Live data from Hacker News

AMP pages displaying your own domain

webmasters.googleblog.com

281–290 of 340 posts

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#281
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Converting web pages into AMP isn't something you can automate, but supporting signed exchanges is. You need certificate authorities to support the flag and web servers support the protocol, but if this catc…

How do you personally feel about AMP? It looks like an attempt to make the web a walled garden.

AMP has a lot of things all together, some of which I like:

* I like that when AMP is used for ads then the ads are fully declarative. Advertisers getting to run custom javascript, even in a cross-domain iframe, isn't great.

* I like that AMP allows sites (currently primarily search engines) to trigger preloading in a way that doesn't leak information to the site that is being preloaded.

* I like the way things like "sorry AMP only allows us to use 50k of CSS" can give developers leverage to push back against bad site designs.

* I like that it centralizes some measurements: instead of every ad provider using their own custom polling system to determine if the ad is on screen they can all subscribe to events triggered by a single well written system. This doesn't affect the amount of tracking (there's lots either way) but it makes it hurt the user experience less.

On the other hand, I don't like that:

* AMP uses a ton of JS, and if all you want is a simple website it's going to slow things down in the non-preloaded case. For example, taking a random post on my site (https://www.jefftk.com/p/trycontra-implementation and https://www.jefftk.com/p/trycontra-implementation.amp) I see a median speed index of 1.611s on non-AMP but 2.051s on AMP: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/190417_XB_22673cb98ce390a... https://www.webpagetest.org/result/190417_PS_1a60378762d87fb...

* A lot of people that don't want to implement AMP are doing it because then they get more search traffic. I understand how there isn't currently a non-AMP way of doing preloading in a way that doesn't leak information to the site (see above) but I think Web Packaging should be extended to support this in the general case and allow publishers to use AMP only if they want to.

* The interaction between AMP and content blockers isn't great. If you have a content blocker set to allow some JS but not all (for example, no third party JS) then it's not going to run the AMP JS or the contents of the block, and AMP pages will render with 8s of white screen before the CSS times out. This is a pain, but I'm not sure what the right way to fix it would be. (I wish content blockers were smart enough to figure out which tags to run, but that's probably asking too much.)

If you wanted to expand on how AMP seems like an attempt at a walled garden I would be interested in reading it; I haven't previously read any explanations that made sense.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#282
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A browser already doesn't show you what server delivered the content. That would be your wifi AP, cell phone tower, or ISP node. No. Incorrect. Completely backwards. Factually wrong. You just failed your networking-exam. Those things you mentioned would be transparent networking nodes forwarding your TCP-packets and they have nothing to do with any layers above that. The fact that you don’t even know this completel…

I think you're missing the point of the GP. It says that you don't know and you don't care which particular server returns your content - is it a self hosted machine, is it a cloud machine, is it a CDN? No way of knowing unless you inspect the deeper stack. What you see very visible is which BRAND (I. E. URL) returned your content. So this Amp exhange technology changes nothing in this regard. It's like Google provid…

> It says that you don't know and you don't care which particular server returns your content

Which is plain wrong. I care.

When the URL-bar says I’m looking at company.com, I expect my browser to have used my OS’s DNS-resolver to look that name up, connect to the IP-given and nothing else.

I certainly don’t expect it to send traffic to certainly-not-the-nsa.com which are MITMing my traffic and tracking/monitoring it.

If I can’t trust my browsers URL-bar to exclusively and accurately reflect what is actually requested, it is effectively lying to me, the user, it’s owner.

And then suddenly all URLs are phishing URLs because Google made URLs no longer matter or mean anything.

Completely unacceptable.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#283
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't see AMP if you switch search engines.

Bing implements AMP, and there's nothing technically stopping other search engines from adding support. Also, links in the Twitter app default to AMP as well.

Good for most people they use neither of those things then.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's served from Google, so they still control all the analytics

No they don't. The page contents are controlled by the publisher and cryptographically signed so Google can't alter it. Another improvement over the previous situation.

Since it’s not fetched from the publisher they will have to use Google analytics or have nothing.

Guess what they’re going to choose.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#285

Semi-related, I think Web Packages and Signed Exchanges could have some usefulness outside of Google's caches. One of their spec examples was for verifiable web page archives. Another idea it could be used for a wifi "drop box" (drop station?) when there's no internet connection around. That isn't uncommon at some popular spots up river into the woods in the US. The idea is that as people enter the area, they can upd…

Unfortunately, signed packages won't work for archival or any significant offline use. The signed exchanges are forced to be short lived (in days) to limit the damage that can be done when someone steals a TLS private key.

It's a very narrow spec designed just for AMP, basically.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#286

I can’t believe there is no way to opt out of AMP as the end user. The UX is so terrible. Often times I will search for something and have a Reddit result come back. When I tap the link, I get the AMP page which: * does not show all comments, often ones I am actually looking for * does not let me collapse comment sections * uses the default white background theme which burns my retinas if I am looking at my phone in…

Use something like Searx [1], either self-hosted or hosted by someone or some organisation you trust. You can still get Google search results if you feel the need, either by explicitly asking for them (!go for search, !goi for images, !gon for news, !gos for scholar, !gov for video) or by enabling the Google engines in your config. In the latter case you get Google results mixed up with the other enabled engines. The results are presented as normal links without redirection through the originating search engine.

Searx can be extended so it would be possible to create a plugin which rewrites AMP links into non-AMP equivalents, where available. It can already do things like Open Access DOI rewrite (Avoid paywalls by redirecting to open-access versions of publications when available) so the ground work has been done. I'm currently working on improving (and fixing, where necessary) the image search engines and will probably start on such a plugin if nobody else beats me to it.

[1] https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by not using Chrome you don't end up on an AMP page, I consider that a feature.

Google is unethically abusing their power against non-Chromium browsers like Firefox. Speed matters in the eyes of users, even if we individually block AMP. See the link below for a general pattern. https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

Google just gives users what they want. I've checked the link you provided and the website is total wreck in terms of user experience (subscription popup, large obtrusive ad banners and so on).

I have push notification disabled but it wouldn't be surprise for me if they asking to subscribe for push notifications on the first page view.

Current era of content websites is a disaster except few cases like medium and maybe reddit with a discount.

AMP is an only solution for general users who just want to google a cooking recipe or latest news in their town.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they don't. The page contents are controlled by the publisher and cryptographically signed so Google can't alter it. Another improvement over the previous situation.

Since it’s not fetched from the publisher they will have to use Google analytics or have nothing. Guess what they’re going to choose.

Google Analytics isn't the only analytics solution out there. Publishers can use literally _any_ method of gathering analytics that's not server logs.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#289

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.

By that logic then, what's the point of AMP if Google is saying page load speeds aren't really that big of a factor? Why go through through the trouble of deriving a whole new subset of HTML ?

I discuss this in another reply chain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19681408

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2. How many URL's do you load in a day? My browsing history over the last 10 years averages to 417 pages per day. 2 seconds per URL is 35 days of my life... I totally want that time saved if possible.

Making everything faster won't give you more time.

That's literally not true.

It looks like you were trying to make some deeper philosophical point, but you'll have to be clearer because your statement makes no sense.

Post reply on HN