How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer | Hacker News Reader

How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

markosaric.com

1,238 pointsmarkosaric539 comments

I worked on amp for a leading newspaper, and everyone who says that amp is about "making the web faster on mobile" is either very naive or doing marketing for google.

For publishers, amp is about trying to top the results on google search and capture traffic, it's their only motivation to publish their content using amp, and the only metric they look in order to evaluate the results.

Once they have their amp content, they will look how to load it with ads and tracking, which very conveniently is supported on amp, just as they do in their regular sites.

So the "fast" part, besides using their CDN, actually comes from limiting what you can do on almost every other part of the site, you can only do the stuff that is packed in the amp components controlled by google, which in practice means that google controls the web behavior.

Of course AMP has other motives than simply making the web faster for mobile, but it also does make the web faster for mobile. I guarantee the AMP version of that paper's mobile website provided a significantly better user experience than the normal version. That is why AMP has been successful, and it's why I will continue to click on AMP links whenever available.

Is giving Google that much control ideal? Of course not, but from a user perspective it's a hell of a lot better than the alternative.

> but it also does make the web faster for mobile.

AMP probably help making some previously bad-written amd bloated websites less slow, but it doesn't make them fast either.

HN is a fast website. The old reddit was a reasonably fast website. The new reddit (with AMP) is slower on my phone than the old one. It's still faster than the worst websites I browse on mobile, but it's far from being the fastest, and it's one of the slowest I actually use on my phone (simply because I usually don't browse websites that are too slow).

AMP isn't about speed.

> it also does make the web faster

this is true

> That is why AMP has been successful

This is not. If google removes ranking incentive, people will forget about AMP the next day

> it also does make the web faster

No, it is not. Optimized plain old webpages are faster.

If Google wants to promote faster pages then amp should not be promoted in the search results.

It is about capturing traffic, injecting tracking and ads.

>> That is why AMP has been successful

>This is not. If google removes ranking incentive, people will forget about AMP the next day

Google giving ranking incentive to sites that are faster seems like the exact sort of thing they should be doing.

> Google giving ranking incentive to sites that are faster seems like the exact sort of thing they should be doing.

Yes. It should give ranking incentive based on actual speed, not AMP support.

> Google giving ranking incentive to sites that are faster seems like the exact sort of thing they should be doing.

Really? I thought Google's purpose was to find information in the web, not to give me fast links. If I am looking for an article, I want that article, not a different but faster one. If I am looking for a piece of information, I want the best fit, not the second or third best but faster fit.

Google already incorporates site speed into their rankings, separate from AMP.

However, if you want to get into Google's mobile carousel above the normal search results, you have to serve AMP pages and let Google cache them.

Except that it's now giving a huge boost to websites that use a specific technology to be fast; instead of just boosting all fast websites like it used to. Sites can be fast even if they don't use AMP.

But speed results in better ranking, and that's what amp provides.

No, AMP provides space on a top carousel of results.

It may also do that, sure. But you're telling me it does not provide speed improvements?

Install a content blocker, and the original site sans bullshit is the best experience.

Ironically the amp page is artificially slow when blocking amp’s JS because they force an 8 second delay - via required boilerplate css - before content is visible.

You misunderstand the 8 second CSS animation in the AMP boilerplate. Here's the code (simplified):

  <style>
    body { animation:-amp-start 8s steps(1,end) 0s 1 normal both}
    @keyframes -amp-start{from{visibility:hidden}to{visibility:visible}}
  </style>
  <noscript>
    <style amp-boilerplate>
      body{animation:none}
    </style>
  </noscript>

See the noscript section: if javascript is disabled, the CSS displays the body immediately. If Javascript is enabled, but for some reason the AMP javascript fails to load, after 8 seconds, the page is displayed anyway. When the AMP Javascript loads (a single js file, one request, typically already in the users cache), the javascript displays the page immediately. The page is probably somewhat broken without the javascript loading, but the 8s is a fallback, not code to slow down non-javascript browsers.

The only two cases where the 8s is relevant are: the network connection is so bad that the javascript file fails to load within 8s and the useragent has explicitly blocked the one javascript file on the page, without blocking javascript overall.

The 8-second delay is there to punish users who block JavaScript that is loaded from Google's servers (with ad-blockers) but still have JavaScript enabled.

