Google AMP – A 70% drop in our conversion rate
medium.com
medium.com
Also, I wonder if I'm the only one that avoids AMP-based sites out of principle. I highly doubt it affects your conversions (I'm not really the easily "convertible" type), but makes one wonder if there can be effective web tech boycotts.
So yeah, just me trying to get blessed by G so everything else improves from G for us :)
It's easier for a dev at a newspaper to say "sorry marketing, Google AMP doesn't allow your javascript" than to actually argue with marketing.
Tell them that it won't support all their various analytics scripts, tracking pixels, and A/B testing scripts that fill up their charts with vanity metrics they use to impress stakeholders.
Counterfactual: lots of terrible business decisions are made because someone gets on an ideological bent and runs with it. Revenue today is worth more than revenue tomorrow. Balancing growth opportunities against investment risks is the core of commercial decision-making.
Is there a mobile browser that tracks bandwidth used, and can tell me how much money I'm spending on bandwidth per domain?
I'd like to know which sites are parsimonious about page size. Then I'll limit my mobile browsing to those and ditch the ones that don't care.
https://github.com/brave/browser-android-tabs/pull/331/files...
Once [cross-origin server push][2] becomes standardized, regular webpages will be able to take advantage of similar functionality.
[1]: https://medium.com/@pbakaus/why-amp-caches-exist-cd7938da245...
[2]: https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-http-origin-...
There are also privacy concerns – e.g. the remote server could set a cookie in a response without you ever visiting that site but if you disable cookies by default users will have to refetch the resource anyway if there's any session state involved in page generation. You also have issues like companies wanting to distinguish between traffic from actual page views and the prefetch mechanism.
That's not to say that the answer is AMP — e.g. since it puts so much render-blocking JavaScript into the critical path prefetching is often just canceling out that cost – and it's sad that the marketing push has made the discussion of alternative performance improvements unnecessarily contentious.
I think aside from the icon and the special treatment mentioned above, don't AMP pages get served directly from google and get preloaded on the search results page? So that's the other benefit, I guess. Whether a few less milliseconds from preloading on an already fast page really buys anything is another question.
On the technical side, it hardly matters. If the sales and marketing teams have bitten, they sell to management, and tech is informed they will be implementing it.
That's often how these things go, anyway.
If Google replaced all of their search results with ads, people would easily switch to bing as bing isn't that much worse.
Facebook on the other hand definitely is "pretty much" a monopoly (but not completely) for certain subsets of the social media market due to network effects which is why they shovel ads down your throat on their platform and they are making tons of money.
Their search results are good because they do machine learning on data from all their other users.
A lesser-used search engine has less data, so even if they have smarter people and a better algorithm, the search results will probably be inferior.
... and let me tell you Bing is not nearly as good as Google when it comes to bringing me the right search results first.
But I got tired of Google asking me to “prove that I’m not a robot” by tapping on roads and street signs with every new search. I use incognito mode, and since they can’t track me, they either are punishing me or just automatically assume I’m not human.
The reason why they do it is because of better search page placement in Google. It's unfair and wasteful, since site speed can easily be measured by the most advanced search engine that already has tools and reports doing exactly that.
AMP is offered as a promise to the user, not the publisher. When I see AMP it guarantees that the site has minimally invasive JavaScript (and the scourge of nonsense that comes with many sites now), will load quickly, etc. The site cannot suddenly bait and switch and start mining bitcoin or spamming pop-overs because it has been technically restricted from doing so.
So yes, sites can be every bit as fast as AMP. And industrial manufacturers can be every bit as clean as required by regulators if they had no regulation. But they aren't, and they don't.
We need an HTML Lite as a mode in the browser that winnows down the enormous featureset of HTML. Not for all content, but for that content where text is king.
Honest question: would the author of the linked article have experienced the same issues if the users had actually visited his own site's AMPages?
Couldn't agree more with this. People approximate it with e.g. noscript, it would be awesome to have a standard which describes a minimal HTML Lite spec though.
Edit: It would be awesome as another option in the link context menu: open in new tab, open in incognito tab, open in lite tab
Right now the AMP CDN enforces the restrictions of AMP (you can't simply pretend it conforms to AMP to Google and then feed the client something else) which is something that is fundamentally misunderstood when this is discussed on HN. AMP is a protection and guarantee of behavior for the user, it is not for the publisher, it is not for the developer. Google has a profound vested interest in trying to maintain people's interest in the web, especially in the face of various alternative walled gardens like Facebook feeds, Apple News, etc.
Yes, right now there is a technical need for an intermediary because it guarantees AMP is actually AMP. It is trivial for a page to say it's AMP, load the AMP standard library, and then do everything disallowed by AMP. There is absolutely nothing preventing that but that intermediary rejecting non-compliant content.
Now of course we've talked about an HTML Light and that would be the browser enforcing that limited sandbox. It could send a relevant cookie and then reject content that steps outside the bounds. But we don't have that right now.
That's because the standard is not well defined. If you had a doctype just for AMP at the top, that would work. I don't see any technical reason why google's servers are necessary. I see a business reason for Google of course but there's nothing technically that makes sense.
