Google is abusing its powers. The search rank is our currency and Google has pushed AMP sites to the top for some while. So, everybody is now building weird AMP layers for their sites. We went from a free to a proprietary mobile web in just a few weeks. And we can't do anything. It feels like the times when the Internet Explorer tried to rule except that more people were complaining.<p>The open solution to a faster mobile web would have been so easy: Just penalize large and slow web pages without defining a dedicated mobile specification. That's it. This wasn't done in the past, slow pages outperformed fast ones on the SERPs because of some weird Google voodoo ranking, heck sometimes even desktop sites outperformed responsive ones on smartphones. If they had just tweaked these odd ranking rules in way that speed and size got more impact on the overall ranking there wouldn't have been any reason for AMP—<i>the market would have regulated itself.</i><p>I'm wondering who at Google is responsible for AMP. Who created AMP's random specs (no external CSS but external fonts files, preference for four selected font providers, no JS but their JS, probable ranking preference of Google cached AMP sites, etc.). Why did they decide on the spec themselves and not as a part of an industry group? Again why didn't they just tweaked their ranking algorithm and btw, they could have also made Android's Chrome faster, it's still significantly slower than iOS' Safari. I'd be happy if this person could comment on the abuse of power (Sundar Pichai?).
AMP is one of the most frustrating experiences I've had with Google. the fact that it's foisted on users, with no option to disable it, makes it borderline infuriating.<p>If you're stuck on an AMP page in your mobile browser, you can click on the browser's "Request desktop site" option to load the full page.
I wrote a similar(although not as concise) article about 3 month ago:
<a href="https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-your-mobile-traffic/" rel="nofollow">https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-your-mobile-...</a><p>After which I was invited to meet Google AMP team and to express my concerns, you can read my Q&A here:
<a href="https://www.alexkras.com/i-had-lunch-with-google-amp-team/" rel="nofollow">https://www.alexkras.com/i-had-lunch-with-google-amp-team/</a><p>TLDR; A lot of concerns are getting addressed<p>1. Minor, but the bar at the top is now scrollable on all devices, including (finally) iOS:
<a href="https://www.alexkras.com/amp-toolbar-is-now-scrollable-on-safari-mobile/" rel="nofollow">https://www.alexkras.com/amp-toolbar-is-now-scrollable-on-sa...</a>, it was not when I first wrote the article, so it's a good sign.<p>2. It is my understanding that the team is actively working on
a way to "fix" the link issue, and give an easy way to get to original article, although it remains to be seen how they will approach it.<p>3. You can opt out from AMP cache on the web site end, but it really defeats the purpose. Read more here: <a href="https://www.alexkras.com/i-had-lunch-with-google-amp-team/" rel="nofollow">https://www.alexkras.com/i-had-lunch-with-google-amp-team/</a><p>4. Most importantly, looks like there is even internal pressure to give people an option to Turn Off AMP on the search engine side, if they don't like it. See this, for example: <a href="https://twitter.com/slightlylate/status/820344221450125312" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/slightlylate/status/820344221450125312</a>
@cramforce is THE tech lead on AMP and @slightlylate is also a big shot at Google on Chrome Team.<p>Personally, I have mixed feelings about AMP, on one side I really like the speed, on the other I hate how it breaks the Web as we know it.
It's so strange to see Google repeating all the same mistakes AOL did so many years ago. No I don't want your fucking garden, I want the network. If you get in the way of that I'm done with you.
I don't like AMP, and I very glad there is now some push back against Google's implementation of it. Fast pages are great, but I suppose I'm missing the background on why it was necessary to do this, when anybody who can implement AMP could presumably have implemented "lightweight non bloated pages" without using it.<p>It's bad enough that I've had to switch to using Bing on mobile, despite the worse results, and I'm actually genuinely fearful for the first time about the openness of the web.
One thing I love about AMP, that seems to never be mentioned when people discuss it, is viewing AMP-HTML pages on my laptop.<p>I wrote a small chrome extension that always forwards my page to the equivalent AMP page (if one exists) and the experience of reading the news is so much better.<p>AMP pages off mobile are really really amazing. Compare Non-AMP[0] vs AMP[1]<p>[0] <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Trump-on-the-minds-of-MLK-Day-marchers-in-SF-10861091.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Trump-on-the-minds-of-...</a><p>[1] <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/amp/Trump-on-the-minds-of-MLK-Day-marchers-in-SF-10861091.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/amp/Trump-on-the-minds-of-MLK-...</a>
Using <a href="https://encrypted.google.com/" rel="nofollow">https://encrypted.google.com/</a>
to avoid AMP is a great tip. I'll be doing that, does anybody have more information on what that URL is for?<p>Is it possible to set it as default on iOS/Android somehow? AMP really frustratingly breaks link sharing, and I'd like to totally avoid it.