I think that's a bit unnecessarily tin-foil-hat. If they didn't put in the 8 second css rule it would just show blank for those users right? So adding that rule is making it work at all instead which doesn't sound like "there to punish them".

This will hit a lot of people on the web today that have given up on a blanket block on JS (because a lot of pure text content simply fails to render without JS, yaaaaay) but do have a blanket blacklist on JS assets and whitelist requests on a need basis.

Source for your second paragraph: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16730905

That's out of date now, though; despite still being part of the required boilerplate CSS for AMP pages, I can't find that delay in any of the https://amp.dev/ pages (the ampbyexample.com replacement demo site).

This is really shady.

It's a little more complex than that:

If you disable all js, there is no delay. If you specifically block amp js, there is a delay. There could certainly be a shady reason for this, but the justification makes sense: one of the goals of AMP is to have, basically, a single, correct, initial paint. That's why images are statically sized and amp sticks placeholders there until the real images load. The js delay exists to allow the site to fetch the js and use it to correctly render the initial paint, even on a slow/flaky connection where the js takes a bit to fetch.

The delay is css based not js based, so why would blocking all js affect it?

Sites which optimize their pages via https://www.npmjs.com/package/@ampproject/toolbox-optimizer have the initial layout performed server-side instead of by javascript, and thus the CSS Flash-of-unstyled-content protection is removed. amp.dev runs this optimization, along with lots of other sites.

Does it really make the web faster for mobile? I've had the exact opposite experience with it. It's made sites run much slower, broken things like dark themes, and make advertisements more intrusive. For example, I used to think the game guide/news site polygon was a horrible slow mess until I learned about amp, I was accessing it via google search, and once I excised the amp portion of the url the site became snappy and usable. The same exact thing happened to me two nights ago with SoundOnSound as well.

> a lot better than the alternative

There are more alternatives. IIRC the goal in 56k days was to make the page load inside 10 seconds. People managed.

It was probably 5 seconds, to maximize conversion. Thankfully, I haven't had to think about it for 10+ years.

HTTP/2, HTTP/3, 5G, faster mobile phones, will all make AMP inconsequential and unnecessary, unless your primary audience lives in rural areas or are not able to adopt such technologies.

Applications used to fit on a floppy disk. Websites used to be a few K in size. AMP might be successful (if it's even considered successful), but only for a short while. I avoid AMP links when I can, since I don't want the jank, stripped down experience of a site. If I really want a great experience on publishing sites, I just turn on Reader Mode.

And of course, it's preposterous that Google gives preferences to AMP pages on search rankings. It's just as if Amazon prioritizes its own products in its search rankings (not saying it does or doesn't).

Exactly, use google amp and get higher rankings and it can increase your traffic by hundreds to thousands to millions. I hate it but its how it works

Huh, weird, it's almost like they're abusing their search monopoly to push a technology that everyone hates and is only fast when compared to their ad monopoly.

> a technology that everyone hates

There are users in this thread that seem to like it quite a lot because it's faster than the original site, because it limits the amount of crap the original site can run. The only reason I don't like AMP is because I don't like an intermediary like Google rendering pages for me and probably tracking what I do on them. That's ... not even close to something on most people's radars, so there's no way "everyone" hates it for that reason.

I suspect most people have never heard of AMP and just like it when sites load fast.

Higher rankings and google will preload the amp page they have and their servers for the amp link. That's why it is a tiny bit faster. It has nothing to do with the amp spec itself. It's faster because google is abusing it's monopoly search position to pre-load.

I think the idea is that preloading wouldn't be feasible with arbitrary unrestricted HTML because of security concerns, which is why they created this restricted subset in the first place.

> google is abusing it's monopoly search position to pre-load.

How is that abusing their monopoly search position? Abusing their monopoly search position would be making publishers integrate directly with them to enable preload, like Apple News. Instead, they ask publishers to serve documents that can safely be prerendered, and all their competitors get to (and do!) consume those documents as well to enable safe prerendering from their own sites.

Without their monopoly search position no one would be forced to adopt amp and further strengthen said monopoly position.

Apple isn’t running a dominant search engine that upranks Apple News results.

