Seriously, I just don't get these hateful comments on Hacker News regarding AMP. It helps websites load fast on mobile, and users really appreciate when websites load fast.
"This webpage works best in Our Browser™️" was just a pointer to the user for a faster experience. It came at the small cost of crippling the web for a mere 15 years, probably costing a few billion hours user time wasted at horrible UX bred in a hostile corporate controlled environment.
AMP is just the same all over again, just with a singular player which might just be too big to fail. Oh, and also this time things like the information source of the western world is at stake, not only fan sites of specific locomotive models by some geeks.
But at least my websites load....slower actually if the page was properly built[1]!
[1]https://digiday.com/media/google-amp-beat-facebook-instant-a...
while i agree with the overall sentiment that google is pulling a microsoft, i don't see how this line is true. if google went away tomorrow, how would it lead to an economic downturn?
it would suck if you're all in on google in some way, but most of their products have competitors and substitutes, so you could switch. maybe android losing some core services that aren't immediately replaceable might cripple phones for some folks. the engineers could certainly find new jobs, and a bunch would go on to create new companies from the things they're working on now while soaking up all the idle wealth around the world looking for any return at all.
i rarely use google for anything, so maybe i'm missing the obvious.
I hate that every fucking google search result on mobile web has its stupid little icon
I hate that there is no way for me to disable it as a user
I hate that it has muddied the waters in what the url bar means
I hate that it has trained users to not question fake url bars.
I hate that cloudflare so thoroughly jumped on its dick
I hate that we invented a way to fake the address in the url bar just for this stupid fucking feature.
I hate that we now have a system where somebody can share a page url with a friend, and that friend can view it on t he same device model using the same browser with the same settings, and will get a different page because one was viewing an amp page but shared it's real url.
I hate that every fucking amp page is lower featured in some way, and almost never works in desktop mode.
And most of all, I hate that it leads to everybody offloading shit onto google's servers.
AMP is not fast because it's served from google's CDN. That's a lie, It has always been a lie, and it will always be a lie. AMP is fast because it's incompatible with 99% of the bullshit client cpu heavy tracking and ad libraries, so they don't get included inside AMP pages.
We could have just had that, without all this stupid bullshit CDN redirection/misdirection bullshit.
And you know what, You want me to get off my hate train? Get google and all of the other search providers using it to solve complaint #2. That's really all it would take to get most of the hate to go away.
I agree the world could have faster pages without AMP. What would that take though? Would it take web developers across the world pushing back against including megabytes of extra JavaScript for ads/tracking, at all the companies who are currently using AMP?
I cringe everytime I visit a page that's AMP enabled, and usually bounce or just get on a desktop. Sure, promote a 'faster' web, but if it's at the expense of a horrible experience, why?
Before that, people were massively moving to the apps because the web got too slow and unusable on mobile.
Okay, I can see that. The idea of Google being the gatekeeper and regulator of the Internet is scary though, especially given it's a for-profit corporation that has its own interests at hand. I think AMP would have been better if it started off as a proposal for it being a standard to HTML, voted on and governed by the W3C, instead of by Google.
> Web developers weren't professional enough to make the web fast
I would argue though, that web developers who are professional enough to adopt AMP, would be professional enough to ensure their site doesn't load bloat.
Don't shit on (other?) developers to make your point. It's revisionism that only serves the purpose of taking more control from users and developers, which just conveniently gives even more power to the stakeholders who most benefit from the structurally unsound game businesses have been playing.
By the same logic, I could say the Google Chrome team (not related to AMP — just a metaphor) isn't professional enough to make a browser that uses less RAM. In reality, the team deals with a myriad of constraints and other priorities, both technical and commercial, that sometimes clash. Rendering speed and security are its major selling points; if both are met, management is satisfied and Google makes billions.
I'm loath to say this, but performance isn't where a lot of websites make money. It's the ads that people click, way too often by mistake. To feed this system, a bootload of tracking scripts, A/B testing scripts, overeager live support widgets...
Google is coyly selling preferred placement in exchange for performance, which may be the only way to get some businesses to care about performance. Developers are cranking out what the business owners are asking for.
Ask yourself why Google did not take aim at the ownership side, why it did not arrange discussions with major media companies etc. to establish performance as a company-wide goal, instead, put the responsibility on developers.
> Before that, people were massively moving to the apps because the web got too slow and unusable on mobile.
Yeah, the thought process to go from seeing the "use our mobile app instead! It's so much better!" banner, closing it and sending my eyes onto the content that I wanted to read takes at least half a second.
Hence why web developers of HN are so angry at AMP - it bans them from building sites filled with 20MB of JavaScript bloat. If you read through HN history, you'll see hundreds of comments belittling anytone that complained about webpage size and slow loading - usually defending it with a "noone has time to optimize things and build without these huge libraries" argument.
Any examples? My limited reading experience here has been the opposite.
I think it's because comments we don't like make a much stronger expression than comments we do, so they weigh more heavily in forming our impression. This also explains why people arrive at such contradictory generalizations: it's because they like different things.
Which would of course include a lot of what Google does. So they "solve the problem" by not solving the problem.
Yeah, seems like you should be able to. Just curious, where would you want that option to appear, and how would you want to see the search experience change as a result?
Making it default for everyone and then forcing people to sign in to opt out would be counterproductive from a privacy standpoint.
Could also just provide the original link right next to the AMP link in search results and let users decide.
- Google has settings for search and a page for these settings. For example, I have sometime in the past went to that page and set my preferences there. And now they're taken into account when I use Google's search. Like settings are wont to do, y'know.
- We already know how search without AMP works.
As a user, I should just see whatever the site lets me see. If they decide AMP is best for user experience, I would no doubt get it. If they decide to show a responsive mobile friendly site because it works best, then show me that.
What do you want, to search for stuff or to feel that you're supporting the winning team or something?
It's a fact. There's no quick path to victory until mass tech community adoption rubs off onto regular folks; it hasn't hit that first milestone yet.
It won't win in the short term, which is where AMP adoption is
AMP is fast because of prefetching. That's not a "lie." You can measure this. When you click an AMP link, the page is already downloaded. Prefetched pages load faster than https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
But prefetching has a problem: when you visit a website, they can fingerprint you and track you. Prefetching from random websites in search results violates your privacy.
The only way to fix the privacy issues with prefetching is for the search engine (not just Google--Bing, too) to serve the prefetched page from their own CDN.
Except Google is probably the biggest threat to privacy on the planet. You're not "fixing" the privacy issues, you're making things worse.
I don’t like google google either, especially because of their history on privacy issues, but they’re not getting much additional info from this. Just a stronger foothold on the web
Even Internet Explorer will prefetch and render pages.
Does it also keep every cookie on a page 1st party to Google, so they don't have (m)any more GDPR-type blockers?
No, I'm not. What gives you that impression?
But mostly I hate that URL crap. Give me my URL bar functionality back with original host URL. And that there is no way to disable AMP from results.
We do not recommend our clients to use AMP.
To be fair, they have more employees, and I don't assume bad faith in the downvotes — I've been wrong more than a few times. Still, I sense that Google elicits a gratitude that is unjustified when it comes to relationships between companies, customers and employees.
It also breaks URLs – instead of the real URL, you get a google.com link which doesn’t have a good desktop experience.
In general, HN has a pretty strong bias against Google and Facebook. I suspect it may be clouding the average user's judgement. AMP has done immense good for the majority of users of the mobile web.
As a developer, I hate that AMP is just another one of Google’s tentacles with which I have to contend.