> Now of course we've talked about an HTML Light and that would be the browser enforcing that limited sandbox. It could send a relevant cookie and then reject content that steps outside the bounds. But we don't have that right now.
Well, AMP could be just that if it was standardized.
To me, AMP is just Google trying to turn the open web in its own walled garden.
Then "HTML Fat" and "HTML Light" could even be served as one document. If you execute the Javascript, you get the fat version. Else, you get the light version.
If you use Javascript not just to improve the behaviour but also to display content at all, you can provide fallback content that is only displayed in light mode. The fallback content is marked by a special tag. Let's call it `noscript`.
My point is: Making it easier to serve sane and lightweight HTML will not help fix the problem. Publishers don't want to do that, they like all that crap. If we want them to make sane web pages, we must force them.
Google is going to get in trouble stewarding their gateway into the internet in this fashion with these rules. Rules about slow page load times can be seen as universal. Rules about using a Google proxy however are just begging for political intervention. As someone with a small business, I'm upset that these companies, under the guise of helping users, are giving reasons for these liberal governments to act. It negatively affects me when these inevitable regulations come down because companies like Google can't remain provider-neutral. Arg!
> We need an HTML Lite as a mode in the browser that winnows down the enormous featureset of HTML. Not for all content, but for that content where text is king.
I concur here and have been thinking about this recently especially in the context of web browsing in the terminal. But it has to be driven by user adoption, not rules written on the walls of a few companies' gardens.
In the meantime, I would ask that the search engine not give preference to their proxy over anyone else's but instead define the guidelines that we can all reasonably meet.
From what I am aware, in practice there are a large number of sites which provide different content or different behavior in response to the GoogleBot user-agent.
Pinterest runs its own AMP cache for prerendering pages linked from Twitter. Bing runs its own AMP cache to prerender pages linked from Bing. Yandex runs its own AMP cache to prerender pages linked from Yandex. They can't use each others' AMP caches and get the same benefits.
Or, based on the browser I use when I care about speed, can we design pages around the constraints of Lynx/Links/eLinks? The CSS layouts work when called for, menus work in text-mode, but without images, *.js, and all the other Web annoyances, everything loads quick even on the worst connections.
If I were looking for song lyrics, or a recipe, or schedule information, etc, I would be browsing in HTML Lite mode. I don't want popovers, subscribe now boxes, animated bullshit, etc.
My root post is sitting in the negatives right now, and I own that and embrace it because it is how discussions about AMP always go on HN. A bunch of web developers herd in to tell us how terrible AMP is while the web gets more and more bloated, more and more destructive and tragedy of the commons, and we all layer on various shoehorned, half-assed solutions to fight back (e.g. Ad blockers, nuisance blockers, tracking blockers, etc).
Really, what you're saying you want just links back to what I suggested - disable remote CSS (preferably also inline but that's a pipe-dream), disable JavaScript, disable images, and turn your content blocker on full blast. Either that or just use Links. It works for me and blocks all the crud so I can get the content I actually want. The only thing I'd like to do with Links is to change the terminal colors it uses (which I don't think I can do in Windows - if you know how please do tell me). HTML was a fine language for what it does, and it still serves as a very solid core for a Web made of pure content. Only a Web made up of utter corporate nonsense needs scripting.
In abstract, I also don't like the notion of giving Google that much power. Even if what you say makes sense, and regulation is necessary, a private company doing it is the worst of both worlds - they are not accountable to the rest of us, and they have their own goals that contradict the public good.
- Execute all AMP JavaScript asynchronously
- Size all resources statically
- AMP uncouples document layout from resource layout. Only one HTTP request is needed to layout the entire doc.
- All CSS must be inline and size-bound
- Minimize style recalculations
- Only run GPU-accelerated animations
- Prioritize resource loading
- The new preconnect API is used heavily
- When AMP documents get prerendered for instant loading, only resources above the fold are actually downloaded. Resources that might use a lot of CPU (like third-party iframes) do not get downloaded.
- 1K of HTML with 40K of CSS in a file with a long term cache. Clicking a different page on the site downloads another 1K of HTML.
- A 41K file with everything inlined. Clicking a link downloads another 41K.
In the AMP world, this whole stylesheet would end up inlined, and you would download it again the next time someone posted a Medium link on HN.
However, if you have non-render blocking CSS, or CSS that's used for below the fold or generally lower down the page content, "only render critical CSS inline" is usually coupled with "and then have the rest of your CSS in an external stylesheet". Which you are not allowed to do.
Accordingly, it's ALL inline, all the time.
I think that's the only reason.
But imagine you've got an advertising department that wants three different ad networks, a couple different managers that want to see stats from a couple different analytics platforms, and and the designer wants to load a font from fontsquirrel and another one from typekit and another one from google web fonts, and as a developer who wants to keep the site fast you have to fight them every single time they want to add something else that slows your site down. Having the same fight every time, with everybody else saying "oh, it's just one request. and this one is really critical" it's hard to keep fighting that fight.