No, I'm well aware that that's what it's "about," just like I'm well aware that the search engine is mainly about advertising. I just don't care what it's about so long as the results are beneficial to me -- which they definitely are. When I see the AMP icon I know the page is going to load much faster

Always question what long term loss you are taking for these short term gains.

I really wish content servers considered that before letting all their sites become ad laden wastelands.

The web infrastructure we have today can respond to pages blindly fast if proper optimization is done, bloated front end frameworks and malvertising counter all of that to draw it down to molasses speeds - and the "I want to server my stuff to my users" argument is only valid if it's to extracting ad revenue from them - I think it's just time to reeducate people on the fact that ads may subsidize content but they can't fully sponsor it outside of niche situations.

I suspect I am not losing very much at all by preferring to click AMP links.

Are we going to lose high-quality paid by the reader content? Probably not, because that already happened to the newspapers. They were replaced by the "get a view at any cost, track the user through all means possible, it's all about eyeballs on ads" folks and now they are warning us that they might be next and we, the readers, should decline reading the low quality fast.

The long term loss for short term gains that we're already dealing with has been the page bloat over the past decade.

AMP is the solution to that long-term loss. It's not the best possible solution, but it's the best that we currently have.

Prior to AMP, the web didn't give a rat's ass about performance.

To me, AMP is annoying because it means I have to make two extra clicks to get the real site to load.

use duckduckgo! :)

> I just don't care what it's about so long as the results are beneficial to me -- which they definitely are.

Are they though? With the search engine example, how do you know that the engine is not biasing your opinion so that you act against your own self-interest and to the benefit of the advertisers?

The AMP situation is a bit more complicated, but how are you sure that AMP is beneficial to you in the broad, long-term sense?

It is quite simple. My calculation is: 1) an AMP page will load much faster 2) clicking on an AMP or non-AMP page will have nearly no effect on me in the "broad, long-term sense;" to the extent AMP more generally may adversely affect me, my own personal participation in it has pretty much no impact at all.

I invite you to go to your local Fox/ABC/CBS channel's website and TRY to read an article vs AMP.

AMP is about stopping....that. It's indescribable how horrible these companies have become.

1. Auto-playing ads 2. Scroll-jacking 3. Overlay...after overlay... after overlay. 4. Popover 5. Paywall 6. Popover again for good taste. 7. Oops you scrolled too far better redirect you to another page entirely. 8. You wanted the video version of this article right? Better force you to read the article in 20% of the screen so all of our ads, bars, and video can fit on the page.

This doesn't address those problems, it has effectively created a second, proprietary web which is only accessible from the Google home page.

If Google actually wanted to improve the web, they wouldn't be splintering it, they would reward publishers with better search placement for building user-friendly sites. As it is, AMP is little more than a way to ensure the "Google" web is better than the non-Google web. Which of course funnels money into Google's pockets.

AMP pages are just HTML. Publishers can and do use AMP pages as their "regular" pages that every user sees, not just those coming from Google. Other aggregators (Bing, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) link to AMP versions. These pages are far from only accessible from Google queries.

Publishers can and some do, but from what I've seen, the overwhelming majority do not. The overwhelming majority of "modern" web-sites are a shit show. If that wasn't the case, there would be no need for AMP.

If they’re just HTML pages, why would I use AMP?

Google is capable of driving SERP and carousel position based on the performance of the site. They don't need AMP for that. AMP is very much about creating an semi-walled garden. Any performance benefit is the lovely exterior of the Trojan horse.

And has been. Look at how well that worked for mobile web.

Sorry, "has been" what?

You mean Google is using performance, in a meaningful way, to drive SERP and Carousel placement?

If so, I disagree. They talk about it. They don't do it in a way that drives behaviour. They could.

A significant drop plus a webmaster tools message that says why, would work.

No kidding

Despite all the claims that AMP is only faster because of preload, if you actually look at these HTML sites on big news orgs they are MONSTROSITIES. Check out dev tools, the number of network requests is wild. The page is so insanely dynamic do old / slow computers even run it well?

From script size to dome/paint reflows etc etc to third party javascript having total access to your page - much of that is limited with AMP. I think third party javascript is forced into an iframe sandbox, can only be async with a web worker, limited in size acrosss ALL scripts etc.

