Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

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> React was a tool the community loved

AMP is a feature that users love. The difference between the two is that here there's a much higher ratio of developers, and most users don't realize when they are using AMP. If you gave them a comparison of a fast loading light page or not (just compare a site's page pre and post them deploying AMP capability), I'm confident this would be easily shown.

There are some problems with AMP, and there are some problems with how Google utilizes it, but it does help the problem of page bloat and slow loading pages.

> React's licensing switch was a liberation, this feels like appeasement.

A lot of the complaints are about Google's control over AMP, and how they might change it in the future in directions that are harmful for the minority. This does address that somewhat. I see them as very similar. Both are projects where a large company spurred release for their own reasons, but had to make it more open to appease the public and actually get more of the adoption they wanted.

People love fast websites, not AMP. For users, not much would have changed if the lightning icon on Google Search meant "This site loads really quickly" and AMP was a JS-framework made by Google as an example how to make fast sites, but basically all objections from the dev side would be invalidated.

AMP is not your website. It's a restricted shell of your website's content that is hosted on google.com. People aren't visiting your website when they visit those AMP pages.

The cache part is only one aspect of it: I regularly encounter AMP-based sites that are not served from Googles caches.

Are you arriving from Google Search?

How do you turn off the cache and prevent Google from adding back buttons and left/right swipes that take visitors off your page?

I use Firefox on Android, which if I understand correctly isn't sent to the cache, but some sites still are AMP. + AMP links shared by others, on other sites/channels.

> AMP is a feature that users love.

AMP requires me to manually edit URLs to remove AMP before sharing, several times per day, because some people have an aversion to MitM between their browser and publishers.

As of iOS 12 Safari does this automatically when you use the share sheet.

> AMP requires me to manually edit URLs to remove AMP before sharing

That's Google's usage of AMP pages, not necessarily AMP itself though, right?

There is no "AMP itself" outside of Google. The AMP project consists of three parts[1]:

1. a specification for an HTML/CSS subset (almost) which is relatively easy for browsers to render efficiently.

2. an open source client-side JS library designed to automatically apply a number of performance optimizations to pages written against the specification above

3. a closed-source proprietary proxy server designed to further optimize content delivery for pages written with the above tooling.

The first two are pretty awesome; full stop. The third one is probably also pretty awesome from a technical perspective, but it's hard to say for sure since I can't spin up my own proxy server to find out.

AMP pages can be served without the proxy layer, but then they're not really AMP pages. They're just unusually svelte HTML pages with some slightly esotreric JS runtime extensions. In order for the end user to actually get most of the benefits of AMP the page needs to be filtered through a compatible proxy, and that means Google (or Cloudflare, who also host a proxy layer with Google's blessing).

I've got nothing against Google's proprietary tools. I've got a Gmail account, all my spreadsheets live in Google Docs, I still miss Reader. But let's call a spade a spade. AMP is fundamentally a proprietary Google offering with a handful of open source components. Nothing short of enabling third parties to host their own proxy servers will change that fundamental fact.

[1]: https://www.ampproject.org/learn/overview/

Most defences of AMP seem to focus on how all the Bad Stuff(tm) is a property of how Google does AMP (As if anyone else showing users AMP pages is relevant), and how its an open standard you can "fix the problems with" (You can't fix things in the way Google decides to show users things).

It really smells like an android-esque "fake open" move where any complaints about Google's control over the situation is deflected with arguments about how parts of it being open source (But not the parts that are giving Google said control)

That sounds like a you problem. Lots of sites use CDNs. Do you refuse to use any site that uses Cloudflare? Or is it just because AMP is easier to see that it bothers you?

AMP is a feature that users love.

AMP is almost certainly not a feature that users know about, beyond it being a bit faster and breaking stuff.

I absolutely hate being taken to an AMP page instead of a web page, and worse is having no way to say to Google "please don't show me this".

> I absolutely hate being taken to an AMP page instead of a web page

Are you saying you hate to be taken to a page designed with AMP in mind (AMP compliant), or that you hate being taken to Google's cached version of AMP pages served through their CDN, which is not at the target site?

These are not the same things. AMP is a spec for how to design and implement your page. Google uses the specifics to cache the page and show it. People seem to think these are inextricably linked, but there are other CDNs, and this whole announcement is about giving AMP itself it's own governance.

sure ya do, use firefox

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