It's a lot easier to say "i can't do that, it doesn't work in AMP". If you can find a better way to convince large organizations that page load speed is a valuable metric, and more important that whatever other resource they want to load today, I'd love to hear it. But from what i've seen, AMP is the only thing that's had any success in tackling this problem.
I've been fighting against adding additional tracking forever, but constantly get railroaded by marketing because "they're the ones that know how to make us profitable."
Fundamentally I hate what it means for the internet, but I finally have a little power to say "no we can't do that."
That's a rather a-historical way to describe that. The various cookie notifications used what was already common code to implement it since most people didn't want to spend much time on what they saw as a formality.
If companies can't manage to offer their service without exploiting your data and have to blacklist Europe, that's a win to me.
Thankfully, I don't live in the EU because I would be super pissed about all the websites blocking me because the EU no longer wants to give me the option to trade some data for a free service and I expect it to get a LOT worse once they start actually enacting fines and every company realizes that that they have really been force opting in people to data collection so it is no longer profitable to serve the EU.
In my opinion, it would be far far better to force companies to offer a "fair price" paid service in exchange for not collecting data (I'm 100% for taking them to court if they misrepresent the value your data provides so they don't overprice it forcing people to choose the free option). That way, I can choose to keep getting my free service in exchange for data and you guys can pay to protect your privacy. Does this option sound reasonable to you?
Pretty much everything you stated here is completely wrong. GDPR states that personal information can only be collected on an opt-in basis. Your entire statement therefore is completely off.
Because it has to be freely opt-in you cannot just do an opt-out.
> In my opinion, it would be far far better to force companies to offer a "fair price" paid service in exchange for not collecting data
The GDPR doesn't force to use anything for free.
I said "use said service for data" which means all or nothing, no ability to use a service and selectively decline the exchange of data that makes the company you are exchanging with money.
> The GDPR doesn't force to use anything for free.
I didn't say anything about that. I just don't like that free online content like the la times is now blocking all of the EU because their business model is incompatible with GDPR and so I would prefer if the law still allowed EU users the choice to accept said business model, or use one that contributes revenue in proportion to the old one so their business model works while also satisfying your wants. Does that make sense/sound reasonable?
I think you should at least know the basics of the topic you're discussing before leaving nonsensical comments.
Everything you're saying is completely wrong.
> not even having the option to use said service for data
Companies are blocking all of the EU because of GDPR which is denying them the "option to use said service for data". Here is one list so far: https://gdprcasualties.com/
> Thankfully, I don't live in the EU because I would be super pissed about all the websites blocking me because the EU no longer wants to give me the option to trade some data for a free service and I expect it to get a LOT worse once they start actually enacting fines and every company realizes that that they have really been force opting in people to data collection so it is no longer profitable to serve the EU.
I don't know of a single company that now gives users to opt into each data collection so if they actually start throwing down huge fines (which I fully believe they will based on their history), I expect it to get a lot worse.
Assuming (correctly) that web sites are untrustworthy data collection bandits, why should they behave well only because a user proved their submission (and their gullibility) by paying them?
Didn't know what that was until you said it and still not sure how it applies.
> Assuming (correctly) that web sites are untrustworthy data collection bandits, why should they behave well only because a user proved their submission (and their gullibility) by paying them?
I think you are misunderstanding me. I love everything about GDPR except 1 thing and that thing is not allowing companies to tie providing their service in exchange for data so that they can make money because it denies people the CHOICE (key word here) of using said option.
I proposed an option (just pay for the lost revenue the company no longer makes) so that everyone still gets the option to use current revenue models, pro privacy people can pay their fare share for the service, and companies don't blacklist all of the EU for what a portion of the people want. What does not sound fair about that?
I'm curious, how do you propose to fund the web? Should every site now have paywalls?
You cannot do that not because of the EU but because of basic logic.
You're making nothing at all from 20-30% of your visitors, because they're blocking ads. If you're actually following the GDPR, then your average CPM for EU users has tanked because you can't track them and can't serve targeted ads without an explicit opt-in.
Your average revenue per page view is declining, so what do you do? More aggressive ad units and more of them. Popovers and interstitials aren't new, they're just becoming more widespread because many publishers are starting to get desperate. Your bounce rate will increase, users will eventually learn not to click your links, you'll push even more people to use ad blocking, but none of that matters right now because you've got revenue targets to hit.
There is also a real herd effect. Many people will do whatever Matt Cutts tells them because they think it will be good for their SEO. Yeah right. Some of the people who are good at SEO either went to work for huge brands or quasi-competitors of Google (like about.com) that might have some ability to bring Google to anti-trust court; most of the others switched to paid advertising once they figured out that Google won't let you win at SEO.
Certainly people who write for Spamium (aka Tedium) are the ones who try herd-following methods of getting traffic and they tend to be impressed when they get 100 hits on their blog.
How about customer-centric culture? One where UX is #1, and not out of sight?
> Your job is to show why both parties’ incentives are actually aligned, not opposed.
This!