> 3. Overlay...after overlay... after overlay.

amp-sticky-ad, amp-video-docking, amp-app-banner

> 4. Popover

amp-fx-flying-carpet

> 5. Paywall

amp-access, amp-access-poool

> 7. Oops you scrolled too far better redirect you to another page entirely.

amp-next-page

> 8. You wanted the video version of this article right? Better force you to read the article in 20% of the screen so all of our ads, bars, and video can fit on the page.

amp-sticky-ad, amp-video-docking

Can probably solve all of that by switching off Javascript.

uBlock Origin and uMatrix can give you the AMP experience without AMP, but the vast majority of users won't use them. I see the need for AMP but it just enables these bad corporate websites, as if CNN/FOX/Quora etc. can't afford to clean up their pages.

It would be better to just completely penalize blogs that paywall or otherwise make content unreadable. It's not like news articles are ever scarce. I don't know what they're doing as a search engine if I get any results that are this opaque.

Serious question: what else those websites are supposed to do (that AMP does not provide) with all those megabytes of scripts?

Newspapers display a text and an image and very rarely an interactive content(Election day maps and charts, mostly).

Is there a reason FROM USERS PERSPECTIVE to have different website codebase for each publisher?

For years the Web community kept creating new JavaScript libraries every day and all these web libraries were about providing a different way to do the same thing. No one ever created anything for the users, in fact, AMP is the first web technology that improves the user experience. It's loading fast and not too much stuff happens to display a text and an image.

Web people are mad at Google and I think they should be but all this happens because the web publishers refuse to compete on User Experience. They all optimize for the clickbitiest title or controversial topic and Google came and steamrolled their publishing tech.

I can't really blame Google for this one, you can check it out - I am critical of Google but I am more critical of the news business or the web tech community that optimized for very bad KPI that destroyed democracy, made web unpleasant and are now crying because of someone demolished their low-quality business.

From USERS PERSPECTIVE, AMP is a godsend. You can quickly view and skim low-quality content. The alternative is slowly viewing and skimming low-quality content.

It seems like the web technologists are unaware that they are dealing with real human beings, optimizing blindly for page views and CPMs.

AMP is Youtube for written content. A strealined conent delivery platform prioritizing UX that the publishers failed to create themselves all these years.

I’m just annoyed at my links being hijacked. When I click a link, my intention is to visit someone’s page, not to view it through some sort of creepy iframe. When I go to share a link, why is it a google link instead of the newspaper? Why do I have to spend a minute or two hunting for the real one in the ugly ui?

I agree with this, I don’t want to share AMP links because it feels wrong for some reason. Still, on the right top corner there’s a share button that would give you the link to the original source.

Publishers who implement Signed Exchanges get AMP links directly to their site with no iframe viewer on browsers that support the technology: https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/optimize-...

https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/blob/master/explainer.md

Doing a thing and then offering a service or agreement to undo the thing is not the same as never doing a thing and is usually a pretty clear signal of some underhanded doingness.

Is “browsers that support the technology” interchangeable with “Google chrome”?

> From USERS PERSPECTIVE, AMP is a godsend.

This right here.

The first time I found myself on an AMP page, I thought "Holy crap, this page is fast and responsive!"

It was a couple months later I started seeing hate for AMP on HN and was kind of surprised. I understand the dislike of Google basically taking over, but I feel like Google is telling publishers "Since you guys can't figure out how to make fast web pages, we're gonna basically do it for you".

> AMP is Youtube for written content.

A few commenters have taking issue with this, but I interpreted it to mean early YouTube. Before YouTube became a thing, sharing videos online was difficult for a non-technical person. Just like YouTube made it easy to share videos, AMP has made it easy to make responsive pages.

Though a key difference is that it isn't hard to make responsive mobile web pages. Site owners have just decided that tracking, metrics, and advertising is more important than UX.

from USERS PERSPECTIVE, amp is meh. yes it's faster, does it really matter if you re getting an article in 1 second when you -obviously- plan to spend 2 minutes reading it? i dont know anyone who thinks so, perhaps your USERS do

> A strealined conent delivery platform prioritizing UX that the publishers failed to create

what you re implying is, Google failed to improve their algorithms to bypass obvious SEOs, so they are forcing everyone to use a dumbed down platform that is harder to SEO - for now!

Actually, it's a pretty well-known fact that users leave websites if they are not loading fast.

