I think it's very important to address the reason why AMP is possible in the first place: Websites are so extremely slow these days.
From users perspective, when I see the lightning icon on my search results I feel happy because it means that the page will show me it's contents as soon as I click it.
It means that the website is not going to show me white page for 15 seconds then start jumping around, changing shape and position for another 30 seconds until everything is downloaded.
I hear all the ethical/economical/strategic concerns but the tech community resembles the taxi industry a bit, that is, claiming that a tech that improves users experience significantly is bad for the user and must be stopped politically instead of addressing the UX issue that allows this tech to exist in first place.
The tragedy of it is that web browsers have never been faster - it's just that websites insist on bloating, and bloating, and bloating. It's not unusual for modern websites to have literally megabytes of pointless JavaScript. (Reminder: Super Mario 64 weighs in at 8MB. The whole game.)
AMP strikes me as a clever technical solution to a problem that doesn't need a technical solution. It just needs restraint and better web development with existing standard technologies, and ideally a strong taboo on bloated web-sites.
See also two other technologies, the existences of which damn the web: Opera Mini (cloud rendering! and it's useful!), which can only exist for as long as the web is laughably inefficient, and Reader Mode, which improves modern web-design by removing it entirely.
What people do when a website that goes popular on HN or Reddit is too slow or can't respond at all? Someone on the comments links to Google Cache and more often than not this js-less basic HTML snapshot is good enough.
AMP is just a way to do this properly and automatically. The Webdev community chooses to ignore the speed of the content delivery and Google seized the opportunity.
What can a modern webpage do for the user that 2008 webpage can't? For most of the web, the answer is nothing, all the improvements are about better tooling for the management(measure and monetize) of the webpage.
> It just needs restraint and better web development with existing standard technologies, and ideally a strong taboo on bloated web-sites.
Restraint can't appear out of nowhere, especially when bloating the website frequently works - more ad revenue, more information about existing visitors and potential new customers.
These needs won't just disappear, so yes, the problem needs a technical solution.
I work for a publisher that zero ads. We have fast pages with minimal JS. We rolled out AMP purely for the SEO win and saw a huge uptick in traffic.
If Google really cared about performance they’d reward publishers doing the right thing on their regular pages (which would benefit the web as a whole), not just those using AMP.
I understand their problem, I understand their solution. I have nothing against their solution.
But I'm freaking out that there's absolutely no way for me to compete with websites that are trafficking everything through Google, even if I create a product that's speed-wise compatible with AMP pages.
Google should be penalising the actual problem - page weight, not building their walled garden.
So encouraging speed is ok to a point. Do they stop there and create AMP because Google is so invested in their ad ecosystem? Serious question, as it's hard not to feel cynical when the solution appears to avoid the actual problem. AMP seems a way of actively avoiding the issue.
It's so far beyond ridiculous that a website downloads from 30 domains, and pulls down so much JS that you have more code than an entire 16 bit OS, GUI and game, just to see one text only page.
If they did that, then all websites with ads will be deprioritized, and it would be obvious (if it weren't already) that ads create a shitty experience. Google probably doesn't want to highlight that.
Slow web sites shoot themselves in the foot. They need not be slow. My company develops high performance web sites. We can beat any AMP site you can find and we do it without CDNs or Google-like networks.
It's not a technical problem at all, and it's not the developers being bad.
If the top 1000ish sites can make millions a year from tacking on Outbrain, Taboola, etc. and the analytics to support those revenue streams, why do they care if the page speed is 3 seconds vs 500ms?
I don't blame Google for AMP. The industry could have come together to offer a better experience and speedier page load, but of course they didn't and preferred having countless scripts and poorly optimized ads and that translated into a poor experience for users.
This created an opportunity for Google to come in and offer this solution and now we're stuck.
To the contrary, one of the most frustrating things for me about AMP is Google's contributions to "the slow web".
