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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

#321

Post by acdha »

ashark wrote: post #192
josteink wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where is this open standard to make pages lod faster? Not filling a page of what is effectively 80KB static text-content with 20MBs of JS, fonts, tracking-code and other "assets" would be a good start. The web isn't slow. People deliberately create slow web-pages because they care more about user-tracking and "fancy" technology than they care about user-experience. And making Google a pre-requisite for any web-page…

At some point... god, most of a decade ago now, I guess, it seems like the kinds of people doing web design changed and this new crop didn't care about or understand bandwidth constraints like the old ones did. Strangely, this was around the same time "digital native" instead of "print influenced" design got big, so you'd think it'd have gone the other way, but it definitely did not . In fact, I'd say the much-deride…

> At some point... god, most of a decade ago now, I guess, it seems like the kinds of people doing web design changed and this new crop didn't care about or understand bandwidth constraints like the old ones did.

This is a cyclical problem because people tend not to measure performance until they notice a problem, which means it's a function of both technical factors and user expectations. The rise of mobile added a confusion point since it basically dropped back to dial-up/DSL-class networking after the overall web community had had a decade to get used to cable modem-grade performance and made wasting bandwidth a direct cost rather than just inefficiency. In the mid-2000s, using a big JavaScript toolkit wasn't great but it wasn't so bad when you could assume that most users had better latency than even LTE delivers and user expectations hadn't adjusted for the post-IE era.

The other big factor is the ongoing decline of advertising as a viable business model. The worst offenders I see are either ads or the measurement tools publishers use to document their site's performance, and that's been getting continually worse as everyone keeps chasing diminishing returns.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#322

Post by mikewhy »

mthoms wrote: post #270
mikewhy wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, and I consider it a modal over the search results, not the page that hasn't been displayed yet.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#323

Post by niutech »

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…

Have more optimism. AMP is all about performance and fighting web bloat, which is a real problem nowadays. This is how a typical mobile web page looks like: https://i.redd.it/t6u12tcocx5z.jpg and AMP is a radical but effective step towards the faster web. Additionally, AMP Cache loads content in less than no time and saves bandwidth and load on original servers, which reduces costs.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#324

Post by seanwilson »

sixstringtheory wrote: post #315
seanwilson wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't need AMP to get rid of them though. We can appreciate that Google encouraged developers to get rid of bloat AND to opt-in for AMP, but that doesn't make AMP technically superior. I think we should give a critique of ourselves and ask why did we wait for a corporation G to push us to get rid of the bloat we created? AMP (or something like it) makes it easier to push recommended practices to upper managemen…

While your point is valid, it's a sad state of affairs when engineers and their managers can't even be trusted to make good decisions for themselves, and have to outsource their judgement to Google under the guise of having your hands tied. The irony, it would seem, is that you're actually tying your own hands in other ways. Of course, we could argue till the cows come home about what "good" judgement is :)

> While your point is valid, it's a sad state of affairs when engineers and their managers can't even be trusted to make good decisions for themselves, and have to outsource their judgement to Google under the guise of having your hands tied. The irony, it would seem, is that you're actually tying your own hands in other ways.

Well, when you've got your project managers, marketing people, coders etc. all trying to optimise for different things, each group doesn't understand each other and team member expertise differs I don't think it's that weird that issues like blocking JavaScript, encoding image sizes in HTML etc. aren't top priority.

For website speed, anything that makes it easier to know what the right thing to do is without debate is going to help. Even within a team of experienced web developers it isn't obvious what the best approach is because there's so many options.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#325

Post by godzillabrennus »

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…

Kind of like how selling socks shouldn't require a 60MB video autoloading. Yet http://www.sockfancy.com has a huge video that automatically loads and plays on desktops.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#326

Post by codedokode »

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…

Publishers want revenue, not fast sites. I think that is the root of the problem.

Instead of AMP a better solution could be to add buttons to browser to disable JS/CSS/Web Fonts (the most useless innovation)/Cookies and let the user decide what they want to see.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#327

Post by klibertp »

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.

Well, hypertext is "hyper" because it is more than just text - images, animations, as well as links, are the most basic building blocks of the Web. It's not like we've invented animated GIFs in the current decade - the pages in the 90s were as full of unnecessary "things" as they are now; if there's a difference it's in what things the tech lets you shove into your HTML.

Also, you can get pretty close to the experience from the 90s if you disable loading images in your browser and/or use uMatrix or something similar. You'd be amazed how much faster it makes the web, at least on the pages which support plain HTML (instead of rendering everything in JS). You will be missing most of the visual bells and whistles, but it was also like that back in the day: not only did graphic elements (and don't even mention Java applets) take forever to load, they frequently stopped loading altogether, leaving you with a cute Netscape icon in a place where the image should be.

I guess what I want to say is that there was never a time when a majority of "webmasters" designed their pages for simplicity. People creating the web pages were testing the limits of the medium since its inception, and what we have now is a consequence of the limits being removed by better technology.

In other words, people who create websites were always shooting themselves and their users in the foot, back then with some ASG, then later with increasingly potent guns and now they're shooting with 10 meters long cannon. And it's not going to get any better, unfortunately, because most people want their eye candy - just as much now as back in the nineties.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#328

Post by vengefulduck »

AznHisoka wrote: post #78
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.

Can you elaborate? sites that dont implement AMP still appear in google news and even above AMP results as far as I can tell

It only affects the carousel at the top of the site

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#329

Post by odbol_ »

virmundi wrote: post #303
abritinthebay wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there is - but consumers prefer free + ads to micro-payments or subscriptions. Granted there has been pushback recently but that's usually due to gross abuse of ads. The only realistic way that I see forward are the ad networks (and this includes Google) setting lower maximum payload sizes for ads. Obviously sites can push back on quality and size but it's a hard metric to track consistently given how ad networ…

There are no micro payments out there that would support the site. You'd need to charge something like 0.0005 cents per view. No currency exchange supports something small. In reality, it would make people money. The consumer could limit their account to $20/m. On the other hand, micropayment would freeze out poor people.

No, poor people would just see ads because they can't pay to remove them. Although I guess that's not a great target market...

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#330

Post by p49k »

criddell wrote: post #319
abraham wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile or desktop? On mobile the carousel was 100% AMP. On Desktop the "top stories" was 0% AMP.

Mobile. I have a Nexus 5X. I was using the default Chrome browser.

That's strange. I only see AMP pages now, and I have only ever seen AMP pages in the carousel for at least the past couple of months. Maybe they're doing some kind of A/B test for some users.
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