People don't go with reading plans to websites, the titles are optimized to bring you there and you don't know what's in the article. More often than not, the text on the website is not what the title made you believe it is. You can't plan ahead, you want to quickly find out what is this all about.

The article themselves are usually garbage optimized for SEO, long paragraphs of sentences that say the same thing but with different keywords. If that's not enough, they try to sway attention with ads and popups. Even if you had a plan about reading an article, the publisher's plan about you is different(tip: it's not about letting you read in peace).

The Web is horrible, it's even more horrible on mobile. AMP is an improvement.

Actually, it's a pretty well-known fact that users leave websites if they are not loading fast.

Is it? The only place I've ever seen push that view is Google. I've never seen any non-Google information reflecting that.

> users leave websites if they are not loading fast

then google is doing a bad job of presenting these sites to users, since obviously these sites should lose their rank, since users leave them. Google surely thinks bounce rates are important, no?

> The article themselves are usually garbage optimized for SEO, long paragraphs of sentences

and how is AMP fixing this? and who is responsible for SEO having these incentives? SEO literally means they optimize for what google wants

It's sometimes a little faster but also considerably less functional. The Guardian and Reddit both have AMP pages that are much worse than the actual pages.

> if you re getting an article in 1 second when you -obviously- plan to spend 2 minutes reading it?

In my experience, 99.9 percentile is more like 2~30 seconds in NorCal with a potentially sub-optimal ISP. I expect this to be even worse in developing countries like south/southeast asia.

You clearly don't speak for the users in the developing world with bad connections. Speed is anything but irrelevant.

Google AMP mostly just reduces the latency by pre-loading the pages from Google Search results. That has the side-effect of increasing the traffic on networks using Google Search when Google AMP results come up on the Google Search results, which they probably will given that using Google AMP will improve the site's Google Search ranking.

I haven't benchmarked it, so I can't actually speak from anything but wild speculation, but Google AMP might actually be making this problem worse.

I know it's not kosher to complain about downvotes but I said nothing about AMP, just argued against the statement that users don't care about speed. Anything that could possibly be interpreted in Google's favor gets downvoted immediately. It's carpet bombing with collateral damage.

slow users everywhere are better served with the simple amphtml page without any of google's scripts

The major problem is the download size anyway, and most of it is google-served ads and trackers. Amp is making this asynchronous, but afaik it doesn’t get rid of the ads

AMP is Youtube for written content. A strealined conent delivery platform prioritizing UX that the publishers failed to create themselves all these years.

Do you pay for youtube? Because the vanilla youtube experience is an ad-ridden UX nightmare.

If AMP is YouTube, AMP sucks.

I use adblocking on Safari(mobile and desktop), so the web experience for me is very good. On the iPhone App, the ads are annoying but I do understand that this is how the content is paid for, so I am O.K. with it.

The main difference is that with many websites things jump around when on Youtube the design is clearly defined. There's no cognitive load in trying to find the content between those "subscribe" popups and menus etc.

They clearly designed their experience with the understanding that you are there to watch a video.

Actually, YouTube's website is so good that the first thing that appears on the page is the video and it starts playing when the rest of the page(like, subscribe buttons suggested videos etc.) is still loading and not rendered.

Most websites on the other hand act as if the content was the bite to lure you there and try to make you subscribe/create an account/ allow notifications/show you ads and it's their failure if you actually happen to consume the content that was promised to you from the link you clicked.

Completely different experiences.

What's the point of praising youtube's UX if you're blocking part of it?

> The alternative is slowly viewing and skimming low-quality content.

No, the alternative is quickly skimming low-quality content with an adblocker and reader mode.

AMP is fast because it prerenders. That is the main point of AMP, and you seemingly don't understand it after working on it. It amazes me how little developers understand their platforms these days.

You may consider that we do understand pre-render, but don't like the trade-off involved.

A full on AOL style walled garden could be even faster. It could mandate brotli, force a common css base, only offer one kind of ad platform, etc. Should we go there?

The person I was responding to said that AMP was fast for a reason other than prerendering. That's wrong. Prerendering is the main point of AMP, which is what I pointed out in my comment.

A full AOL style walled garden is what Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles are. AMP enables the same speed in a way that any link aggregator can take advantage of without having to strike deals with individual publishers.