AMP is okay for news, but terrible for other forms of content. The reddit implementation is way less usable on mobile than going to their actual site.<p>It also results in lower quality news appearing at the top of searches in cases where they have implemented AMP and the better sources haven't.
I really prefer Google and still use it when I'm on my desktop, but I find myself using Bing more and more when I'm on my phone just to avoid AMP. If Google made an easy way to jump from the AMP page to the original page then I wouldn't mind it so much.<p>The # 1 reason why AMP bothers me is when I want to share a link with someone, I don't want to send an AMP link.
I'm glad AMP's weaknesses are finally gaining attention and making their rounds. Google should not be allowed to steal publishers' traffic and strong-arm them into going along with it.
And what happened to whole "don't build different markup for different devices" mantra that has been the accepted wisdom in web development for the past 4 or 5 years (whenever responsive design was discovered)? Feels like "m." sites all over again (but this time with google's CDN as a required intermediary).
I make my own amp pages by keeping JavaScript turned off on my phone. 95℅ of pages work and load instantly. Those that don't, I turn on JavaScript. If I go to those pages a lot I add them to my exception list. Sorry but I'm not an amp believer.
Possibly off-topic, but the article isn't displaying[0] for me on Chromium 55.0.2883.87 (64-bit), running on Arch Linux, unless I go in the dev tools and manually remove "Fira Sans" from the font-family list in .container[1]. Not sure whether the problem is with me or the site, I'm surprised it doesn't fall-back to sans-serif before I override manually.<p>[0] <a href="http://i.imgur.com/qJKSvMC.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/qJKSvMC.png</a>
[1] <a href="http://i.imgur.com/zYDZrtr.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/zYDZrtr.png</a>
On AMP page, clicking the X on the header box should load the HTML page. Instead it kicks you back to the search results. I think I would be okay if they fixed that one thing.
There's little power for us when Google abuses the trust the community has afforded to them.<p>Let's assume this got much worse, and evidence came out that private political interests worked with Google to interfere with informed consent by reprioritizing what some called "fake news", when really what was being called fake news was actually anti-government activists pointing out collusion between tech companies and the government. Clearly, Google would be an agent to destroying democracy.<p>I imagine detecting that a visitor came from Google, and showing them an interstitial informing the user they have come from a state-sponsored search engine, and letting them know what that means and the alternatives to Google.<p>I think it's actually pretty trivial to build something like this with recipes for the popular CDNs and servers out there. Even a JS snippet would be totally fine.<p>Google is pursuing AMP not because it wants to promote a better experience on the web, but because Google wants to be the provider whose technology and own practices perform best on SRPs. They are acting like capitalist pigs, and we should coordinate a protest against Google to let them know they can't just walk all over us with no consequences.<p>January 20th seems like an ideal day.
My biggest problem is simply being unable to open up an amp link in a new tab. Often in Google News for example I prefer to open up several tabs and read through them at my leisure. But with AMP this became impossible - though I'm unclear if this is simply a limitation of the implementation.
I don't generally disagree with this article but I'd be interested to see research behind "it is a lot easier to stop using the Facebook app or Apple News app than it is to avoid Google search." - for Facebook specifically.<p>I know a few people who view Facebook's app on their phone as the Internet and who would never think to Google search a question. I'd be interested to know how widespread that actually is among Facebook's vast user base, in comparison to how many use Google and avoid Facebook.
AMP made me switch to DuckDuckGO on my iPhone as default search engine. Day 5, and so far I am surprised how well it works! I might switch on my computers too... Google just went too far with AMP in my opinion, pure abuse of power. Reminds me of something that would Facebook do, where they push changes down the consumers throat, but they aren't aware of their dependency on users (but most people don't care, bitch and whine about something that they do not like and don't sanction the product/company).
The joke of AMP is this: I lost a few rankings for an important keyword to a competitor. My page loads in milliseconds without AMP, whereas the competitor shovels 300 HTTP requests down the visitor's throat with several MB worth of ad trackers and junk.<p>The technical side of SEO – and thus the justification of AMP – is a joke if a trash website like my competitor's can be on #1.