It's your job to do just that because of your vantage point i.e. you're able to see everything more broadly than anyone else. Understanding that all the stakeholders in your organization are doing something important that allows everyone to have a place to come to work to tomorrow is critical for you as the engineer.
It sounds very good on paper but it doesn't really work in practice because devs are generally not recognized as important decision makers in product design, despite said "broad vantage point".
From there, it's a rather thankless uphill battle of the "no good deed will go unpunished" variety. It's a very misaligned situation.
The need for metrics is another way of saying "I don't trust you", which may be understandable to a degree but stakeholders should also understand that not everything can be measured, and that measuring things in a manner that is both accurate and useful is very hard. I'm skeptical that metrics have more value than the word of a seasoned engineer on a project. We don't have very good results with measuring other vague things, why would software development be any different?
That's a rather odd statement to hear from a dev (or developer advocate) because I've always heard fellow engineers talk about how data is more important than opinion. Why is this an exception?
I think the UX is the most important thing, without it (i.e., a good one) there is no profit.
In 2018 bosses involved in web - directly or indirectly - should be well aware of this. At this point in time the web dev's job should not be to "fix" those above them. There's plenty else to do and keep up with qithout having to add risking their career to the list.
And few if any freelancers are going to speak up. Which is all the more reason the decision makers should understand the implications of their decisions.
In my experience it's next to impossible. We have a bunch of inefficient bloated legacy shit that barely works and we spend most of our time bug fixing. Yet we keep adding to it while hiring more and more people to fix the increasing amount of bugs.
I've been fortunate to spend my career working at sane companies, but I've talked to so many people who were in situations where management wouldn't listen to their own staff, but then turned around and listened to (and implemented) the exact same recommendations when they were made by a consultant.
I know there are often valid reasons for this, and external validation can be important. But it sure must be frustrating as hell to see your company pay $25+k to receive a list of recommendations you already made.
Trusting subordinates who are incentivized to fudge the numbers is very difficult. Most people won't outright lie to their boss to get ahead, but they will make a bad business proposition look good to the point they genuinely believe it themselves. Leadership is hard.
That is mostly a problem if the people above the management are the same. For a sane company with good leadership, failures are a learning experience that makes you better.
In SpeedCurve, for just around $8/mo per page/site you can set up daily synthetic checks for the business and its competitors, covering multiple profiles: mobile/3g, tablet/4g, desktop/fibre.
You can use both the metrics (Start Render, SpeedIndex, Hero Paint) [1] and the filmstrip videos to literally show them how they compare side-by-side [2] – this is super-powerful as it's so visual.
Disclaimer: I don't work for SpeedCurve, just a fan of the tool.
[1]: https://speedcurve.com/features/synthetic/#benchmark [2]: https://speedcurve.com/demo/video/?tests=180102_1T_d12fa882f...
were the filmstrips enough to convince them, or did your bosses want to see numbers/stats like how many were dropping off your site for each x-seconds of delay?
There are some great stats on bounce rate / abandonment on WPOStats: https://wpostats.com/
This is my favourite:
> 53% of visits to mobile sites are abandoned after 3 seconds according to research from Google's DoubleClick.
One thing to note, to those stakeholders who are aware of web traffic stats, is that if a site uses client-side analytics (e.g. Google Analytics) and it hasn't loaded the analytics script by the time the user abandons the site, they won't be tracked, so the bounces won't be affected – it'll be like they were never there.
So ultimately, bounce rates in analytics tools can typically be significantly worse than reported when web performance is poor.
That doesn't sound like it relieves you of maintaining a bogged down version of the site, it just means in addition to maintaining the bogged down version you have to now also maintain the amp version, and keep them consistent.
Yes...do all the same things but without requiring Google proxy it. There are several things orgs will do to optimize SEO, conforming to AMP rules can be another. Gaming SEO is a concern for all SEO requirements so surely that's a poor excuse for proxying.
EDIT: But it did give me an idea on how to tell websites you aren't happy with something: https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/91
Have google results punish fat pages. Then we can say "I can do that, but you have to sign this the declaration accepting responsibility for our page hits tanking".
There's a certain "theory of the firm" that says corporations exist because they reduce the overhead cost of operating certain enterprises.
Things like this -- along with the also oft-seen need to hire consultants to tell some people in your company to do what other people in your company already know needs to be done -- make me wonder if the limits of that theory are well understood.
Honest question
I hate needlessly heavy sites. I just avoid them. I'm also it a fan of AMP. I especially hate the URL is wrong and trying to share the correct URL is tedious
And then the engineer could point at validator results.
It's much more likely that the changes done to a website to satisfy AMP affected the conversion rate.
https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2018-03-19-how-fast-is-amp-r...
Because you need to convince business folks about stripping down bloat from your webpages. And doing that by citing sticks and carrots from Big-G is much easier than doing it on your own. So we can attribute this to: laziness of developers (who cannot make arguments to reduce bloat), boneheadedness of business folks (who cannot quickly understand why bloat is bad), tragedy of commons (my competitors are gaining valuable traffic by having their articles in special Google carousel at the top of search results, I am missing out so I must do AMP) etc.
