191–200 of 247 posts
I think HN crowd doesn't fully appreciate the benefits of AMP to people having slow connections. In third world countries still on 2G networks AMP has been an absolute boon. Additionally, lot of these users have limited data packs so they're better served by pages which are light in data consumption. This is true even for a lot of low income neighborhoods in the US. Making AMP opt-in would defeat the purpose as a lot…
I think the root issue here is that most websites are now designed by people who don't even know HTML. ("You had one job!") From there, we get years of unoptimized, bloated websites made by people drawing pictures with HTML editors. They are exclusively focused on visual presentation and ignore any mechanics under the hood. Not everyone, but most. Finally Google can't take it anymore and creates AMP as an angry middl…
> From there, we get years of unoptimized, bloated websites made by people drawing pictures with HTML editors. One look at the source code for most popular sites shows this isn't true – and that makes sense because when you look at the average sluggish site the bloat is mostly JavaScript rather than the HTML source. What's actually happening is that a bunch of people are working hard on something which is important t…
Although I reject the idea that popular websites are representative of the web in general, let's investigate that anyway. Currently on the HN homepage:
1. Netflix blog post scores 73/100 and 85/100 on Google PageSpeed Insights.
2. Flickr post gets 67/100 and 83/100 on PageSpeed.
3. Google's own post gets 61/100 and 79/100 -- oops!
4. gatech.edu gets 66/100 and 82/100.
All bad, decided to stop there. Even many/most popular pages are bad (careful reading shows that I didn't say all) . This jives with what I've seen as someone who looks at Google PageSpeed Insights A LOT.
> average sluggish site the bloat is mostly JavaScript rather than the HTML source
Someone "drawing pictures with HTML editors" as I said is still going to add JavaScript, images, css, etc. They'll also specifically add tons of unoptimized images that aren't even losslessly optimized, let alone put through manual lossy optimizations. I bet the average webmaster can't even define lossless and lossy.
FWIW I think AMP is just awful. In contrast, Google PageSpeed Insights is amazing. I adore the PageSpeed website and recommend it wholeheartedly. It's been a huge help to me.
The solution to this mess is competition, not centralization. Make speed a major ranking signal and let the ecosystem say goodbye to those who can't hang.
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Which is exactly the point. Use it as a stronger signal and case closed. Web will change the way they want. Always. Right now they want to change it to their walled garden.
If they've been using it for six years, and it hasn't improved things, what makes you think using it as a stronger signal will (a) actually improve things, (b) not make it trivial to game SEO?
Citation?
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I hate the scrolling on mobile (iOS). I don't know what they tried to do, it feels like a JavaScript smooth scrolling on top of native smooth scrolling.
I believe that for some reason, possibly because of the way the pages are set up with the top bar that shows you the URL of the real page (since the AMP page is hosted on google.com and breaks the normal function of the URL bar), they use an element with CSS `overflow: scroll` to hold the main page content. There's a trick to making those elements have momentum scrolling, but it has different acceleration settings th…
I think HN crowd doesn't fully appreciate the benefits of AMP to people having slow connections. In third world countries still on 2G networks AMP has been an absolute boon. Additionally, lot of these users have limited data packs so they're better served by pages which are light in data consumption. This is true even for a lot of low income neighborhoods in the US. Making AMP opt-in would defeat the purpose as a lot…
I hate AMP. Not even kind of, I mean so much I've started using Bing (DuckDuckGo hasn't been so useful for me). Beyond the distasteful navigation hijacking, and often broken or buggy page loading... I think Google throwing its weight around to force publishers to use it is an abusive use of power. I also think it's an unnecessary standard since it's nothing more than simple well wittten HTML and CSS. Yes, we should m…
AMP is horrible and I wish European Union or someone would hit hard on google. They are essentially forcing websites to format the sites in exactly the way Google wants, then they steal the content. All these google SEO guidelines inevitable end up helping google becoming even more powerful abusing their almost monopoly in search engine market. When power is too concentrated in one area, its never a good sign for the…
The speed improvements and mobile friendliness should be the only criteria that the Google ranking engine should use for boosting the SERP rankings of these articles using it, not simply the fact they use AMP. But objectively measuring the quality of these page vs other unoptimized sites - which I hope is currently what Google is doing. That way there is nothing monopolistic about it.
Considering how awful most news sites are JS/ad-wise Google is attempting to solve a problem the publishers themselves created. Sites like Forbes are notorious for loading mb's of ads and they have that ridiculous quotes splash page. It also does away with annoying pop up modals news sites love to use.
So if these sites rankings are getting hurt because of their failure to offer good caching, image optimization, reducing the size of JS assets, etc, etc, to offer a competitive experience with AMP pages then I see nothing wrong with that. The competition will be good for users.
As long as publishers are voluntarily using this because it improves their UX then I'm fine with it.
Ideally in the long run this is just a stop gag until these publishers learn how to optimize their own sites. Then they can move off the platform. I don't see it as a viable permanent solution given the compromises involved and nor should the publishers.
My only complaint is the URLs are prefixed with Google.com making it harder to share direct links. But otherwise the UX improvements are worth the tradeoffs - in the meantime at least. If it's still the default in 2-3 yrs and news sites haven't fixed their sites I might take issue with it.
Edit: I did some testing and it looks like Google puts AMP articles in a carousel at a higher prioritized position vs other news stories. They aren't mixed with other news sites... that's not cool.
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Hacker News loads very fast without AMP. Daring Fireball loads very fast without AMP. Lots of sites do. That's up to the people making the sites to fix. He's the thing: I CAN'T OPT OUT. If I don't like it or don't want it my only option is to ditch Google.
You're not claiming the solution to the slow web is that every website should look like HN or Daring Fireball, are you?
There's a lot of hate going on in this thread towards Google ... maybe unfairly. Keep in mind, a huge reason why Google created AMP is because website bloat has gotten out of control. It's not uncommon for a simply Wordpress blog to be 4MB in size and have 70 requested objects to fetch. I live in a geography that has LTE and web site are painfully slow to load on mobile devices. I can't even imagine what the Internet…
You have a valid point about page bloat, but its a distraction and a poor excuse for hijacking the entire web. My hate for AMP is because Google is using its might to break a fundamental contract for how the web works - the URL bar shows what site you're on, and content is coming from that domain. No other site has gotten away with this. The last time I can recall someone attempting something similar was Digg (rememb…
I hate AMP. Not even kind of, I mean so much I've started using Bing (DuckDuckGo hasn't been so useful for me). Beyond the distasteful navigation hijacking, and often broken or buggy page loading... I think Google throwing its weight around to force publishers to use it is an abusive use of power. I also think it's an unnecessary standard since it's nothing more than simple well wittten HTML and CSS. Yes, we should m…
I posted a complaint here a while back and the response I got made me wonder what I was missing. Like I was the only one who didn't appreciate it.
Yeah, I get that it speeds things up. But, do they really have to prevent you from linking out to the publisher's full site? There is no legitimate reason to serve up the publisher's content and force me back to Google. Can't even share the underlying URL. They are essentially hiding sites, but displaying their content. It's a hijack and I'm not sure why publishers approve.
And, on a recent search, the SERP only showed AMP, without the site name. Had to click thru before I even knew which site it was. Don't know if that was a bug or something they are testing.
Way too much power.