They're not in any way the cause, not even a majority contributor, but look at Google's influence on frontend web development, from providing drop-in-with-zero-thought script CDN links, popularising the @font-face standard through their Web Fonts service to the point of its use being expected and non-optional in many web design teams, Google's terrible Page Speed tool favouring large complex pages over small simple ones, and the general cavalier "hey just paste this snippet of JS into your HTML, don't worry about what it does" attitude that things like GA have helped to make the norm.
Genuine question: Why do people view AMP as a threat, whereas many Apple's formats/compatibility are non-standard? Is it because many accept privacy over openness?
Example: Apple news or iTunes or Messages
I think there's an element of them forcing an entirely new Google standard (then favouring it in their results) on to something they could just as easily punish (slow sites) directly.
Slow sites can be sped up quite often with small optimisations and improvements and those improvements can be guided by Google tools but instead they're forcing their own new format in the name of speed.
My guess is that they are separate services which have always been that way and people can choose not to use them from the beginning.
Amp is different in that it sits in front of a lot of websites which used to work directly, it’s apples and oranges.
iTunes didn’t take over any existing service or stop you from doing something you could before on the web
Google controls ~80% of online search and ads. Apple controls ~30% of the smartphone market and 10% of the laptop/PC market.
Its the same reason why Apple never gets slapped with monopoly charges. You have the option of using Android for your phone (ignoring the fact that if you value your privacy you don’t) and Windows/Linux.
You have the option of using Android for your phone
Does the user have the option of changing to DuckDuckGo? Yes. And moreover AMP can also be hosted totally by your own servers. See Guardian.com AMP servers
You can use the Apple News Format, but you can also use it to subscribe to standard RSS feeds.
iTunes has been selling non DRM music for a decade and you can transfer most purchased movies to other services using Movies Anywhere. The podcast directory is just that - a directory to podcast feeds. They don't host any of the podcast and provide an API.
Messages interoperare with standard SMS, MMS. You don't get all of the non standard features.
Personally, because I don't use a single idevice and don't plan to. Any of apple's bullshit can't touch me. But google's amp is fucking up the web everywhere. On my Ubuntu/Win10 laptop, on my android phone, every device I use to access the web.
Fun to watch whataboutism move from politics into computing.
Personally I'm about as hostile to Apple News as I am to AMP for a lot of the same reasons. And I also don't love Apple's embrace & extend approach to SMS.
I guess there was a time when I was concerned about iTunes and DRM and the network effects of an Apple music ecosystem, but I mostly stopped buying stuff through iTMS that I could get elsewhere about a decade ago and then largely ditched iTunes somewhere around 5 years ago after Apple had spent so much time "revolutionizing" the UI that it became a shambling horror of a guessing game rather than an experience, and AFAICT these days there's plenty of ways to use Apple devices for listening to music without using any of their specific apps/services.
So, yeah, I'd guess there's probably a concerned audience that isn't exactly picking on Google while giving Apple a pass.
>The web community has stated over and over again that we’re not comfortable with Google incentivizing the use of AMP with search engine carrots. In response, Google has provided yet another search engine carrot for AMP.
This wouldn’t bother me if AMP was open about what it is: a tool for folks to optimize their search engine placement. But of course, that’s not the claim. The claim is that AMP is “for the open web.”
I think a large portion of the tech industry understands Google AMP is an undeniable threat to the open web. The question is: Is there anything that can be done to stop it?
There are many threats to the open web. For example, governments building firewalls. Lot of content locked up in walled gardens. The death of net neutrality.
Definitely one of the threats to the open web would be the web platform falling behind "native" platforms such as mobile platforms. 10 years ago it seemed that native apps are dead, the web is going to win. And then the rise of smartphones has brought us back to a world where we are forever installing native applications. From what i can see, attempts to make the web faster (SPDY, AMP), safer (Certificate Transparency), more open (AV1) are all initiatives i can get behind. The question is : What are other companies doing to ensure the web retains its place as the premier open content / application development platform.
