Ive forced myself to use Bing since google introduced AMP. Do I like it better than Google? No, I don't. But! I like not having google become my single source of content more than I dislike the slight drop in quality as a result of using Bing. I like the sites I go to, to have control over their content and being able to easily link to them.<p>I think it's reprehensible for google to push this so relentlessly and beyond simply stealing links it makes google into the "internet."<p>This (AMP) could easily be a standard, in fact it's mostly just common sense (good lightweight HTML/CSS/JS). Instead of Google forcing its way on users and creators it could just lower the page rank of the offenders.<p>One other thing about AMP that pisses me off as a user and an engineer is it's one more place to maintain meaning one more shitty neglected experience. As a user I hate it when AMP pages are broken and I somehow can't get to the non-AMP version. I don't blame the developers because we have enough on our plate. My anger is solely directed to google for making the damn mess in the first place.
> Google has no respect for [iOS Safari]. It’s a deliberate effort by Google to break the open web.<p>I could make the same argument that Apple cripples iOS Safari's implementations of emerging standards that aim to bring the web experience closer to a "native feel" to keep its app store revenue churning:<p><a href="http://caniuse.com/#feat=stream" rel="nofollow">http://caniuse.com/#feat=stream</a><p>...but really it's a lot more likely that getting _all_ things right on _all_ platforms is the really, really hard thing about the web, for browser vendors and web developers alike.<p>Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence (or in this case, sheer overwhelming difficulty).<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor</a>
With respect to scrolling: We (AMP team) filed a bug with Apple about that (we didn't implement scrolling ourselves, just use a div with overflow). We asked to make the scroll inertia for that case the same as the normal scrolling.<p>Apple's response was (surprisingly) to make the default scrolling like the overflow scrolling. So, with the next Safari release all pages will scroll like AMP pages. Hope Gruber is happy then :)
In theory* I don't mind the idea of having a more standardised subset web page that has a consistent internal structure and that renders quickly.<p>However, having Google load this structured content and host it on its own platform is a terrible idea. Content should remain on the publisher's site. Putting too much content in one place is dangerous for competition.<p>* In practice there are implementation problems too, e.g. those mentioned in the linked article.
Here's your one step recipe to kill AMP:<p>* Build fast webpages.<p>The linked article says: "Yes, AMP pages load fast, but you don’t need AMP for fast-loading web pages." Well yes, but people don't build fast webpages without AMP. They could've done all the time, yet webpages got more sluggish over the years.
The complaint about AMP's strange UX paradigms is valid: it works very hard to pretend like every AMP article is a standalone website, but it actually behaves like a viewport-wrapping iframe, where Google Search is on the outside and the article is on the inside [1]. But it's not a personal affront to iOS; it's more of an artifact of Google's confusing market strategy and conflicting requirements for AMP's deployment: pretend like AMP pages are real browser-resident tabs, while actually driving traffic around within the confines of Google Search (vs. outside) when possible. As much as I don't care for their strategy, I respect needing to balance conflicting requirements. They should scrap the dishonest UX and be up-front about what they are, as I write [1].<p>But Josh descends to hyperbole. I've been both critical and supportive of AMP on here [2], but it's important to not lose sight of the big picture. AMP isn't an effort by Google to kill the open web; it's a technology whose existence was forced by Facebook Instant Articles' meteoric rise, a competitor from a company that doesn't even operate on the level of the open web, but runs a family of products where the data flow is one-way: inbound.<p>Instant Articles made publishing harder on the web, giving preferential treatment to articles posted within Facebook's walled garden (cf. AMP giving preferential treatment to content that adheres to the AMP spec, the same way they give preferential treatment to content served with TLS). With Instant Articles fizzling a bit [3], AMP's importance as a strategic play is lessened, and we can enjoy its benefits without feeling like we're pawns in a game between two massive content aggregation portals.<p>Besides, Apple News is the same idea as AMP; I'd be curious how Josh feels about that.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13415625" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13415625</a>
[2] <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20%22AMP%22&sort=byDate&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20%22AMP%22&sort=byDat...</a>
[3] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14126073" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14126073</a>
HTML is already fast. It's the stuff that's added to the page that slows it down, and we already have plenty of standards, techniques and solutions to make sites faster.<p>AMP is just an alternate HTML framework that prevents certain things, that's all. Not sure why everyone is so eager to opt-in to a less flexible system instead of fixing their existing web presence. All it does is increase the amount of time and resources needed to now maintain effectively 2 different versions of the same site while also losing control over rendering, URL location and privacy.<p>Also the main reason for slow sites is all the ads - ads which are are usually served by DoubleClick, the biggest ad server on the planet and owned by Google.
