I see this more and more recently where a webpage takes ~5 seconds to load if it’s an AMP page if I have some sort of ad blocking (cookie restriction) in place. What’s interesting is that the page content is already loaded but my browser (Safari) is waiting for something to render everything. So, if I have the Reader Mode pre-activated on the same page, I can read the page before the ~5 seconds is over and I can <i>actually</i> see the page!
Major appreciation to Terence Eden for putting his own time and expense into representing the interests of the Internet here. I'm extremely comforted that there are people out there that care enough to take our words here on the Internet and bring them forward in person, and I think if you look at the meeting notes, it's clear there was some real impact.
> When a user uses Chrome for Android to search Google, they get AMP results. When a user tries the same search in Firefox, they only get regular results.<p>Sounds like a win for mobile Firefox.
"Without user research support, there's no acceptable route to creating new AMP components."<p>I can't think of a way to say this without sounds really cynical... I don't think they can about "users" in the same sense that "user research" would support, but rather they can that users click on whatever AMP is designed to do best, which is I assume ads or paid stuff at the top of search results. I seem to remember Google selling people on this by highlighting it's fast and more people click on it? I would think that's all that matters to them. I can't blame them, that's their job, to get more people to click on more things that Google makes money from.
Fantastic, a big thanks for doing this. Google probably has the most to benefit from, but I suspect there is something more structural that is leading to poor management decisions.<p>"Well, AMP was an interesting experiment. Now it is time to shut it down and take the lessons learned back through a proper standards process."
This was a very well rounded analysis and I agree with it's points. Even though I like AMP in its general case (making the web less of a hog), it's proprietary nature, lack of accessibility and so on are in fact real dings against it.
I have to agree with this but if Google's goal is to make the web faster then the AMP mission can still be done almost exactly as they are doing it today. Just publish a profiling tool (expanding Lighthouse maybe) that reports the numbers back to Google and then you either get to use their cache and edge servers and get ranked higher or not based on whatever metric that Google wants us to care about. Maybe I'm missing something but that really seems like a much more obvious approach to solving the problem without going through this weird extra webcomponents library, different URL schemes and all that.
"Some people felt aggrieved that all the hard work they'd done to speed up their sites was for nothing."<p>This seems like a backwards way of saying that speed improves for most sites? Isn't that a goal?
What's your solution for instant-loading pages from link aggregation pages? If you have a better solution, the AMP advisory committee will have a reason to change. Otherwise, you're wasting your time and now ours.