Aren't all of the companies that we are usually associating with doing bad things for the web (Microsoft, Google, Apple) now also pushing PWAs on their platforms? Google seemed far ahead of the push, Microsoft and Apple are currently on the run to bring them to Edge and Safari, and Mozilla introduced them to mobile Firefox less than a month ago.
And isn't there more of an incentive towards structuring the web coming from these big players as well? Google and Microsoft (and Yandex) created Schema.org, and are all giving them a priority in this switch from search results to instant answers.
I guess my point is to say that the companies that are locking the web are somewhat playing on both fields and giving webmasters products that are truly improving the web as well. It's far from being a one-sided battle.
Just consider the commercial web as a lost cause: this is the centralized, identity enabled network companies want.
Focus on the anonymous decentralized efforts to develop tools for the open web.
If most people don't care about their data and the security of the web, you can't make them.
Welcome to internet hub 85.* Lighting access to the world's information.
* additional charges occur when accessing information outside from the Internet hub.
Internet hub only allows storing of information which the government approves. Storing unauthorised information on the internet hub will result in your biometric account being banned for life. Access to the rest of the internet is not affected.
This is particularly noticable on iOS- AMP pages break iOS' standard page scrolling ballistics, for some reason. It makes them feel non-native in a particularly egregious way.
It's great that you love AMP. There were probably people who were happy with Ma Bell's phone service too. Monopolies usually deliver efficient service, at least for as long as they have to.
I miss the 'ads' part of AMP in the article? One of the main goals is to serve ads better/faster.
"The AMP Project is an open-source initiative aiming to make the web better for all. The project enables the creation of websites and ads that are consistently fast, beautiful and high-performing across devices and distribution platforms."
Readit News
From users perspective, when I see the lightning icon on my search results I feel happy because it means that the page will show me it's contents as soon as I click it.
It means that the website is not going to show me white page for 15 seconds then start jumping around, changing shape and position for another 30 seconds until everything is downloaded.
I hear all the ethical/economical/strategic concerns but the tech community resembles the taxi industry a bit, that is, claiming that a tech that improves users experience significantly is bad for the user and must be stopped politically instead of addressing the UX issue that allows this tech to exist in first place.
AMP strikes me as a clever technical solution to a problem that doesn't need a technical solution. It just needs restraint and better web development with existing standard technologies, and ideally a strong taboo on bloated web-sites.
See also two other technologies, the existences of which damn the web: Opera Mini (cloud rendering! and it's useful!), which can only exist for as long as the web is laughably inefficient, and Reader Mode, which improves modern web-design by removing it entirely.
AMP is just a way to do this properly and automatically. The Webdev community chooses to ignore the speed of the content delivery and Google seized the opportunity.
What can a modern webpage do for the user that 2008 webpage can't? For most of the web, the answer is nothing, all the improvements are about better tooling for the management(measure and monetize) of the webpage.
Restraint can't appear out of nowhere, especially when bloating the website frequently works - more ad revenue, more information about existing visitors and potential new customers.
These needs won't just disappear, so yes, the problem needs a technical solution.
If Google really cared about performance they’d reward publishers doing the right thing on their regular pages (which would benefit the web as a whole), not just those using AMP.
I understand their problem, I understand their solution. I have nothing against their solution.
But I'm freaking out that there's absolutely no way for me to compete with websites that are trafficking everything through Google, even if I create a product that's speed-wise compatible with AMP pages.
So encouraging speed is ok to a point. Do they stop there and create AMP because Google is so invested in their ad ecosystem? Serious question, as it's hard not to feel cynical when the solution appears to avoid the actual problem. AMP seems a way of actively avoiding the issue.
It's so far beyond ridiculous that a website downloads from 30 domains, and pulls down so much JS that you have more code than an entire 16 bit OS, GUI and game, just to see one text only page.
Like-minded thoughts: https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2018/02/linkbait_37...