I agree with your literal statements, but Google does abuse AMP. The way they hijack left/right swipe and the back button for carousel loaded pages is ample evidence for me. It's very clearly not my content any more when you steal the top X pixels and hijack user interactions.

AMP also requires I include a Google owned and controlled piece of JavaScript that they can change at any time. That's literally in the "standard". In fact, a bad update borked all AMP pages for quite a while some time ago.

Please don't cross into personal attack. Your comment would be fine with just the first sentence, or if it stopped before "you seemingly". There's no need for supercilious disses of "developers" either.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That soyyo, like the article's author, seemingly does not understand that AMP enables prerendering is simply stating a fact. In soyyo's comment, there is no place where soyyo shows any understanding that this is the thing that AMP was designed to do.

When I continued with my general statement about developers not understanding their platforms, I can see how that can be interpreted as a personal attack, and for that I apologise to soyyo and to the readers of this forum.

> So the "fast" part, besides using their CDN, actually comes from limiting what you can do on almost every other part of the site

That is a good thing.

If you work for a media org - than you KNOW that on the non-amp pages the synchronous java script from a hundred tracking / ad platforms (why can't these sites just use ONE tracking library) CRUSH the page load times.

Despite your (false) claim that google support sync javascript ad libraries "just as they do in their regular sites" this is 100% false.

The amp javascript components have DOM interaction restrictions, file size restrictions, response restrictions, can't run sync etc.

for amp-ad

"No ad network-provided JavaScript is allowed to run inside the AMP document. Instead, the AMP runtime loads an iframe from a different origin (via iframe sandbox) as the AMP document and executes the ad network’s JS inside that iframe sandbox."

If you can't understand why some of these steps result in both a faster site and one that is more secure I can't help you, but please stop with the misinformation here.

> "No ad network-provided JavaScript is allowed to run inside the AMP document. Instead, the AMP runtime loads an iframe from a different origin (via iframe sandbox) as the AMP document and executes the ad network’s JS inside that iframe sandbox."

GOOGLE CONTROLS THE AD ECOSYSTEM. If they think that's a good idea, do it on regular webpages. Literally, AMP is only faster because Google provided ads are so slow that any more sane architecture can easily run circles around them.

How Google could speed up the web 5000%:

"Starting next month, all ads must be a collection of static assets with no JavaScript outside of this toolbox. We will host the ads and ensure no other JavaScript is executed."

Done.

> Despite your (false) claim that google support sync javascript ad libraries "just as they do in their regular sites" this is 100% false.

OP didn’t claim this.

> they will look how to load it with ads and tracking, which very conveniently is supported on amp, just as they do in their regular sites.

Yes OP did.

He put words in OPs mouth about sync loaded JS.

No, this doesn’t say anything about sync vs async.

amp-ads moves those ads/trackers in iframes, but that doesn't reduce the code size, right? google is also injecting code in your site , so you can't be sure that it's secure / private, right?

And if i promise to make all ads async and iframe, will google promise to rank my site higher? If not , they are discriminating in favor of their own walled garden system without an objective ruse.

really? adsense forbids use of iframes afaik

Many ads are served via iframes

https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/183282

they offer replacements as amp-ads. i dont know how they work

Probably highly unpopular opinion, but as a user I've never had anything but positive experiences with AMP-enabled sites. They load massively faster than normal sites, especially on poor mobile connections where main sites sometimes hang indefinitely trying to load javascript, ads, etc.

While content publishers are continuing to overload their sites with further trackers, ads, javascript, remotely loading assets which slow down performance, AMP seems like one of the few counterbalances and is pro-user, even if Google's endgame is self-enrichment rather than benevolence.

Content publishers could easily fight back by independently improving their own performance and not forcing mobile users to suck down megabytes of trackers on shaky connections, but they seem to be choosing not to.

> They load massively faster than normal sites, especially on poor mobile connections where main sites sometimes hang indefinitely trying to load javascript, ads, etc.

Have you tried the normal mobile websites with an adblocker?

I have, and I agree - as a user AMP sites seem to be faster, at least the ones that I've noticed are AMP.

But I've also implemented AMP pages and as a developer they are a PITA. And as discussed in the OP and related they are definitely an of example Google crowd-sourcing their challenges onto everyone else.

