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> The most important feature of AMP is that it makes it impossible to add the kind of bloated crap that causes poor performance on something like a large media company website.

The only reason AMP matters is because Google was heavily pushing it and for awhile restricted the top search result carousel to AMP pages. This goal could far more easily have been satisfied by a policy which set limits for time-to-render and total transfer rather than dictating usage of a proprietary framework which often makes performance worse (you need a 100KB of JavaScript to finish running before an AMP page isn't blank).

What actually made Google try it is that it gives them control over the advertising system. Performance was the pretext they used to protect their main source of revenue.

Except it does so in a rather poor way:

* It's clearly driven by a biased entity (Google)

* It doesn't actually directly prioritize page speed

* It breaks websites

It also grabs a significant portion of the top of your webpage...which happens to be the reddest part of a heatmap for eyeballs.

> nonbiased entity (Google)

You probably meant it the other way round?

Fixed, thanks.

The web development community had plenty of time to fix these problems in better ways and it instead just spent time building bigger and bigger JS frameworks and background videos.

What problems exactly? The web works pretty well and the source of most problems is non-technical. AMP is cache + handcuffs. No, thanks. I am no web-developer, but pretty sure I wouldn't want to touch that. Is performance really an issue these days? It probably always is but there are worse ones. One specifically being closed web technologies administered by large companies like Google.

The number of times I open a news article (local/regional seems to be the worst) on my phone, start reading the article, and then 10-15 seconds later have the whole thing go blank, reflow, and start me back at the top of the page... I haven't spent any time investigating what actually causes it, whether it's a stylesheet or a big JS module or what, but it's absolutely enraging. I'm just reading what could be plain text content, and that flow gets horribly interrupted.

I'm really torn on AMP to be honest. I'm morally and technically opposed to it, but... the experience is often dramatically better than what I would have gotten without it.

Having a basic knowledge of optimising images in photoshoot would save a MFT (Metric F&^K Ton) of page weight

This is nonsense. AMP pages can still track and advertise and use unlimited amounts of crap; it's just different syntax.

TFA is just stating that you don't need handcuffs to behave well. You can optimise your site without AMP.

Except this doesn't happen in practice. We've already seen that in the wild. What is left to have a discussion about?

The top-level post of this thread argues that the problem Amp solves is that it makes it impossible to add bloat, and that the mere possibility of adding bloat to your website means that it'll happen.

Now, I don't know whether that's true, but supposing that it's, the post you're responding to raises an important point. If AMP doesn't inherently limit bloat, maybe it's only a matter of time before AMP pages are all bloated crap.

So the answer is to hand the mobile web to Google?

> Turn off your ad blocker, go to a news site, watch the network tab and despair.

Or don't, and you'd never have the problem in the first place. The problem with bloat IMO is that clients at all support it. Thankfully there are a lot of browser extensions for generous content blocking that can make the user experience passable.

Sadly, Chrome doesn't support extensions for mobile. Firefox does, which is the (only) reason I use it but that's obviously not going to be around forever. If the choice is ever surf with ads/trackers or don't surf I'll be not surfing.

You are implying that ads are mandatory part of life when we know that they aren't. I agree with the analytics part, however I would not use Google for that either. For me AMP is pretty useless and it is another way for Google to hijack the web.

Google Analytics became useless after Google decided they weren’t going to block Analytics spam.

> The most important feature of AMP is that it makes it impossible to add the kind of bloated crap that causes poor performance on something like a large media company website.

Exactly. Nothing stops you from following them in the regular Web

AMP is used mostly to get higher visibility on Google. Imagine if there was a third-party AMP caching website. Would anyone make an AMP version for them? No way. They do it only because Google will show them above their competitors in search results.

You are taking about policy here. The article is talking about technical implementation.

You missed GP’s point. They were saying that the devs generally didn’t need to be convinced, it’s the business owners who did. Being that AMP dictates none of the bloatware, the business can’t steamroll their demands over the engineers.

Yes in that sense AMP is a business contact rather than a technical innovation. "Follow these rules and we'll tell users that we think your site is fast and maybe prioritise it in search results".

That's why you can't have a fast news site without it - because new site owners won't follow the rules needed to make their site fast unless they get something in return other than speed. Only AMP gives that.

If Google based is lightning bolt etc. on measured page speed instead then yes you might not need AMP. But they don't.

> If Google based is lightning bolt etc. on measured page speed instead then yes you might not need AMP. But they don't.

But they do?

https://searchengineland.com/google-speed-update-page-speed-...

That page doesn't say that at all. Speed is obviously considered in ranking but you don't get a lightning bolt unless you use AMP.

> The most important feature of AMP is that it makes it impossible to add the kind of bloated crap that causes poor performance on something like a large media company website.

When I load this AMP page [1] with an empty cache, Dev Tools show that 3.3 Mb of files are loaded [2]. Also, the page contains lots of errors [3]. This page contains ads, analytics and even a video that you have mentioned in your comment.

After loading, every 10 seconds a HTTP2 request to cloudapi.imrworldwide.com is sent even if the page is in the background.

