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Comment by CDSlice | Hacker News Reader

But publishers weren't doing that before AMP came out. What AMP does is provide a tangible thing devs can sell to higher ups in order to be allowed (or just given the time) to write less code and load fewer assets. AMP also helps search engines (not just Google) be able to preload websites without violating user's privacy, which seems like a good thing, no?

I honestly don't get all the hate AMP gets around here. From a consumer standpoint AMP provides nothing but benefits compared to what we had before.

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A thought experiment: Google could, in a proverbial heartbeat, unilaterally make and publicize a change to its search rankings that amounted to "achieve AMP-like performance with your site, OR ELSE". AMP as a technology is irrelevant to this end.

Instead, AMP is about control and disintermediation – eliminating the need for users to ever actually visit the sites of content producers. The economic impacts of that redirection be damned.

The objection to AMP is thus not about the performance. It's about Google's proprietary end-run on the web platform, and its (ab)use of monopoly power to achieve that end.

Google would face the exact same criticisms if it tried to strongarm publishers into caring about performance.

> Google would face the exact same criticisms if it tried to strongarm publishers into caring about performance.

You state this as a fact, but Google seems to use, and to have long used, load time as a ranking metric (see https://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors #22, for example), and I've never heard any serious complaints about it.

it would face less criticism (even though it does use site speed as a signal - they ve said that many times)

> I honestly don't get all the hate AMP gets around here. From a consumer standpoint AMP provides nothing but benefits compared to what we had before.

Two main reasons:

1. The obfuscation of AMP source URLs in Google search results is usually the biggest reason for the hate.

2. The "AMP Carousel" in Google search results is designed to keep people on Google and makes it much less likely people will leave to explore other pages on the publisher site (I can't find the article now but I recall reading a report from one publisher that showed a HUGE dropoff in users viewing an article and then going to view other articles on the site).

So it's less about the technology of AMP per se and more that, the way it's currently implemented, is about Google dictating more and more the way the web works.

> ... showed a HUGE dropoff in users viewing an article and then going to view other articles on the site ...

Just speaking from personal experience, lots of AMP pages are totally broken for me aside from the actual content. I have encountered pages multiple times where visiting links to other content was broken. I would (personally) take findings like this with a grain of salt.

If you encounter this again in the future, I'd love to take your bug report with the specific page in question. You can email me directly. My email is pretty easy to find from my profile.

#1 is being fixed for supporting browsers (Chrome so far). https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/04/instant-loading-am...

You can see it for a number of sites already. For example, search for an AMP result from collins dictionary.

So essentially yet another standard pushed out by google via Chrome with 0 feedback from other browser vendors.

No, the other vendors gave feedback and objected to it: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/30/mozilla_web_packagi...

That sound even more like Google's modus operandi when it comes to browser development!

- fundamentally changes the way the web works. Websites suddely became second citizens, essentially making google search the primary citizen who serves other people's content as if it s their own.

- It splits each webpage in two.

- Hiding the real domain means fake sites and phishing are possible

- Prerendering downloads on average 1.4 MB of data with every search results page that the user may not even want or ever choose to see (it might even become a huge secuyrity hole). This probably renders server-side analytics useless too. only google now knows the truth about your traffic

- single point of failure for a government to shut down / censor articles / delete specific information from all news websites

- obvious google's control of your content / and manipulatively ranking higher the content they render - I expect this to cause an anti-trust fine very soon

- Replacing HTML with an abomination , which WILL be abused in a few months, the same way that html is currently abused in news sites.

i m curious how they manage to preserve privacy if they route api requests through their servers

See https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/04/instant-loading-am... which addresses the concern about the URL. You can see it for a number of sites already. For example, search for an AMP result from collins dictionary.

As reported in the paper, prerendering only affects amp pages in the first viewport of the search results, which is reported as 10% of the results in their sample. Prerendering does not have any security issues. AMP guarantees that all resources in preload are served by the AMP cache, and custom javascript is prevented by your browser via CSP.

Javascript based analytics works fine, with support for all major vendors and custom setups.

That "standard" is an abomination. What's next, we 'll upload our SSL certs to google so they can masquerade more efficiently? IETF should not back standards introduced by and benefiting only google.

> Prerendering does not have any security issues.

Currently. Are you saying it is impossible that someone will hide a hack in an amp page that steals data or sth without the user ever visiting that amp page?

> AMP guarantees that all resources in preload are served by the AMP cache,

What about privacy? are user data sent through google's servers?

> Javascript based analytics works fine, with support for all major vendors and custom setups.

How do those analytics handle prerendering?

AMP documents are delivered with a Content-Security-Policy which instructs the browser not to load javascript resources outside the AMP origin, including inline scripts. The AMP Cache ensures no remote images or other remote resources can be loaded in preload.

When using signed exchanges, the preload does not even parse the document until navigation, as per the signed exchange spec.

Analytics loading is deferred until after user navigation, which makes sense as the user has yet to navigate to the document.

The AMP Cache serves publicly cached HTML documents, and the static fonts/images within those documents. If a document wants to render user specific data, it can load that directly from the publisher's origin upon navigation (not routed via the AMP Cache). See, for example https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-list/. Analytics, ads, etc are all fetched directly from the vendor or publisher origin and the AMP Cache will neither proxy nor otherwise see this data.

Thats not really loading it from the remote site is it, its more the url bar lying to the end user? What happens if you copy the url or enter it directly?

Yes and no. The browser is making an HTTPS request to the AMP Cache for the document. The document's integrity is ensured by the cryptographic signature of the publisher's origin which the browser verifies. As far as the integrity of the document, this is the same conceptually as the fact that your wifi router is actually serving the document to your browser. The AMP Cache cannot modify the document, and the publisher may choose what to sign or not sign.

Entering the URL directly will make an HTTPS request to the URL's origin server, as it always has. There will be no AMP Cache involved in that request, but it will work just the same.

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