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Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but wonder what problem they're solving for. Is there a huge market of people clamoring to make webpages load faster than they already do?

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You should try loading "the modern web" over a not great but passable phone connection (ie 3G maximum) on a non-flagship phone. Nearly every normal website you will have an exceedingly bad time on. That's what AMP claims to solve. Far be it from me to claim they succeeded or that they are doing it in the right way, but I think pretending the problem doesn't exist at all is disingenuous.

Why not fixing “the moder web” then?

Because convincing all the website owners to do anything (even if it clearly benefits everyone) is an impossible task.

See HTTPS adoption.

Isn't https over the hump in most of the world?

HTTPS adoption:

https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.thenewstack.io/media/2018...

Great example. You just proved my point that it is possible to have positive change in large communities.

I'm not sure that graph shows what you think it shows.

That graph shows that there's an obnoxiously large number of websites that don't support something that there's zero reason not to support.

It costs $0 and takes maybe half an hour to implement, browsers are screaming "not secure" to each visitor, and one in five websites still don't support it. "Make websites faster", on top of being vague, is way more difficult to implement.

1 in 5 NOT supporting it is much better than the opposite when I started working in the web where 90+% of websites didn't support HTTPS.

Well, I like the percentages and the direction that the graph is heading.

You don't have to convince anyone, it's about incentives. The article and many others have shown exactly how to do this: make the metric a big part of search rankings.

If fast site performance ensures you get listed first, every site would get faster overnight.

Google can't block ads and tracking scripts in Chrome without either blocking their own, or facing (valid) claims of anti-competitive behaviour. Neither of which would get the person who did it promoted.

And no attempt to fix the slowness of the modern web will succeed without blocking ads and tracking scripts.

This is the downside of the dominant browser being made by and ads-and-tracking company.

AMP is a terrible user experience though. Google Search on mobile is - pardon my language - fucked now. I hate it. I get trapped in the cache, getting to the actual source is pain, there's some stupid bar on top, websites are showing their own bars to signify that the user is not actually on the website. And I'm a techie, I know how this works! I imagine regular users must be utterly confused.

Thanks for voicing this out. I'm on the same boat, AMP is a terrible user experience. It takes me multiple clumsy steps to get to the content page I thought I was getting to when I clicked a link.

Apart from that a lot of websites started showing an overlay on top of the AMP pages, clicking on AMP pages don't work as expected a lot of times, it has a noticeable delay between actions (scrolling/tapping).

I disliked AMP when I first started seeing it but the way it has evolved has made the experience way worse than it started with... Probably because Google also caved in and tried to cater to customisations requests from big publishers.

I have 4G and a top end phone, and mobile web is getting worse by the day.

The first solution is not AMP. The first solution is to go back to when a web page was a "page", not a program made up of cobbled together bits of JavaScript.

Cookie preference popups, join the newsletter popups, animated or dynamic ads, and everything else stupid websites do that causes the browser's rendering engine to grind away non-stop...

The current user experience is worse than I think it ever was.

But as other posters have comments, AMP is probably intended to be a control and data tracking system first, with user experience being second or lower priority.

This is easily solved by installing Firefox for Android and uBlock Origin. I don't even understand how people tolerate the "modern" web otherwise.

Yes. In many areas where phones are the main tool used to access the internet, and coverage is primarily still 3G. Not defending AMP - but making pages load faster is still something people want and need.

For a lot of niches usage is > 50% mobile already.

There are billions of people with capped data plans and where 200kb/s is the standard.

There are no AMP pages that weigh less than 1MB.

However, since Google aggressively preloads most of that data while you search, it gives you the illusion of AMP pages being lightweight.

Non-AMP pages? Oh, Google will happily penalize them even if they perform better.

I did a mobile Google search for "Trump" to bring up the top news section on Google, and was able to find sites (generally non TV-news sites which aren't doing video with every story) that weighed less than 1MB:

USA Today (582KB, first item in the top news section) https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/3431466002

Vox (486KB) https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy...

The New Yorker (565KB) https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/news/current/...