Part of what makes AMP pages faster is that the AMP constraints force you to abandon not just ads but also many other complex HTML5/CSS/JS features. The resulting UX is less sexy and may be lacking in functionality, but there is simply less of it. Getting simple AMP pages from Google's cache _is__ noticeably faster on mobile, as much as I wish it wasn't.

Good luck doing it on mobile phone. I'd say 99.99% users out there on mobile never even attempted to use another browser than safari or chrome for ios.

Firefox on android lets you install most of the available desktop extensions, so you can use your favourite ad blockers

Safari supports ad blockers, and they’re quite easy to set up.

Whether or not people actually install them is a good question, though.

I’m using safari + adguard (an app that injects adblock rules into it) and pretty sure that I see no ads. Except on few sites that usually try to push it even through desktop uBO anyway. Even no youtube ads, idk how they do it.

I'm from Poland, a country which has one of the highest percentages of adblocker users. Most pages adapted to it by either doing nasty tricks to bypass them, or just slapping an unclosable popup telling you to disable your adblocker...

I've seen a few such websites. Hit back button and never visited them again.

Normal people don’t know how to do that

Normal people know how to use Firefox which has it built-in.

Have you used AMP reddit?

Yes, it's substandard, but you can easily get to the main site. Also if you're googling for an answer from Reddit, I've found the answer is often in the first few posts anyway. Reddit is probably the only case I can think of where the AMP user experience is not ideal.

Clicking through to the hamstrung Reddit on AMP and then clicking through to the actually functional site makes for an artificially high load time.

I'm not a fan of Google's proprietary web, but it's worth pointing out that this is largely a response to the increasingly shitty way publishers treat their users. Just reading basic articles on the web has become a painful exercise in dodging "Subscribe" faux-pop-ups; trying to scan text while your vision is bombarded with unrelated video; and user-hostile scroll capture effects.

For much the same reasons Google AMP is a thing, I use Apple News for most of my news reading. The web has overcome commercial broadcast television as being the shittiest way of consuming content.

It's worth noting that Apple News take a 50% cut of the revenue. On the web, a publisher is free to do whatever they want so when Google can insert themselves into that, it is a fraction of the cut that Apple takes.

It's the sort of thing that reminds me why I want the web platform to remain competitive with iOS, Facebook, and Android. If not AMP, something like it was sorely needed.

I guess because I work on mostly b2b or private apps, I'm not up on the latest for sites that are trying to drive traffic and views. SEO has always seemed like a dirty world of stepping on whatever you have to just to get clicks, and be the 500th app someone grants notification permissions to.

Why using proprietary Apple News when there are so many news aggregators and even RSS readers? Isn't it just laziness?

I started blacklisting hostile websites and encouraging people to do the same.

Also worth pointing out Google can and does rank websites by any criteria they choose. So if the top ranking sites have poor usability that is on Google in the first place.

It's tough to work-around the unilateral-disarmament problem here: if supporting AMP gives you a boost in Google SERPs it's difficult to boycott AMP if your competitors don't.

This is what is so insidious about what Google is doing here and seems to me to maybe make a good case that Google abuses its monopoly power.

(INB4: "It's a bad idea to make your business depend on Google traffic because that's fickle and outside of your control." Sure, that's true, but still, organic Google traffic is a pretty rich vein to completely ignore or cede to competitors.)

I agree with all of this, but until google provides a way to appear in the discover box without having AMP-published pages, this is a non-starter for publishers. Ironically, by creating AMP, google has disincentivized publishers from making their canonical pages faster.

Publishers hate that google holds them hostage with AMP in this manner, but the situation is what it is, until someone from the Justice Department starts making the lords of Mountain View antsy.

I think the fact that Google gives higher ranking in their search results to sites that use Google technologies should be addressed in anti-trust investigations.

>Ironically, by creating AMP, google has disincentivized publishers from making their canonical pages faster.

In theory, maybe, but I think history has clearly demonstrated that publishers will not make their pages faster if AMP didn't exist. That's why AMP has been so successful in the first place.

It would have been interesting if Google had openly added the same incentive (access to carousel at top of search results, search prioritization, special marker (lightning symbol)) to pages that follow the same guidelines AMP enforces (generally, avoid techniques that block page rendering or cause large layout changes), and published AMP as a reference implementation.