The usability of your site just doesn't really matter if your business is to get traffic from Google and monetize it, which is what we are talking about here.
You can implement this feature yourself too: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Link_prefe...
Maciej Cegłowski (aka idlewords) recommends exactly this is in his (2015!) talk "The Website Obesity Crisis": http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
His specific comments about AMP: "AMP is a special subset of HTML designed to be fast on mobile devices. Why not just serve regular HTML without stuffing it full of useless crap? The question is left unanswered."
Personally, I think it's stupid from content creators, because if I visit the website I might read more articles, share, or sign up to the newsletter, and that doesn't happen with all AMP implementations I've seen.
So, lack of UX with the links.
So unless Google actually adjusts the ranking it is useless to get AMP. I wish though that many web sites would chill down with including so much of JS on their pages.
The article also mentions the impact on conversion rate. We're interested to learn more details surrounding this. Blank pages loading for many users would explain a lower conversion rate but we'd like to figure out if there's any other possible cause since it doesn't currently seem like most users hit a blank page in actual usage. I'll get in touch with the article author to see if there's openness to digging in further.
If, as the article implies, Google will give me the same rankings if I do things to get the same performance as an AMP page then I would rather do that.
Unpopular where? Between web devs on HN which are the main cause of the web site bloat plague?
Even the author couldn't narrow down what exactly was the cause other than maybe:
a) the domain name being different
b) the addition of chrome w/ a link to Google support + a notification "You're now logged in as [user]@gmail.com"
c) minor CSS changes as a result of minimizing static assets
None of these screams an obvious problem, especially given the other benefits this process has given in return (which of course could be accomplished without AMP).
Google has been using indicators like page performance in their ranking algorithm for quite a while now, so to be fair, it doesn't look like it helped that much. A single label and clear prioritisation apparently make it a far easier sell within companies.
(Not that I'm a fan of Google/any single company having to be that warden, but I digress.)
Note that "content blocker" is congruent to "resource failed to load", which could always happen.
It's actually to the point that I have stopped using non-browser google search on my phone. In fact I didn't really notice it was AMP just that results from "Ok Google" were annoying as hell after upgrading to Google Assistant. Reading this article was an "oooooooohhhh that's what's going on" reveal to me.
I don't even know where he's getting this "Info" thing. To me it just looks like some sort of chrome window that doesn't let me edit the url. Even when I do "Open in..." to send the link from I guess it's called Amp browser (...that somehow looks like Chrome?) to my browser it leaves me trapped in AMP with weird urls. It's extremely confusing.
I just want to escape to the actual website in an actual browser and for whatever reason I end up having to try and re-find the site in the mobile browser. Maybe there's some obvious way to do this but it's just driving me bonkers.
* ublock origin
* view image (google picture search)
* background video playback (eg. YouTube)
* redirector (eg. auto switch to old.reddit)The solution needs to start in much simpler terms: Google should publish page traits that are rewarded and punished, and tools for seeing where you stand. It should reward/punish all sites based on how they fare in the published areas.
We don’t need new protocols/wrappers/rehosting or extra scripting or whatever else to drag bad sites into the 21st century. These just create additional issues when we have plenty of engineering problems already.
The web has incredible variety in tech stacks, business structures and even views on what a standard means.
But AMP is a standard. Using AMP doesn't solve any of the problems you're talking about. If people's usage is too diverse to be accurately measured, then it's too diverse for AMP to meet everyone's needs. And if it's not important for AMP to meet everyone's needs, then why is it important for a set of page tests to do so?
I agree there might be problems building a small set of tests to check page speed, but that would still be strictly better than AMP. It would still cover at least all of the use-cases that AMP covers now, and it would open the door to cover more use-cases in the future.
If you're ranking search results based on whether or not someone uses a framework, you are implicitly ranking them based on the attributes of that framework. What people are asking is for Google to make those attributes explicit instead, and to directly test them.
AMP's website defines it as a library: https://www.ampproject.org/learn/overview/
I don't particularly care whether anyone thinks that's technically a standard or a framework or a library by the ridged definition or not; at the point we start down that rabbit hole we're just talking about words, not concepts.
What I was trying to get at above was that any problems people bring up around Google profiling websites for search placement are still present in AMP. Forcing developers to use a specific set of technologies is functionally the same as forcing them to conform to a ridged set of benchmarks. For the purposes of this discussion, we might as well call AMP a standard.
My non-technical significant other and my dad have repeatedly asked me if those pages are safe to visit: after training them for years on the heuristic of mistrusting a page where the URL doesn't match the expectation, AMP is now breaking it for them and causing unnecessary insecurity.
I'd prefer something that I can install on my phone browser to redirect me automatically to the non-AMP version, I'll do some digging.
Which is Firefox for Android.
Chrome bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=873571
awkward for me. i really liked Wave.
After Wave failed, they doubled down on making Gmail into more of a nonstandard product with reduced interoperability (now requiring Gmail API instead of standard IMAP) and increasingly, embrace & extend functionality such as email expiration dates.