I know it might not be their shtick, but I wish the post focused more on the "publication independence" part of the criticism. Giving Google control over prioritizing a subset of the web, and letting them optimize for it, just gives them a better way to filter content. They seriously have enough power over the web as it is.<p>The other criticisms about how it performs on iOS seem truly secondary, they could easily fix them but we're still left with the far bigger issue.<p>Additionally, criticisms about iOS having a closed ecosystem seem irrelevant to this. An App Store is one thing, but starting down the path of effectively adding "high speed lanes" to the supposedly free web is scary.
The only reason AMP is even viable is because the current alternatives are even worse.<p>Publishers have to date shown a remarkable inability to grasp the idea that <i>user experience matters.</i> Just about every major online publication is painful to browse on a mobile device, even ones that have embraced responsive design, because of things like slow-loading ads, excessive use of JavaScript, and enormous modal prompts for things like subscription offers and newsletter signups. Every year the situation gets worse. And no publisher appears to be willing to buck the trend; presumably they believe that, as long as everybody else's site is just as bad, doing so would just be leaving money on the table. So the economic incentive for change is not there.<p>AMP is a terrible idea for a lot of reasons, any one of which would in a sane market make it an instant non-starter. But the state of online publishing demonstrates that it is anything but a sane market; it's a market trapped in a death spiral, and in that situation <i>any</i> idea that seems to offer a way out is going to get some traction. So it is with AMP.<p>The only way to make AMP (or something like it) irrelevant would be for the publishers to get their houses in order on their own, without the need for external pressure. But their leadership doesn't have the kind of farsightedness such a move would require, and that leaves room for someone like Google to come in and do their jobs for them.
AMP is Google's latest attempt to build a walled garden. It's more dangerous to the web than Facebook's WG because of Google's near-monopoly on search. AMP does indeed need to die in a very hot fire.<p>And in the long term, it's high time somebody built a less creepy, better functioning search engine.
Honestly? I've come to loathe the abysmal performance of the modern web so much that I'm ready to accept AMP. Half the reason I come to hacker News is that the site runs fast. And half the reason I comment before reading the article is because it doesn't.
AMP needs to either be drastically rethought or killed. Nothing more annoying for me on my iPhone than clicking a link and it's AMP - as it means missing features, broken scrolling, masked URL and worst of all, in page search is totally broken on the iPhone! So annoying that there is no way to disable it - if Google persist in pushing it then it might push me to try alternatives!
I feel like I may be in the minority here. I don't like the philosophy behind AMP, but with the internet at my mildy rural house, AMP articles can be sometimes the only way to access the news without waiting 30+ seconds for a single article.
AMP was born dead no need to kill it. As the webmaster of many websites, the last time I heard customers complain about rankings in SRPs was ten years ago. Their main concern nowadays is likes, follows and shares. I keep telling them: put some effort on your website, own your audience, you do not <i>own</i> your FB page much less the fans and likes there. They don't listen. Trapped in the hype.<p>In this light, how do I sell to them the idea that investing in AMP content (same trap different server) will help with rankings/performance where they do not care?<p>Sadly enough, the Internet is happening inside social networks, Amazon and mobile apps. AMP is late to the party, no?
What kills me about AMP's UX is that not only is it a dark pattern, it's not even a <i>new</i> dark pattern.<p>Back, say, 10-12 years ago it used to be really common for sites to jigger their outgoing links, such that the target site would appear in an iframe underneath a toolbar from the original site. This was widely reviled, and mostly died out, and the fact that Google is reviving it really bothers me.
I do not understand the dislike this community harbors for AMP. I personally really enjoy the system; whenever I'm searching for any type of article on my phone (Android), I prefer AMP pages, because they load faster and are far more responsive than some of their more bloated counterparts.
Long before amp, Google began prefixing search result urls with "google.tld?url=" and adding Google parameters as suffixes such as "sa=", "ved=", etc.<p>Unless I am mistaken this parasitic cruft only serves Google, not end users.<p>Below is quick and dirty program to filter out the above. Replace .com with .cctld as needed.<p>Requirements:
cc, lex<p>Usage:<p><pre><code> curl -o 1.htm https://www.google.com/search?q=xyz
yyg < 1.htm > 2.htm
your-ad-supported-web-browser 2.htm
</code></pre>
To compile this I use something like<p><pre><code> flex -Crfa -8 -i g.l;
cc -Wall -pipe lex.yy.c -static -o yyg;
</code></pre>
Save text below as file g.l
Then compile as above.<p><pre><code> %%
[^\12\40-\176]
\/url[?]q=
"http://www.google.com/gwt\/x?hl=en&amp;u="
"&amp;"[^\"]*
%%
main(){yylex();}
yywrap(){}
</code></pre>
As for amp, I read that it needs to use iframes (and Javascript). Yikes. We can easily write a program to strip out iframe targets as well as links to Javascript.<p>amphtml does look great in a text-only browser that does not load iframes automatically.