I am unfamiliar with AMP, so I apologize if this question is based on a misunderstanding. The article says that all links in AMP pages begin with "<a href="https://www.google.com/amp/"" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/amp/"</a> right? Isn't this an invitation to bad actors of every flavor to produce AMP pages which will, to the users who know to look at their address bar and note the source domain, appear to be legitimate?
Google deserves more credit than it's being given here.<p>I think AMP is Google's next SPDY. As you know, SPDY eventually became HTTP/2 through an open standardization process, and Google has since deprecated SPDY in favor of the open HTTP/2 standard.<p>AMP is similarly open. While it is still Google-driven at this stage, other companies are already iterating on it and implementing their own AMP caches[0]. There's no reason to believe Google is attempting to "lock-in" users to Google (and this article provides no evidence of that).<p>Every major tech company is trying to keep up with the demands of users. They demand content that loads really fast. People in many parts of the world have poor access to mobile data, which increases the importance of this even further.<p>As mentioned in this article, both Apple and Facebook are also working on similar projects. At least you can send a pull request to Google's.<p>Is Google using its influence to push the web in a different direction? Yes. Is it a bad thing? I don't think so, but others may disagree. The issue is that this article provides no argument that AMP is a bad thing, but rather a conspiracy theory that it is Google's attempt at "lock-in".<p>I agree that requiring an external Javascript to be loaded is a privacy issue, and that should be fixed. How about contributing a solution?<p>If not AMP or something along the same lines, how do we the tech community solve the problem of delivering static articles lightning-fast?<p>[0] <a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/website-optimization/accelerated-mobile-links/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cloudflare.com/website-optimization/accelerated-...</a>
I agree with some missing content and linking issues with reddit, however the improvement in loading time is probably 10x. I'd be interested in seeing this quantified - I didn't appreciate just how slowly reddit loaded until loading the amp version, followed by the real version. Loading the amp version on a less-than-stellar mobile connection is much preferable to the real version.
CPP (Content Performance Policy) is an open, standardized alternative to AMP, that may need help to finish it:<p>Draft: <a href="http://wicg.github.io/ContentPerformancePolicy/" rel="nofollow">http://wicg.github.io/ContentPerformancePolicy/</a>
Github: <a href="https://github.com/wicg/ContentPerformancePolicy/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wicg/ContentPerformancePolicy/</a>
Launch article: <a href="https://timkadlec.com/2016/02/a-standardized-alternative-to-amp/" rel="nofollow">https://timkadlec.com/2016/02/a-standardized-alternative-to-...</a>
HN: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12787462" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12787462</a>
> Techniques such as subresource integrity should be used where appropriate.<p>While this is a good recommendation, I'm not sure this is possible with AMP, as they don't provide versioned URLs; the JS loaded keeps changing over time.<p>Edit: Indeed, this was rejected: <a href="https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/534" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/534</a>
My biggest issue with AMP regards its UX. In mobile Safari, scrolling is hijacked. This creates two issues: non-native scroll momentum, and the inability to scroll to the top (by tapping the status bar).<p>I have several other issues as well, but they are mentioned in the article.
Yeah you can use Cloudflare to serve amp from your own subdomain instead of Google's CDN. <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/</a>
Cloudflare just launched an accelerated mobile links project which addresses most of your criticisms.<p><a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/</a>
I wish the post offered an alternative.<p>Given that there are at least three similar specs, shouldn't there be a Light HTML5, or something that provides the same set of underlying guarantees?
I've had almost nothing but problems reading news webpages on my phone since AMP; variously, I can't see the URL, I lose the typical Chrome app functions, I can't zoom in or out, I can't see side or video content referenced in the article, and I lose options I normally would with long-pressing.<p>I can't disable any of this from the browser and I can't choose to view the non-AMP version. It's painfully frustrating, and I'm being forced to read my news AMP's way instead of my way.
I am always confused by this topic.<p>Having browsed the web via mobile for several years with chrome, I have yet to encounter an AMP page. Do I have to enable something or is this region specific? I live in Norway if that matters.<p>Six months ago I switched my mobile browser from chrome to firefox but I still se nothing (nor the bar with the X everyone are talking about).
So the argument against AMP is someone's broken implementation and "security" of Google's CDN. Sounds like terrible arguments.<p>That said, Google should give option to opt-out from CDN caching (if they don't already) as otherwise implementing AMP gives Google the right to host your content on their domain.
