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Comment by jsnell | Hacker News Reader

That seems like a gross mischaracterization of the article. Their measurements show a huge effect from the AMP cache (average load time from 3.1s to 1.2s).

And that's a feature that's just not possible to support for arbitrary HTML. Just because you've repeated something that's not true a million times does not magically make it true. Cross-origin prefetching is not viable (privacy leaks, flaky browser support). And on the flip-side, same-origin serving can't be done securely with arbitrary HTML + JS.

I get that this won't make you hate AMP any less. But maybe the hate could be rooted in facts? It'd make it a lot easier to have a rational discussion about the subject.

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Is the AMP cache any different from any other CDN caching assets other than that it is owned and prioritized by Google? Does that fact alone make it faster? If so, are we as a community okay with this imperialist strategy by Google?

And prerendering is absolutely viable and in practice all over the place apart from AMP. Here's Chrome's own docs on it: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/prerend...

Is the AMP-specific prerendering another abuse of Google's position despite them using the technology elsewhere?

It just seems like this is not technology specific, but prioritization of tech created by a giant company that owns nearly everything and must own more.

>Is the AMP cache any different from any other CDN caching assets

I'm not an expert but Google AMP is not a simple CDN cache. The Google-owned servers also proxies API calls to whitelisted urls like approved ad networks and Google Analytics. (Expand all the triangles in the list: https://amp.dev/support/faq/platform-and-vendor-partners/)

A cache service like Cloudflare CDN doesn't do that. (Although there's an example of somebody trying Cloudflare's new "Workers" functionality to proxy an api call on the server side instead of the browser side: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/google-analytics-proxy-wo...)

For publishers that use ad networks, Google's AMP is a different value proposition from a typical CDN. Because Google's AMP has a different technical architecture, it solves a different problem than a CDN.

Yes, Cloudflare could conceivably add more functionality to their service to proxy ad network api calls like Google AMP but it wouldn't buy them as much of a speed boost because Cloudflare doesn't own/control the "google.com" domain that serves search results. It's "www.google.com" that has Google's trusted javascript code to preload AMP data that is executed on the user's web browser.

This is a misunderstanding. Browser requests to ad and analytics networks are never proxied by the AMP Cache. They are made directly from your browser to the vendors listed. You can verify this in network tools. The AMP Cache proxies: AMP Pages, images, fonts. That's pretty much it, since those are all that's needed for prerendering.

> Is the AMP cache any different from any other CDN caching assets other than that it is owned and prioritized by Google?

Yes, it's substantially different, since the purpose of Google's AMP cache is to serve pages linked to from a Google origin. Google has to know which search query you entered to render the results page, so prefetching some of the actual results doesn't leak any information. If you prefetch from arbitrary domains, you leak information about people making a search to those domains, even if they don't click through.

(And likewise for other entities that are running their own AMP caches, for links hosted on their own origins.)

That's very clearly the actual technical problem being solved; if you set out to solve the problem of privacy-preserving prefetching of search results with the tech from 5 years ago, you'll inevitably end up with something like AMP.

> Does that fact alone make it faster? If so, are we as a community okay with this imperialist strategy by Google?

Irrelevant, since you're basing both of these questions on inaccurate assumptions.

Doesn't Google share information with site owners about the searches that include that site anyway?

> hat seems like a gross mischaracterization of the article.

I mean the article itself says that the other improvement are much less significant than the overall 2.5 speedup of the amphtml page. Whether the user will have to do 1-2 more seconds is immaterial , when you have typical newspaper websites that take 10-30 seconds to load.And you don't implicate google's caches (which will at some point refuse to render you if your page is against their politics) in any step.

Regardless, i believe amp will fail equally to how html pages fail now: newspaper marketers will keep adding more and more stuff to their amphtml webpages (and amp makes it easier to add extra components), and no matter how fast it loads, they will become heavy as hell and your phone will again start to smoke. We just dont see that yet because it's early days - but newspaper sites were also bare html 20 years ago. AMP is an evil bandaid with significant sideeffects

> which will at some point refuse to render you if your page is against their politics

Say what now? Citation needed.

didnt they censor a bunch of nutrition sites today?

i cant bring u a citation from the future. it's speculation

There's a 2.5x improvement from serving AMP rather than HTML. There's also a 2.5x improvement from prefetching. The part that the article dismisses is the change from just the AMP cache but without prefetching.

I think there's a pretty big difference between a few seconds and instant. Maybe you think the difference doesn't matter to the UX, and there's at least a discussion. But just going lalala and denying that the difference exists?

It's also worth noting that the cache is necessary for prefetching. Without the cache, the prefetch would leak user's query intent to an origin that the user has yet to decide to visit. This would violate the user's privacy, therefore a cache is necessary to achieve prefetch.

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