Is something not working with gmail's imap support?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16951363
https://www.dvratil.cz/2014/06/improved-gmail-integration-in...
https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/gmail/9A5oYELFbu8/7iq...
https://github.com/mscdex/node-imap/issues/71
https://freron.lighthouseapp.com/projects/58672/tickets/1247...
Sure you can still access Gmail through IMAP, but if it works differently enough that using a standard IMAP client feels cumbersome and unfamiliar, is it really anything else than a vehicle to tell people that they should really just use the "better" Google product directly?
That said, my original wording of "requiring" the Gmail API was poor and I should have phrased it more accurately.
Also they're moving away from the icon and going to a full "Not Secure" status. Image: https://i.imgtc.com/9DwDQ6r.png
>do not need to be "secured"
Which is it - is the site secure without SSL, or does the site not need to be secure?
In the former case, I disagree wholeheartedly. In the latter case, you're not blocked from browsing the site - only informed that it is insecure, a factual statement.
HTTP is unsafe in the same way that getting a newspaper delivered to your yard is unsafe.
Oh no. Casual passersby know from looking that I have a newspaper on my lawn. If someone wants to snoop when I'm not looking, they now know that I read a specific newspaper. Someone could even steal it.
It's unsafe in the sense that if you leave your driver license, credit cards, birth certificate, cash, and car keys all in your yard over night, you won't be surprised if at least one of them is gone in the morning.
HTTP is a paper in your yard. A poster on a phone pole. A business card on a broken, smudgedy plexiglass subway sign. HTTP is public, and there is absolutely value in putting things out there for everyone to read in public.
You could argue it is bad for publishers. But users? Please.
This was the result of a lawsuit by Getty Images - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after...
Who are the users you're speaking of? The ones on their mobile devices who click AMP links by and large seem to love them. Who hates them, however, are web developers and web exploiters who see it as a threat, a limitation, etc.
Really? The main comment I've heard about it (when people mention it at all) is that it messes up the URL. I doubt most people notice anything changed.
By what mechanism? Because copying the URL from the bar does not copy the correct URL, it copies the AMP url.
This was fixed at the beginning of this year. Now what canonical URL the publisher uses is up to them.
Another comment said that relative links are all messed up o n the Reddit AMP version. That's Reddit doing it wrong.
Such a frustrating experience for users.
2) Links no longer point to your own website.
3) Analytics don't work correctly, because the wrong URLs are logged.
4) It centralizes the WWW on Google's domain, keeping users on google.com rather sending them deeper into your site.
5) It restricts the way that you can monetize your site.
6) It causes webpages to load slower when 3rd party scripts are disabled.
7) It restricts how you can build your site.
8) It isn't faster than hand-optimized HTML.
9) Etc.
Even if nothing else, people should oppose it because centralization is exactly what the WWW isn't supposed to be.
"Make no mistake. AMP is about lock-in for Google. AMP is meant to keep publishers tied to Google."
1) Click on an AMP link by mistake in google results 2) Get annoyed at the less-functional AMP experience to read reddit (limited replies on AMP page, no JS expansion, etc)
It's also super frustrating AMP prevents hold-tap on mobile to open a link in a new window, it just doesn't work.
3) Press the chain link icon to switch to mobile site
I've been frustrated and delayed in getting to the mobile site directly.
Since AMP uses an overflow technique to handle content/scrolling, the page never triggers a scroll event on the body. So not only do you see a toolbar at the top (which admittedly, slides out when you scroll down), you see the browser toolbar at the bottom (which persists!)
bloomberg.com/<interesting-story> vs.
google.com/amps/<etc>
Example: https://techcrunch-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/techcrunch.com...
edit: wait, no I don't. I get a header when I visit the page via google search, not when I follow the link directly. I haven't noticed this before because google is the only way I usually end up at AMP pages.
Google link: https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2018/08/08/samsu...
I got them very frequently (as a user). This coupled with the inability to turn off AMP finally pushed me to use DDG as the default search engine.
I figured it was just tehGoog reminding me to pay attention to other human beings rather than staring at my phone. Then they fixed it with some update, when they realized I was incorrigible (actually I never figured out why).
https://www.ampproject.org/docs/fundamentals/spec/amp-boiler...
Yes, probably that. I get the 8 second delay because I block all 3rd party scripts by default.
The aversion to flashes of unstyled content is so absurd sometimes...
The whole point of a search engine is to give you what you're looking for, and ddg delivers. If I ever need to Google something, I'll use !g query. You can make it look really nice also by changing it from the Default theme to Basic.
I've been using DDG as my search engine for about 2 1/2 years now, and I find absolutely no reason to go back to Google other than location search, and DDG proxies that easily.
I took that to be what the parent meant. And it's not cool and has never been cool, but I thought they backed off for some reason.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/mark-up-lis...
The search results you see just put in the effort to provide structured data to google. You can do this easily and without any AMP integrations by simply embedding structured data (such as JSON-LD) on the page.