If the top 1000ish sites can make millions a year from tacking on Outbrain, Taboola, etc. and the analytics to support those revenue streams, why do they care if the page speed is 3 seconds vs 500ms?
This created an opportunity for Google to come in and offer this solution and now we're stuck.
They're not in any way the cause, not even a majority contributor, but look at Google's influence on frontend web development, from providing drop-in-with-zero-thought script CDN links, popularising the @font-face standard through their Web Fonts service to the point of its use being expected and non-optional in many web design teams, Google's terrible Page Speed tool favouring large complex pages over small simple ones, and the general cavalier "hey just paste this snippet of JS into your HTML, don't worry about what it does" attitude that things like GA have helped to make the norm.
I must have extremely low standards, but I simply don't find this to be the case. A few, yes. The vast majority work fine.
Dead Comment
The discussion, if nothing else, sheds some degree of light on how the AMP tech lead sees the situation.
Slow sites can be sped up quite often with small optimisations and improvements and those improvements can be guided by Google tools but instead they're forcing their own new format in the name of speed.
iTunes didn’t take over any existing service or stop you from doing something you could before on the web
Open standard, opt-in free cdn, independent compatible alternatives; this does not sound like a hostile takeover of your freedom.
Its the same reason why Apple never gets slapped with monopoly charges. You have the option of using Android for your phone (ignoring the fact that if you value your privacy you don’t) and Windows/Linux.
iTunes has been selling non DRM music for a decade and you can transfer most purchased movies to other services using Movies Anywhere. The podcast directory is just that - a directory to podcast feeds. They don't host any of the podcast and provide an API.
Messages interoperare with standard SMS, MMS. You don't get all of the non standard features.
Personally I'm about as hostile to Apple News as I am to AMP for a lot of the same reasons. And I also don't love Apple's embrace & extend approach to SMS.
I guess there was a time when I was concerned about iTunes and DRM and the network effects of an Apple music ecosystem, but I mostly stopped buying stuff through iTMS that I could get elsewhere about a decade ago and then largely ditched iTunes somewhere around 5 years ago after Apple had spent so much time "revolutionizing" the UI that it became a shambling horror of a guessing game rather than an experience, and AFAICT these days there's plenty of ways to use Apple devices for listening to music without using any of their specific apps/services.
So, yeah, I'd guess there's probably a concerned audience that isn't exactly picking on Google while giving Apple a pass.
Dead Comment
https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2018-02-14-the-two-faces-of-...
More: https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2018/02/linkbait_37...
Definitely one of the threats to the open web would be the web platform falling behind "native" platforms such as mobile platforms. 10 years ago it seemed that native apps are dead, the web is going to win. And then the rise of smartphones has brought us back to a world where we are forever installing native applications. From what i can see, attempts to make the web faster (SPDY, AMP), safer (Certificate Transparency), more open (AV1) are all initiatives i can get behind. The question is : What are other companies doing to ensure the web retains its place as the premier open content / application development platform.
And isn't there more of an incentive towards structuring the web coming from these big players as well? Google and Microsoft (and Yandex) created Schema.org, and are all giving them a priority in this switch from search results to instant answers.
I guess my point is to say that the companies that are locking the web are somewhat playing on both fields and giving webmasters products that are truly improving the web as well. It's far from being a one-sided battle.
If most people don't care about their data and the security of the web, you can't make them.
Dead Comment
* additional charges occur when accessing information outside from the Internet hub.
Internet hub only allows storing of information which the government approves. Storing unauthorised information on the internet hub will result in your biometric account being banned for life. Access to the rest of the internet is not affected.
As user, I love AMP. It is much faster and lighter. God knows what javascript is running behind those websites that drives my CPU usage to 100%.
"The AMP Project is an open-source initiative aiming to make the web better for all. The project enables the creation of websites and ads that are consistently fast, beautiful and high-performing across devices and distribution platforms."