Unless those articles are packed with raster infographics that's pretty bloated just to send a couple of pages worth of text.

I meam, why exactly are 500kb of cruft is being served to present 5kb worth of data?

The EU experience of USA today weighs on at 248KB and that's without AMP

So even if the AMP Pages are small, they're still much larger than the page ought to be

Sure. But USA Today EU is not really a fair example. You can‘t really expect publishers to serve absolutely no ads and tracking at all. Unless you want them to die. There are initiatives like Apple News+ and Subscribe with Google but they are not mainstream yet. And individual subscriber options for news portals are way to cumbersome (and perceived as too expensive) for users.

I agree, but the solution is for ad companies to improve so you don't need tons of JavaScript to display an advert. Why can't they be done server side, rather than handled by client side JavaScript? A lot of web apps now employ SSR, so having the adverts use SSR should considerably speed them up

I ran all links below with Google Chrome Tools enabled, no cache. Switched to mobile view to make sure that AMP pages are loaded. Cache disabled to see the actual weight of the page.

---

USA Today AMP page: 45 requests. 755 KB transferred. 1.6 MB resource

USA Today EU Experience: 10 requests. 209 KB transferred. 251 KB resources.

AMP version is significantly worse for essentially the same content (AMP version and EU version are nearly identical)

---

VOX AMP: 37 requests. 575 KB transferred. 1.4 MB resources.

VOX AMP not served from Google [1]: 22 requests. 403 KB transferred. 935 KB resources.

VOX non-AMP [2]: 19 requests. 627 KB transferred. 1.3 MB resources

So, AMP is worse when served from Google. And on par with non-AMP version

---

The New Yorker AMP: 129 requests (and they keep coming). 796 KB transferred. 1.9 MB resources

The New Yorker AMP not served from Google [3]: 70 requests (and they keep coming). 745 KB transferred. 1.5 MB resources

The New Yorker non-AMP page[4]: 245 requests (and they keep coming). 8.2 MB transferred. 13 MB resources.

So. The only example where the AMP page is significantly better than the non-AMP pages.

---

But the page weight is already accounted for in Google Search algorithms, and The New Yorker page should have been deprioritised from search. It's not, it's in the carousel, it will redirect to the 13MB version on desktop. Meanwhile, as Vox, and USA Today and many many many others show, the regular properly made website will not differ significantly from AMP versions.

[1] https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy-and-politics/2019/4/...

[2] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/4/10/18305175/t...

[3] https://www.newyorker.com/news/current/william-barr-goes-ful...

[4] https://www.newyorker.com/news/current/william-barr-goes-ful...

I don’t appreciate Google preloading pages that I didn’t ask for, resulting in my limited data allowance being wasted.

Yeah, I am sure there is some sort of KPI tracking engagement which helped to inform this behavior.

Yes.

Yes have you seen as lot of websites these days

As a former SRE for Google who cared for AMPHTML FROM BIRTH, NOBODY IS FORCING YOU TO USE AMP. In return for free hosting of the web content the publisher agrees to use the AMP format/subset. The whole point of the project was to stop walled gardens, like BBC app, like CNN app,etc., which arose because of crappy slow web pages! That was killing the searchable mobile web! AMP is to enable mobile search! The motivation is in the first page of every dang design doc for AMP at Google! You might be really surprised to learn that your supposed plan for world domination is run on a shoestring and a low priority at Google!

Wow, a "shoestring low priority" project gets top search result placement, a custom icon callout, and cannot be disabled. What do the high-pri projects get?

High-prio projects get to be a requirement for commenting on Youtube.

When it affects your bottom line by changing ranking factors then it is no longer as optional as you make it out to be.

Google decided to dominate the search world, and it now underpins a huge portion of online businesses. That comes with a level of responsibility to be fair to it's patrons that in this particular instance I feel isn't being met.

Of course they can do whatever they want, it is their product, but we don't have to like it.

> NOBODY IS FORCING YOU TO USE AMP.

That sure doesn't seem to be true at all.

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