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How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

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Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#541

Post by JoshMnem »

gregable wrote: post #530
JoshMnem wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who block JS by default but who don't want to completely turn off JavaScript encounter that 8-second delay. (I'm using "ad-blocker" loosely -- it refers to any kind of tool that blocks ads and tracking. On my computer, it's blocked at the hosts level in addition to an add-on.) Some people don't want to load resources from Google's servers, and they shouldn't be punished for it. That JS file isn't needed for AM…

Without the Javascript file, the images will not load. AMP loads images using a custom element which has performance benefits such as lazy loading of images until they are close to the visible viewport and guaranteeing a stable layout that will not cause the elements on the page to jump around. The downside is that until Javascript is loaded, these images are not available to the browser.

Not seeing images is better than not seeing the page at all. People who block content know that things sometimes don't load. There is no reason to block loading of the pages for 8 seconds.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#542

Post by buboard »

azylman wrote: post #416
buboard wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

those statements sound like incredible cherrypicking does 1.11% sound a lot an is it statistically significant? cut page in half from what to what? from 30 to 15 seconds? or from 2 to 1? improving one second like how? from 12 to 11 or from 2 to 1? and is 2% really substantial?

Large companies spend a LOT of money trying to increase conversions by even tenths of a percent. Yes, 2% is substantial.

yeah , large companies. like , the 50-100 top sites right? Why would everybody else care about minor speed improvements

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#543

Post by buboard »

mrtksn wrote: post #191
buboard wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> users leave websites if they are not loading fast then google is doing a bad job of presenting these sites to users, since obviously these sites should lose their rank, since users leave them. Google surely thinks bounce rates are important, no? > The article themselves are usually garbage optimized for SEO, long paragraphs of sentences and how is AMP fixing this? and who is responsible for SEO having these incenti…

They do lose ranks[0]. AMP is fixing this because you can take a peek into the content almost instantaneously so you can just see what is this all about and leave. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/07/search-ads...

i don't see why any webmaster would want users who "peek instantaneously and leave". what a waste of an http request

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#544

Post by lillecarl »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #517
squiggleblaz wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there's a difference between having a service which only shows your stuff, and having a service which apparently shows the entire internet, but subtly prefers your stuff. Most people find the latter far more questionable than the former, because if we want to find anything, we need to know where to look.

> but subtly prefers your stuff. It prefers instant loading pages because that's what users want. If not, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Yahoo, or any of the other search engines that also use AMP would simply rank differently to beat Google.

The things that's being discussed though is that even if your page loads in "no time" AMP will be perfered anyways, even if your page loads fast enough that the user wont notice a difference.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#545

Post by saagarjha »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #539
saagarjha wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People don't use squares where they need oblong rectangles, but that doesn't mean squares are not rectangles. You're omitting the context of that quote for trite point-scoring. If I was advertised a browser that "supported HTML" I would very reasonably expect that it had a reasonable set of features, perhaps score well on compatibility benchmarks, and in general make an effort to conform to the relevant standards.…

> If I was advertised a browser AMP is not a browser. It is HTML markup. Likewise, nobody claimed that AMP contains all of HTML. By deliberately misconstruing what AMP is, you are the one who is fruitlessly engaging in trite point scoring. > it would require unanimous coalition of every other member to oppose them. As I have also pointed out before, their goal is to have even fewer Google members on that committee. A…

> AMP is not a browser. It is HTML markup.

Nowhere did I say it was: I was providing an example of a case where technically classifying something correctly may not be what people expect, except I used HTML in my example instead of shapes in an attempt to connect better to the topic at hand.

> nobody claimed that AMP contains all of HTML

The (now somewhat distant) ancestor claimed that AMP is powerful enough to use as essentially a replacement for HTML, and that publishers can use this subset exclusively for all their content. To which I (and others) have counterclaimed that it is not, because we have not seen publishers move to it, which means it is lacking something that HTML is giving them.

> By deliberately misconstruing what AMP is

That was not my intention, and I apologize if I came off that way.

> As I have also pointed out before, their goal is to have even fewer Google members on that committee. Already, anything that benefits only Google would be shot down.

Perhaps you know more about this than I do, but I have seen little movement in this direction or confirmation that Google is divesting themselves of control here.

> Compare to Apple News, which is controlled entirely by Apple or FBIA, controlled entirely by Facebook, or RSS which is no longer updated at all.