So there's no "effortless" way for knowledge of HTML-embedded microformats to filter down to most HTML document authors or web-app theme creators. They have to actually go and seek such knowledge out. And often they don't know what they don't know†, so they have no reason to.
Essentially anything on the web that requires or relies on an HTML-embedded microformat to work, is instantly relegated to being an "SEO black art" that just gets passed around in blog posts read by bigcorp web-app devs and no one else.
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† This is one big part of what the people who dislike minification, WASM, etc. are complaining about re: the "readable" web. It used to be that you'd discover techniques like this by just looking at a bigcorp's production web pages and seeing how they work. That's far harder today than it used to be, and it's only going to get even harder in the future.
WebAssembly expressly has a textual representation so that it can be inspected, it's part of the spec. And for everything else that's compiled, there are always decompilers to give you the source, often times at great quality.
HTTP/2 is binary (and by default encrypted) but nobody notices because browsers and tools transparently convert it to text for you, even though there were plenty of complaints that it would be hard to inspect.
Can we be clear in this discussion that the oft-cited carousel is only relevant for trending/news type searches? It has no bearing on the overwhelming majority of searches.
Sites do it because they are forced to for that placement, not because they want to. They would much rather have a single consistent website that benefits everyone on the web.
It was one of the reasons why I switched exclusively to Brave on mobile because they didn't serve AMP to that user agent, which meant that Google search results loaded faster (that 100KB of render-blocking JavaScript meant a LOT of time looking at empty pages on the subway) and weren't broken if you tried to share or save the URLs.
Testing just now, I see only AMP links in the carousel but there are queries where a non-AMP link has sufficient rank to be featured in the top stories section.
It's an odd worst-of-both-worlds implementation where it has made the compromises needed to display it in a vanilla Chrome browser window, but doesn't actually appear to be a vanilla Chrome browser window with normal Chrome features.
And that's not getting into the terrifying power-position it gives google as the host of your content.
AMP + Safari reader mode = Best browsing experience.
I'd rather not deal with AMP and just go with the real page + an ad blocker. Fortunately, in iOS, the ad blockers also work in certain types of embedded web views (SafariViewController) that my RSS Reader uses.
If Google really cared about fixing the root of the problem, they would put the AMP icon next to sites that are already small and already load fast, and rank them higher, rather than creating a new platform.
A) Not de-ranking sites that are large and slow
B) Asking them to run a bunch of unnecessary trackers (Google Analytics)
I've never used AMP, but it does sound like it is fast, and web-page bloat is indeed a problem. But adding another layer (which also just happens to make you more beholden to Google) isn't the right way to fix that problem, removing the bloated layers is.
B) GA is super lightweight compared to almost every other thing people put on their sites. I mean, it's the equivalent of one tiny image.
B) And? It doesn't matter how lightweight it is. It's still unnecessary.
The result is the same (you murdered somebody), but it very much matters if and how I was involved.
Who are you to decide if GA is unnecessary?
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-i...
They don't weight it high it enough. The fact that it took until 2018 until they did that for mobile is telling enough.
The actual article is a legitimate issue and should be looked into (and sounds like it is), but the vitriol for AMP voiced here is crazy, considering what it does (very little).
I avoid GOOG when possible, so I have to copy out <content> manually, which is (minorly) annoying. Thus, AMP leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Then, of course, there's a variety of ideological arguments against it, but those have all been discussed ad nauseam, so I'll leave them out of this post.
It's a nice bar to set for websites to compete against. I think Google rightfully so should penalize bloated & slow sites.
It's easy to create something better than AMP's experience. It takes a little time optimizing your site to create a pleasant interface & experience.
The majority of sites I see that are below the AMP bar, are sites that choose to be that way with lots of ads & pop ups. They do it because these things help them make money. So for them they have little incentive to use AMP. A lot of them make some of that money with Google Ads though.
So at the end of the day, I really don't see who AMP is for.
AMP convinced me to stop using Google's mobile website and switch to DuckDuckGo, and as an added bonus I can View Image from image search results.
EDIT: Forgot about how Google refuses to serve their modern version of Google.com on Firefox Android. That was the final nail in the coffin for me.
Using this script[0], I was able to get it down to 14K. Then further cleaning it up in emacs and adding <img> tags, I got the html down to 10k. That means it should take probably less than 5 seconds to load the html (not including the massive images) on a 5KB/s connection in Australia (more common thank you might think in the country areas, although getting much better with the NBN roll out) or any other 3rd world internet countries.
You can test the resulting html in this gist[1]. Please note I did that in about 20mins, and did not test on mobile, so it is not perfect. I expect the images need to be scaled to fit on mobile. Also I only used the <style> tag to keep it as one file, I don't recommend doing that on real websites.
I really hope more people start caring about saving bandwidth and client side resources (CPU, RAM, etc.)
[0]: https://gist.github.com/cjbayliss/b0042b5c7b46aebd5b40a85855...
[1]: https://gist.github.com/cjbayliss/4b9f5b5cc7a4dde8efcb4b06c1...
