to non-loading JS resources.

I don't think my setup is as rare as you make out.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#134

Post by mtberatwork »

jsnell wrote: post #119

This is such a strange reaction from HN. The AMP cache URLs have been a top 3 complaint about AMP here. "I can't copy-paste URLs, it's hard for users to understand which site they are on, it looks like the content is provided by Google rather than the real provider", etc. Now there's a solution that preserves the preloading and validation benefits of AMP caches but maintains the original URLs, in a way that's cryptog…

Well, I wouldn't call this a solution just yet. If you read through the documentation, you'll find that this won't work on shared hosts and requires a TLS certificate "that supports the CanSignHttpEchanges flag. As of April 2019, only DigiCert provides this extension." [1] Plus, as if the lift of transforming HTML into AMP HTML wasn't already big enough for your average web site owner, implementing signed exchanges will be over the head of 99% of the folks building web pages on the Web.

IMO, while the URL problem was a big issue, the bigger issue is that AMP's restrictions and limitations gives your users a neutered user experience in the final end. As others have pointed out, if it wasn't for Google's implicit requirement to implement AMP (e.g. to get into their carousel and other locations), AMP would have been DOA.

[1] https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/optimize-...

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#135

Post by cannedslime »

jsnell wrote: post #119

This is such a strange reaction from HN. The AMP cache URLs have been a top 3 complaint about AMP here. "I can't copy-paste URLs, it's hard for users to understand which site they are on, it looks like the content is provided by Google rather than the real provider", etc. Now there's a solution that preserves the preloading and validation benefits of AMP caches but maintains the original URLs, in a way that's cryptog…

My biggest quarrel with this is that its just another way for google to take control over the internet. Does any other search provider than google use AMP? Does any browser other than googles own support this? How busy are you? You can't wait 0.5 seconds for an HTTP request? And you think its worth feeding google with more precise data about your movements online than they already have? And as a business integrating AMP, loose control over your own content and platform? Why?

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#137

Post by themacguffinman »

abc-xyz wrote: post #121
themacguffinman wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because users want relevant search results much more than fast websites. Google already factors in a website's performance in their rankings, but weighing it too much over content relevance will make search results worse.

What's the difference between influencing positions and visibility based on AMP support vs overall page performance? If visibility is influenced by AMP then Google benefits, users using Google services likely benefit, web developers suffer, users not using Google services to view the content continue to suffer (because companies will continue to maintain two versions of the website, a bloated version with 100 externa…

Some differences:

- AMP is a transparent and unambiguous standard that leaves no uncertainty as to whether you are somehow "performant enough" to qualify for the simple but limited visibility boost (referring to the news carousel)

- AMP prevents important usability problems beyond performance, like page content jumping

- AMP can enable advanced/extreme performance optimizations by default that are somewhat rare in practice (eg. only loading images above the fold) or isn't really possible to do safely/properly without a spec like AMP (eg. preloading content before the user clicks the link without unpredictably disrupting the website's servers) or sometimes avoided due to cost (eg. fast global caching with Google's impressive CDN). Important for users in the developing world.

Addressing your other points:

- Users who don't use Google services don't suffer. AMP is not Google-exclusive, all the major search engines (like Bing, Yahoo, Yandex) are stakeholders in the AMP standard and are free to support AMP. AFAIK there is nothing in the AMP standard that favors Google over other search engines or any other platform that might support AMP.

- Not sure how web developers suffer more from AMP. I'd think web developers would suffer more from trying to wrangle their bloated website performance independently rather than use a standard toolkit that enforces best practices and enables difficult/expensive optimizations out of the box.

- It's not clear to me how the internet as a whole will suffer, but I suspect this is just general hyperbole and not a specific point.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#138

Post by andy_ppp »

jsnell wrote: post #131
andy_ppp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough but there is now zero need to load them from the AMP cache at all - this security model could allow News Carousel to load them from the originating site and still have access to the pre-rendering instant load magic/lies that AMP provides. It feels a little dodgy to me this standard and a bit embrace extend but I'll see how it plays out and reserve judgement until we see this happening in the wild and how…

If you're loading the content from the originating site, surely there's no benefit at all to signing. If you're loading the content directly from the site, the browser just needs TLS to verify the integrity of the content. And you're also back to the situation where you can't preload the content in a controlled manner or privacy-preserving manner, nor have the page-speed guarantees since the version being served to t…

> If you're loading the content from the originating site, surely there's no benefit at all to signing. If you're loading the content directly from the site, the browser just needs TLS to verify the integrity of the content.

The browser security model stops them from doing this, but presumably in this new world they could allow this to work and not host the content in the carousel themselves.

I think the argument about content suddenly becoming "slow" and no longer AMP validated if it's not served from the AMP cache is a poor one.

Finally I'm willing to postpone judgement but I did just explain why people feel that Google is embracing and extending the web if you can't understand why people are worried about this that's not something I can help you with ;-)

Cloudflare does not have the same scope, power, monopoly or scale that Google have - I can change CDN provider if they start doing weird stuff, no problem, but I can never really get away from Google.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#139

Post by Agebor »

strictnein wrote: post #55

Remember the talk about how the Chrome team was going to "rethink" the navbar, and what domain and site identity really mean? And people were a little worried about this? Turns out people were right to be suspicious. This is hot garbage. You can no longer ask a user "What URL does your navbar say you're at?". It is no longer a source of truth. They will actively be lied to.

But what does it mean that you are on a particular URL?

For a long time already it's not being connecter to a particular physical server. Now it's the next step - to be completely decoupled from the server and just mean content instead.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#140

Post by Illniyar »

After reading all of the comments here, this seems like a good thing.

This fixes the main UI issues with how AMP is currently used in google search - mainly the url not properly showing where the content is.

If secure exchange is treated the same as AMP pages in google search, I.E. SXG content will be preloaded whether or not it's AMP, it would get rid of the second complaint of AMP - that google's preloading of the content is an unfair playing ground and that the only reason it's fast is because it's preloaded.

If SXG is treated the same as AMP in the carousal then that would fix the last and most serious complaint about AMP.

As far as I can tell, google do seem to be moving in that route, so this should be applauded not derided (the original fiasco that is AMP non-withstanding)

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