You keep bringing this up, but I don't see widespread complaints about Apple News or Facebook Instant Articles (and RSS is beloved to almost everyone I know). I think the key point here is intent: these sources are very clear in what they're doing, how they're doing, and I don't think they feel as "forced" to adopt it.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#546

Post by lern_too_spel »

saagarjha wrote: post #545
lern_too_spel wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I was advertised a browser AMP is not a browser. It is HTML markup. Likewise, nobody claimed that AMP contains all of HTML. By deliberately misconstruing what AMP is, you are the one who is fruitlessly engaging in trite point scoring. > it would require unanimous coalition of every other member to oppose them. As I have also pointed out before, their goal is to have even fewer Google members on that committee. A…

> AMP is not a browser. It is HTML markup. Nowhere did I say it was: I was providing an example of a case where technically classifying something correctly may not be what people expect, except I used HTML in my example instead of shapes in an attempt to connect better to the topic at hand. > nobody claimed that AMP contains all of HTML The (now somewhat distant) ancestor claimed that AMP is powerful enough to use as…

> I have seen little movement in this direction or confirmation that Google is divesting themselves of control here.

"The TSC shall have a goal of having no more than 1/3 of the TSC from one employer."

https://amp.dev/community/governance/

This is required to graduate from incubation at OpenJS.

"Have a defined governing body of at least 5 or more members (owners and core maintainers), of which no more than 1/3 is affiliated with the same employer."

https://github.com/openjs-foundation/cross-project-council/b...

> You keep bringing this up, but I don't see widespread complaints about Apple News or Facebook Instant Articles (and RSS is beloved to almost everyone I know).

Which is why I keep bringing it up. Each of those is worse than AMP at solving the same problems that AMP solves, but only AMP gets the rants from people who don't even know what problem AMP solves. They all "force" publishers to use them in exactly the same way.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#547

Post by lern_too_spel »

lillecarl wrote: post #544
lern_too_spel wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but subtly prefers your stuff. It prefers instant loading pages because that's what users want. If not, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Yahoo, or any of the other search engines that also use AMP would simply rank differently to beat Google.

The things that's being discussed though is that even if your page loads in "no time" AMP will be perfered anyways, even if your page loads fast enough that the user wont notice a difference.

There is no fast enough that a user won't notice the difference between that and instant, especially due to RTT for the request. That's why I always click on results with the lightning icon, and that's what I figure enough other users do too in order for AMP pages to rank so highly. If that's not the case, the other search engines can rank differently to beat Google, as I said.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#548

Post by Avamander »

usr1106 wrote: post #259
Avamander wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=594876 - 9 years old https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727 - 4 years old https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1010527 - 6 years old Not to mention the weird random full-blown crashes that occur when I try to use it that I can't reproduce, no point in opening an issue for those.

> Not to mention the weird random full-blown crashes that occur when I try to use it that I can't reproduce, no point in opening an issue for those What platform are you using? I have used FF exclusively for 10+ years on Linux. Ubuntu and OpenSUSE every day. Nouveau and i915 every day. If I said I get 3 crashes per year in the last 3-5 years that would probably be exaggerating.

Exclusively Linux. I have used both Intel integrated and AMD graphics. No clue what's causing them.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#549

Post by shawnz »

stephenr wrote: post #522
shawnz wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it's true that they forced AMP despite some people not wanting it (and I think you are greatly overestimating the fraction of customers that actually care about this either way). But you know what they say, ask customers what they want and they'll say a faster horse. I don't think there's anything wrong or immoral about going against the current wishes of your customers to further the long term wishes of your cus…

It's cute that you think people either searching on Google, or people/organisations with organic results shown on Google are their "customers". I mean it's also naive, and wrong, but it's cute too.

Give this tired quip a break. You don't have to be spending dollars to be a considered a customer, that's not what customer means.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#550

Post by stephenr »

shawnz wrote: post #549
stephenr wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cute that you think people either searching on Google, or people/organisations with organic results shown on Google are their "customers". I mean it's also naive, and wrong, but it's cute too.

Give this tired quip a break. You don't have to be spending dollars to be a considered a customer, that's not what customer means.

It literally means a person who purchases something.

No sane person on the planet would consider a person using a search engine for free, "the customer". The customer is the person who buys something - in Google's case, advertising.

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