AMP looks more like an internal Google standard for integrating websites into search results. The spec contains a lot of restrictions like these: you MUST include a 12 000-line JS script from Google ( https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js ) into every AMP page, you MAY use only components made by Google and even custom JS template engine made by Google. If you are an ad network then you have to make negiotiations with Google, your competitor, to be included into the whitelist. There are lot of whitelists: list of sites that can provide fonts, list of sites that can add widgets to AMP pages.

Here is one example of such conditions [4]:

> In order to qualify for inclusion, an extended component that integrates a third-party service must generally meet the notability requirements of the English Wikipedia, and is in common use in Internet publishing. As a rough rule of thumb, it should be used or requested by 5% of the top 10,000 websites as noted on builtwith.com, or already integrated into oEmbed.

If you are a small business, you are not welcome.

[1] https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2016/feb/1...

[2] https://imgur.com/RGYij9q

[3] https://imgur.com/j1IYaMW

[4] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/3p/README....

But if there's no advertising where's the money going to come from to pay those developers?

Part of the third-party bloatware problem on the web is us, users who aren't willing to pay for content

The truth probably is that most websites would fail if users had to pay for them. In my opinion, that's a good thing. Ideally, anything that serves an important interest would remain (because users have a genuine interest in further use) while the useless stuff that's just tricking you into paying attention would disappear (because no one actually gives a crap about vapid celebrity gossip unless you really bait them into it). The sooner this can happen, the better.

The biggest sites that are ad-dependent are in the digital media space, and they are undergoing a culling like never before. Mic.com and Mashable recently sold at distress sale prices, and Buzzfeed and Vice are also struggling to meet revenue targets.

> The truth probably is that most websites would fail if users had to pay for them.

I agree with you here, but the implication of this is that if the user isn't willing to pay for it, and ads aren't enough to sustain the business, maybe they should not be in that particular business.

Or, they could try to rise to the challenge and build a brand people are willing to pay for. The Guardian in the UK recently hit a million paying digital subscribers, so it's certainly not impossible. Most sites do not need a million subscribers to make payroll.

I talked of this elsewhere. It's a form of vetting we don't have anymore where there is an educated editor somewhere to make sure what we read is worthwhile (not censorship which isn't the same thing).

There are a number of articles on the 'net that show AMP can often be slower than a well made page or site. I don't recall the details.

I’ve yet to find an AMP page that downloads less than 1MB of crap for what edsentially id a dtatic text page (sometimes with images).

1 MB is incredibly compact by news site standards.

Try a random article page like https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/07/tech/australia-encryption...

I refreshed a few times, scrolling to the bottom of the page each time. According to Chrome dev tools even without a video playing between 6 MB and 21 MB was transferred just for me to scroll to the bottom of the page.

True. The problem with AMP though is that it doesn't push content sites to do anything about their actual sites. Content/news sites produce a stripped down version for AMP in the hopes to get into the search carousel, and that's it.

That's why I view other initiatives by Google such as https://web.dev [1] laughable at best.

[1] Is a rehash of what has been in their docs for ages: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/w...

> it doesn't push content sites to do anything about their actual sites

Literally nothing has ever achieved that, and it likely never will, it's also no AMP's job, AMP's job is to be a workaround for that systemic issue.

AMP's job is to lock publishers in a Google-controlled system where you jump when Google tells you to jump, or else you lose your spot at the top of Google's search results.

Oh. And ads. It's always about the ads.

They don't even attempt to hide it, really. Right there on AMP's page (emphasis mine):

--- quote ---

The project enables the creation of websites and ads that are...

What AMP Provides

Higher Performance and Engagement

....

Flexibility and Results

Publishers and advertisers can decide how to present their content and what technology vendors to use, all while maintaining and improving key performance indicators.

...

More than 1.5B AMP pages have been published to date and 100+ leading analytics, ad tech and CMS providers support the AMP format.

--- end quote ---

The AMP Project site itself is ~500kb.

https://www.ampproject.org/ (desktop version is AMP-ified too).

For me it was over a megabyte, could not scroll smoothly, and had a broken header once I started scrolling.

Do people not use the web, particularly media sites.

PLEASE go browse a bunch of non-AMP media sites with adblocker off. 500kb is TINY by comparison to what is out there outside of AMP.

People do. And people who understand what the web and AMP are know that AMP isn't the solution.

By the time you've loaded CNN's AMP page, you'll have loaded at least 4 MB: ~2 MB of AMP prefetching done on Google's search results page and another ~2.2 MB on the AMP page itself.

If Google adhered to its own page performance standards, as outlined here: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/w..., CNN's AMP page would be demoted in search results. However, since its AMP, it gets put front and center in search carousel.

Same goes for every single other AMP page.

Isn't CNN something like 7-8MB without AMP?

Oh, that was with an adblocker on. But aside from that, many of the websites I go to don't have AMP and load quickly. Hacker News is a pretty good example; I try to keep my own website relatively lightweight as well, just like many other personal blog sites.

To reduce weight issues please replace all your dogs with cows. Research shows that cows are much lighter than your average whale and for this reason should always be used.

Your S key is having some problems...