But also, why are you so sure they're not prioritized in the rest of the results? It's very difficult to prove a negative here, and I personally don't trust anything google has said publicly on the matter.
AMP pages aren't faster. They just feel faster when you go through google search and the hidden background pre-load.
I hate walled gardens. What troubles me more is that something that came from addressing a competitor's product (Fb's Instant Articles in this case) has grown to do more damage than what Instant Articles could have in the first place.
As for the Google Amp URL, they are working on fixing it. https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/950549603975233536
Personally I hope Apple continues to ignore the AMP standard and leaves the links broken on iOS Safari, because it’s the only way to make it obvious to users what’s happening. Google is trying to sweep it under the rug; hopefully Apple doesn’t let them get away with it.
I am fairly sure the product is not working as expected... My experience is on an Android Pixel 2 - so it's not like I am not a target market.
About one year ago when I switched there were a few things that annoyed me, but it’s become a great experience since then... and they’re not tracking me.
Do it, and you won’t regret it.
What is the overlap on the Venn diagram between "people who like to use AMP" and "people who are technical enough to need this service"? My first instinct would be that it's low.
If the page speed is acceptable, its going to be ranked over an AMP page if the content is better.
Content is the key, build better content, that solves better a concrete problem that visitors have: that is how you win visitors trust and get higher rankings at the same time.
AMP is the developer equivalent of getting a gastric bypass surgery because you refuse to control yourself and live a healthy lifestyle.
There's a very obvious solution here to the AMP issues that people keep writing about: stop building massively bloated sites, where the bloat inevitably acts to abuse users rather than provide a better experience. AMP isn't necessary at all. It is that simple. No, you don't need 600kb of CSS. No you don't need 8mb of JavaScript. Just stop building like that, there's a better way. Put your obese, lazy sites on a healthy diet and exercise regimen.
100% on Google Lighthouse
As for seasonality, that's a fine argument. But overall traffic was consistent across these weeks measured. Also, our conversion rate was awesome through US holidays like July 4. Also, as soon as I got rid of AMP, immediately our conversion rate is back. It's pretty stark how bad AMP was for us.
I've looked everywhere, but to no avail. Can anyone shed some light on this?
It's about google hosting your site and capturing data from it. It's a shitty idea and i can't understand why people use it.
Yes, make your website fast, please. There're plenty of guidelines and tests for that, but you don't need amp for that.
I do find myself using Chrome on android less and less primarily because of AMP
I work extensively in SEO and have never recommended AMP for this reason.
This is where consumer choice and free markets break down, and regulations become important. That's why dumping is a illegal, because consumers are not going to turn away from cheap products because of bad actors.
In the real world you need regulations.
We've been doing the Google dance to their tune for too long.
Or is AMP opt-in?
He joked to me and said that this money is essentially "stupidity tax" on these large enterprises because they can't navigate their way through even some trivial tech problems.
AMP is one such stupidity tax in my personal opinion. I have worked for many years in web performance optimisation and I realise that every internet business must pay a good close attention to it but most of them are incompetent to do that. Their webpages are bloated. Just check how heavy is the page for forbes.com and you will realise the problem.
AMP sets a standard where even with low quality developers you can have nice fast loading pages. It is very similar to those Javascript wrappers that force typed variables and semicolons.
IF you are already having a good web team don't waste time on AMP unless there is some real demonstrable benefit.
(I agree with everything else you have said. My Xioami smartphone from 2014 is faster than the Packard-Bell computer I used back in the mid-90s... yet companies always find a way to slow things down. They used to do it with Flash. One catalog company even did their ENTIRE website in Flash... when people were still using 56k modems and DSL was not as widespread as before.)
He even worked with a bank that decided to close down their website and redo entire netbanking in some .net based installable app because it was supposedly secure. After spending a lot of money and a pilot with 10,000 users they discovered that nearly 80% of their users who were forced to use it simply move the money out of the bank.
All this was tech incompetence tax.
While the tech work is pretty less, the social engineering involved is hard to scale.
A: No. Why would you be so naive to think otherwise?
Some comparisons between devices, as but one example, could support the idea that AMP affects conversion rate (AMP is only shown on mobile).
As it is, I have my doubts that the mechanisms he speculates could have such an impact. URLs, for example, are really de-emphasised on mobile.
"There’s nothing that magical about it. A big part of its performance boost is simply its standards: no javascript, all inline CSS, and CSS can only measure 50KB or less. You’re going to make any page load faster with those requirements."
Gee, for my startup, that's the way I wrote my Web pages from the beginning! Microsoft's ASP.NET wrote a little, simple JavaScript for me, but for using my Web pages that JavaScript is optional.
Ruby "going out of vogue" has nothing to do with the authors problem. It wouldn't matter if the author was using TrendyNewFramework.js™, PHP, Django or some GO framework. The issue seems to be the terrible user experience that comes with using AMP. I know I personally hate it and tend to drop off when I see it begin loading.
Also FWIW, there's plenty of slow SPA's built on the latest and greatest, and there's plenty of fast rails sites (have you been to https://dev.to recently? It's like ️). Rails is doing just fine.