Hacker News Reader

Comment by wffurr | Hacker News Reader

I love AMP because I can easily tell which sites will actually load fast and give me the info I wanted directly from the search results page.

Publishers are still able to track pageviews and serve ads, so I don't get what the hullaballoo is all about here.

There's nothing in the AMP spec that stops links from working.

I just searched for "Is Google AMP a good thing" on my mobile, and got the OP's post as the first result (probably personalized?). Had to go to the fourth result for something with AMP, from CIO.com. The page loaded instantly, was able to scroll without things jumping around, and the header link to the CIO.com homepage worked as expected. They were still able to serve ads and count my pageview too, even if I never directly contacted their server.

I just don't get what the big deal is.

View on HN

I see you have never wanted to link someone to an AMP page. You also somehow didn't notice that there's a huge useless bar at the top of the page.

The fact that the person receiving the link will also get a fast loading well behaved page with a bar at the top is not such a deal breaker for everyone.

I don't care and I doubt most users do. AMP has made my mobile browsing experience effectively much faster.

Just for giggles, I hit "copy link" in the Chrome Webview that the Android Google Search App opened up. Pasted that into Android Chrome, and it took me straight the AMP page, which loaded instantly and let me scroll right away. Seems fine.

I then went to my desktop, used the Chrome history feature to open the tab from my mobile, and the AMP URL redirected me to the publisher's desktop site, which took multiple seconds to load and then displayed an annoying interstitial.

If anything, I'm frustrated that my desktop browser wouldn't open the AMP page and load and allow scrolling immediately with no interstitials.

The "huge useless bar" at the top was the exact same in the AGSA Chrome Webview as the OP's non-AMP site. I don't know what you're on about. I didn't notice it because it's not there.

I went and looked at the search results in Android Chrome (instead of the Google Search app), and there was an extra bar at the top that said "From cio.com" which disappeared as soon as I scrolled, which happened instantly because I was able to load and scroll instantly.

I think you've hit the nail on the head there.

I don't much like the idea of AMP because, to me, it does violate the idea of an open and free world wide web. But, equally, publishers have brought this on themselves. (And I suppose, equally, it isn't the halcyon days of the mid 1990s any more either.)

Sites are egregiously slow and heavyweight, and the experience on mobile is often nothing short of appalling with actual content when it eventually loads relegated below the fold, or near the bottom of the screen. You then have to find a way to scroll without accidentally triggering an ad and once you've done this you're likely to be confronted with one of those delayed interstitials that are so in vogue (and so completely unacceptable) at the moment.

From this perspective AMP is kind of a backdoor to holding large media outlets (in particular) to account for the inexcusably poor web experience they offer to users. Because this isn't a technology limitation: it's a choice they make in the name of monetization.

Rant over.

I don't really care about that. I just know that if I see the AMP logo on a search result that I'm about to click, it's going to be a pleasant experience when I click through and very quickly am able to read the page. Whereas almost any other news site will be more or less unreadable and unscrollable, constantly changing as it loads over the course of a minute or more, until a huge popover blocks the whole thing and refuses to close.

It may be a non-optimal solution to the problem, but much like Uber, until someone comes up with something better, I'll take it, because it does improve my experience greatly.

Maybe I'm being selfish, but when I click on an AMP link I know the page is going to scroll funny on my iOS device (something with iframes?) and there'll be an oversized bar at the top and the site will feel really... bland and off compared to what I expected, like I clicked reading mode even though if I wanted reading mode I'd have clicked that.

Im torn because while I want mobile versions of sites to be fast over poor connections, I also don't want to read what looks like a cached version version of the sute. Maybe it's the AMP sites I've visited but it's always way too jarring

Yes, you are right, the speed is great and the concept is actually quite interesting. What annoys me is the fact that they broke the UX on iOS (don't know about other platforms);

- you cannot scroll to the top by typing on the bar at the top on the screen

- there's this AMP title bar at the top, that's super annoying. I read, they might eventually add the option to hide it

- feels like they tried to implement smooth scrolling what conflicts with native iOS smooth scrolling resulting in not-so-smooth scrolling

Finally, and that is more important I'd say, we have the whole point about the openness of the Internet. People are concerned about what Google (and Facebook) does because there is the potential to create a walled garden of exclusive content not everyone can access - which would actually contradict the idea of AMP, wouldn't it?

It's true that loading fast and giving you the info you wanted directly from the search results page is a good thing. It is also important to realize there's a trade off happening where you're further locked into Google and their ecosystem. It's a pretty dramatic change to the way search has worked up until now. It more mimics the way internal webviews work in Apps like Twitter and Facebook apps.

Am I locked in? Bing and Cloudflare also both run AMP caches now.

I was unaware of this. Thank you.

> It is also important to realize there's a trade off happening where you're further locked into Google and their ecosystem

How am I locked in? Google isn't the authoritative host of AMP content, nor are they the only party running an AMP cache, nor does the existence of an AMP copy of a page prevent me from accessing the regular web copy.

Interesting! I was under the impression they were solely in control of the cache and the content. I will look further into this. Thank you.

But, you don't actually get to their page. Once you click on an AMP link on Google's SERP, I've found it impossible to actually "open full site" as you might expect to be able to do. It's also annoying to try and share a search result link only to have it be an AMP redirect.

I was able to open full site just fine. There was a CIO.com banner at the top of the page. Tap on it and it took me to their non-AMP homepage.

It's sacrificing the open web in exchange for a is-this-fast indicator. If the search engine just made note of the site's speed during its crawling, and made that information available to the user, then sites everywhere would find their own ways of speeding up their whole site instead of just some proprietary search result.

I'm not sure you are arguing against any point the article made, rightly or wrongly?

The only "points" the article made were "AMP is bad" because it "breaks linking". Both of which are easily disproved by a moment's casual use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com