Google, Facebook, and Apple all have walled gardens for reading the news on mobile.<p>The web as we know it was killed when you couldn't link to a news site because it'd serve ad interstitials (Forbes) or full screen pop-over ads (basically everyone).<p>I think the real problem is journalists rely on advertising income to do their job. That model requires them to rely on Apple/Facebook/Google for their livelihood, and to focus on sensationalist headlines and quantity over quality (to get ad impressions). One of the most shocking things for me was seeing Buzzfeed have some of the better written pieces in the last year -- all of those stupid "10 best/worst/funniest" type lists provided the ad revenue to do actual journalism that other publications didn't have the budget to do. But it's not clear to me how to break this dependency; for example, UBI might come with strings preventing the publication of pieces critical of the government.
I'm honestly just too scared that Google would gain an even larger foothold in the web to consider implementing AMP on any sites, but the UX argument is valid as well
I actually really like AMP but not for articles but for products in webshops. The media on the internet is such a mess nowadays anyway that having AMP pages makes no difference whatsoever for the content, sharing and talking. How is google optimized content any different than having to print magazines so that they fit through your mailbox? It is just a alternative method of delivery. The truth is that for the everyday user the only interesting part is the content. Not the ads, not the comments, especially not the page layout and hopefully not the links to other "You never believe what X things about Y" articles across 10 X different page loads. AMP for web articles may die as publishers try to remain more independent or relevant in other forums (snapchat, instagram stories, facebook live etc.) but the idea of fast and simple mobile pages should remain.<p>For webshops where product discovery is really important and having a fast google search result could (I dont have data to back this up) really drive users to use your webshop instead of the competitors. AMP style pages force developers to focus on what is actually important on the page.
Looks like Google have recently added a means of getting out of the AMP "jail" and arriving at the original source site by clicking a little link icon in that irritating header that constantly pops over content while scrolling.<p>This is very welcome. My biggest gripe with AMP was that there was no way out of it.
"it breaks the decade-old system-wide iOS behavior of being able to tap the status bar to scroll to the top of any scrollable view"<p>Wait. I don't know of this feature. For example I attempted to tap my addresss bar on iOS but it just goes to change the address. How do I use this feature?
So AMP benefits google because faster page loads = more DFP views (and also more $ for publishers); AMP benefits consumers because JS is not murdering their memory and dataplans. It seems like web developers are the ones that hate it.
I want Apple News and Instant Article to join in AMP so that media developers could reduce the cost of news distribution following the single standard. I even want crawling services, Feedly or Pocket, to serve AMP with advertisements so that I could support writers, journalists and media companies; besides, I have no idea if web feed, RSS or Atom, could consume AMP.<p>Google, which would gain the most benefit from AMP, deserves criticism for potential abuse of their power. Online media, which serve pages with poor performance, deserve criticism for its reluctance to improve their poor UX. AMP, however, hardly deserves criticism, through a perspective of user experience and news distribution.<p>AMP may look intimidating to the open web philosophy, be tepid approach from a technological point of view. But we need more experiment as it stands: everyone can become a media with the Web, old media is still playing a valuable role in society, online media lack prospects for the future to be profitable enough to invest in journalism. Fighting for the open web is good, but fighting for it without caring about anyone but technological principle is no good.
> Except that, hilariously, to create an AMP page you have to load a, wait for it, yes a JavaScript file from Google.<p>What does the Javascript file do? Is there an open-source equivalent? If it transmits data to Google, could you instead collect the data server-side and send anonymized data with a cron job once-a-day to Google's endpoint to reduce the slowdown and privacy issues?<p>It looks like AMP bans all Javascript except for the one Google-provided Javascript file, which provides common UI components:<p><a href="https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec" rel="nofollow">https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec</a><p>"While it does allow styling the document using custom CSS, it does not allow author written JavaScript beyond what is provided through the custom elements to reach its performance goals."<p>Unless Google's library includes everything, even a simple 'Delete' button requires Javascript if you want to use the right HTTP verb. I'd worry about using anything that leads me into a corner like that.
As a web developer I have AMP but as a user I love it! Websites have been so bloated that something like this was badly needed.<p>People loading just 100-200 kbs of fonts to serve 10kb of original content.
I feel like the majority of the benefits of Google AMP could be realized with an nginx & Apache plugin combined with Google's CDN.<p>If it was implemented in this manner, you could keep your existing URL structure and not be forced onto Google's domain. I'm sure many more developers would be okay with AMP if this was the case.