There is no reason for a quasi-proprietary fork of HTML. We already have enough standards as it is.<p>HTML is perfectly fast. Sites are only show because of the media/ads/stuff that's put on them, most of which is a business requirement.<p>Factoring site speed/weight into search and traffic rankings could've easily pressured sites into making much better progress that would benefit anyone using a browser, instead of this random fork that also takes away even more of the limited time and resources that a publisher has to work on their main site.<p>I like Chrome and Google's efforts in making the web faster but this is one of the worst projects they've ever started.
I recently build a dictionary based on WordNet and decided to AMP all the pages. I didn't have any issues and honestly it was fairly straightforward. (<a href="http://www.wordcadet.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.wordcadet.com</a>)<p>Again I'm not doing anything fancy, I don't handle any user data (JS breach at google is least of my concern) or have any concern regarding where Google might take AMP.<p>I personally like the idea behind AMP. With all these over the top JS libraries and bloating web applications, a restrict markup that enforces speed over spectacle is a positive change.
Something like AMP should be an opt-in for users that requires marketing, education and the standard process of trying to make your idea work in the market. Currently its being forced down users and websites throats and is a blatant abuse of market power.<p>There should be a opt-in for every search that specifies amp explicity to signify you want it. Google should be taken to the cleaners for trying to expand its market power so egregriously. Since its is not going to happen in the US at least the EU can step in. There has to be something illegal about these kinds of monopolistic actions.
Every time I post a <i>Wall Street Journal</i> article, the first comment complains about the paywall. AMP is a reliable WSJ-paywall workaround. Could someone help me reconcile?
As a small but growing site, I've been meaning to get on the AMP train and essentially steal some SEO before my competitor sites get in on it. Having a 50k page and dynamic site that lives in the database proves to be a challenge to create AMP optimized pages.<p>On the topic of AMP being a problem for web standards, I agree. I also can't afford to miss opportunities to get ahead either.
As described I don't believe I've ever seen an AMP'ified page as they're described?!<p>Is it because I don't use Google as my goto search engine? (I use ddg almost exclusively.)<p>Or, is it because I don't use Android Chrome as my browser? (I'm on Firefox Mobile unless some site owners forgot to test on Firefox and I'm forced onto Chrome.)
IMHO, worst AMP feature it's that it's viral: when sharing the link, you're sharing the AMP link, so you force your followers to read the AMP version, and, if they share, they'll share the AMP version...
>Google insists that AMP is not a factor in a site’s search ranking.<p>Site speed is a factor in search ranking. Imagine how fast Google benchmarks the speed of a page that is <i>hosted on their own servers</i>...
Wah? I mean, it's a giant step up from a non mobile optimized website, hands down. The article downplays Facebook and Apple despite them doing the same exact thing.
I am completely against AMP and personally have zero plans to learn and implement it. That may come back and bite me in the ass, but that's my current stance.
I've had many of these concerns about AMP myself and have seen other posts on this before. I tend to agree with their points. If you want to optimize your mobile view, than you can do that without a Google pseudo-standard. When someone clicks on a link to your site, they should go to your site.<p>This wouldn't be that big a deal if Google didn't emphasize the rank of AMP pages. There aren't a lot of alternatives out there to search, and Google dominates the market in much of the world.
The more I read about complaints about AMP, the more it dawns on me that there are still a fair amount of people that do not understand that the web is basically Google's product.<p>Facebook and others have arrived to take significant time away from that product. Then combine that with things like Facebook Video and Instant Articles. Google is in a difficult position where Facebook may be able to start offering up a superior product for content as opposed to the web.<p>If you want to blame a big corp for AMP, you should probably take a closer look at Facebook as without it Google risks losing a large chunk of its market.
I think I was trapped on one of these AMP pages when I wanted an article and the link to it so I could send it to a friend, but the article was "trapped" with a google url and I couldn't get it.<p>It was like those old-school days where sites tried to put their frame around the window you were browsing so their ads constantly showed.<p>Or like the toolbar crapware.<p>This sucks.
Our early data is showing that advantages like Search engine ranking and reduction in bounce rate are making AMP a necessity in 2017. All the content gateways have their own proprietary format to keep users locked into the platform it's a smart move.<p>You can read more advantages at <a href="http://alphapages.io" rel="nofollow">http://alphapages.io</a>
Ugh, why does nobody ever point out that AMP and Google displaying AMP are 2 different things? Yes, Google is a huge sponsor in the AMP world but they aren't the only ones involved.<p>AMP itself isn't so bad- asynchronous Javascript (not no script as the article suggests) and it is still valid HTML- it just has extra properties on tags (just how Angular does).