I don't like AMP for no other reason than I don't believe there are any genuinely decentralized initiatives anymore.<p>"Oh, we <i>open source</i> it, you know", seems the common answer.<p>If an initiative is rolled out from the innards of one of the tech giants, and there are a bunch of other tech giants contributing to the initiative because it is open source, and most of the contributors and maintainers just accidentally happen to be also be employees of the tech giants, then stop and wonder about it for a while. And then reject it. That is, don't participate in the initiative.<p>Here is why: at the moment, the cost of open sourcing is minuscule for the giants but the benefits are enormous, and surprisingly often leads the entire tech sector down the path of greater oligopoly (Android being an excellent example). Another way to put it is, given none of the tech giants directly compete with each other in their respective core profit centers, open source is becoming a nice little platform (intentional or unintentional) for extending oligopolies.<p>There is no realistic chance that the open source code can be used by a competitor against the one who proposes the initiative (if you know of a counter-example, I would be happy to hear about it). But, there is every realistic chance that an initiative like AMP could extend a heavy toll on a genuine but small competitor in terms of code compliance (e.g. DuckDuckGo) and put them out of business.<p>But then, don't we all benefit from the nice byproducts of their technical innovations? In sum total, once you see the reduction in privacy, competition and decentralization of the web, probably not.
I suspect whoever made that executive decision at Google to use "AMP" was too young to remember Frontpage and so many years fighting with MSIE. How soon we forget. AMP is bad news. Keep your hands off my design. It's not your Internet, Google. PS: I'm on Linux, not an Apple fanboy :-D
On our site, we just load AMP as a base experience, and load our other stuff on top of it if it's not served in the AMP browser.
So we get the initial render speed of AMP, along with the SEO advantages, and can still implement features not supported by AMP for the majority of our users.
I'm not sure when there is going to end up but because google amp is hosted on google servers you can actually read such articles on GoGo plane flights with out paying for Internet. It was kinda nice although I'm not sure how long until this will be fixed.
> it breaks the decade-old system-wide iOS behavior of being able to tap the status bar to scroll to the top of any scrollable view<p>Is that what was happening. It just felt like scroll was spazzing out. Usually I was just trying to push a button near the top of the screen.
A competing decentralized implementation if anyone is keen to pitch in: <a href="https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/8534" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/8534</a>
As a user, I love AMP. Pages load fast, and that's about all I really care about.<p>I don't really do web dev anymore, but if I was I think I'd be happy about using it.<p>Maybe a content creator feels differently but I don't have any experience with that.
News websites dug their own graves. AMP is a solution to a simple problem: the inability for websites to reach acceptable perf levels. For users, AMP is a blessing. It even improves the ad situation a bit (no more perf impact).
When does that bloody pagerank patent expire anyway? Maybe we can see slightly better quality on other major search engines if they used the same algorithm Google "invented"
Google news has a bug on iOS safari for me that makes it just load the header - it's actually cut back a lot on my idle news consumption - please don't fix!
Do you remember the time when slow webpages with megabytes of ads in popups/iframes were killing the web? When almost every webpage was trying to get you install their half-baked mobile apps?<p>AMP webpages are fast and responsive. Publishers that don't use AMP now have to make their webpages fast. Competition is good for the user and the web.
This, coupled with the common anthem from the tech crowd of using Chrome <i>and</i> only Chrome is a dangerous precedent.<p>Stop supporting AMP, and use something other than Google Search and Chrome <i>today</i>.
Are they serious with the following?<p>AMP HTML uses some stupid Unicode emoji character:<p><pre><code> <html >
^ HN filtered out the voltage symbol, bravo.
</code></pre>
Just, no, Google. You're not Ken fucking Iverson, and this is not APL. Just supporting one way of doing it, <html amp>, is perfectly fine.
"publication independence"? Really? The man who is famous among other things for supporting the most closed ecosystem there is around: iOS, where a single company decides what apps are worth publishing and wish ones doesn't. Or does newspaper publication independence is really that more important than software publication independence. The irony is so clear that it's weird that he didn't even mention it.<p>That genie is out of the box, when you decided that you didn't mind a company gatekeeping which software you can install on "your" devices you opened that can of worms, the one where any company can gatekeep anything they want as long as it is "convenient" for most people.
What's going to be interesting is if browsers can at some point render a APM version of a page natively. What I mean is render the original page on the source website as APM content. That will stop the monopoly and hijacking (or rather the rationalization of it) of target websites in Google results.
Original link was submitted, flagged (why?) and vouched for.
Tried to submit again and, instead of up voting the previous one, it got resubmitted.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14381919" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14381919</a>
i agree that AMP is troubling for a variety of reasons - none of which, however, change the fact that the author of this article is unquestionably a Weenie.