100% agree with that and part of the issue is that they didn't. They had the option to begin aggressively de-prioritizing pages that have performance issues and are otherwise detrimental to user experience.. that would have resulted in some pretty swift changes to bad UX. Instead they created AMP and told publishers "you want to be on mobile search results, use this".

I would like to point out that it is possible to have web pages that load faster than AMP. It has not been made easy but many publishers have figured out (in some cases publishers have web pages that load faster than their AMP ones...)

Take a look: https://webperf.xyz

I have a number of issues with AMP but I will just mention two:

1. If Google addressed how their ad system was being mis-used (and in many respects as-intended) that would have gone a long way to addressing webpage performance. Instead they pushed more work on the publisher to adopt yet another new format (add it to Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News JSON formats, Google News MediaRSS etc.)

2. AMP helped killed some early momentum to make pages faster. They sold a bandaid solution that was 'good enough' for management and undercut engineering efforts to address the root cause.

And in the process introduced a whole new layer of cruft and the number of bugs I hear from the web teams trying to implement content with AMP is... it's constant.

I used to use Google hundreds of times per day, literally everything I wanted to know I would type into Google.

Between their A) political activities (opinion influencing, censorship, etc.), B) business activities (user tracking, ruinous ads, etc.), and C) search quality issues (they have a major conflict of interest between providing good search results and maximizing A and B), I didn’t even have to try to stop using them out of principle; I literally just don’t get any value out of using Google search anymore.

I use DuckDuckGo (starting circa 2013), which provides a fairly similar/mediocre quality search experience, but without all the other aforementioned problems. The truth of the matter is that these search giants ruined search so bad that I don’t even really use search as much anymore. I’ve gotten to the point where I realize that I can no longer rely on finding things easily. This is not a problem of “the Internet has just gotten too big”. This is a problem created by Google, which has now set a low benchmark.

I have been using the "Redirect AMP to HTML" extension:

https://www.daniel.priv.no/web-extensions/amp2html.html

My experience with AMP, immediately before seeing this article:

1. On desktop, I clicked through a link on Facebook, leading to an AMP page

2. The page was clearly meant for mobile, and looked bad on desktop; the images were full-screen size, the font was too big, and the text line length went all the way to the edges of my very wide browser window.

3. I used Ctrl+Minus to adjust the zoom, which fixed the font size but not the images or the line length.

4. I looked at the top and bottom of the page for a "desktop site" link, and couldn't find one.

5. I looked at the address bar, and saw that the URL was an AMP URL. This is the first time I have noticed that I am using AMP in more than a month.

6. I closed the tab and went to HN, where this was the top article.

When AMP works well, it's inconspicuous, so it's not so surprising that most of my remembered experiences with it are negative. Still, I think google needs to invest a bit more in preventing this sort of bad experience, because currently it comes across as "google breaking the web".

Every valid AMP page includes a <link rel=canonical href="..."> to the canonical URL for the document. If the aggregator (facebook in this case) parsed and linked to the canonical as the publisher recommends via this annotation, you would get the version the publisher preferred. This is how browser extensions that rewrite to the non-amp version work, they extract this URL.

The AMP viewer iframe share button (and share intents) all share this canonical URL, not the AMP url. Google's implementation is trying it's best to get you to that version as well when sharing links.

Link Rel Canonical is an old (2012) standard: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6596

I don't understand how Google's AMP business strategies are dissimilar to what Microsoft got in trouble for with Internet Explorer. Would be interested in what someone who is knowledgeable on that topic has to say.

One could argue, that it never really got Microsoft in _that_ much trouble. They retained Internet Explorer, and really all the requirements put on them by the U.S. and EU combined didn't amount to much.

Not saying it _shouldn't_ have gotten Microsoft into that much trouble, just that it did not.

It has been argued that Microsoft (higher management) missed the Web and/or the smartphone because they were caught up in litigation.

Imagine the position Google would be in today if both Chrome and Android were controlled by Microsoft.

For those interested in security - AMP basically forces the iframe javascript sandbox security model.

https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/security/sandboxed-i...

Even reputable web pages tend to have a metric TON of non-sandboxed javascript from third parties. If you care about your security this is a risk.

If you stick with AMP - this is - by spec - prohibited.

Something to think about as you browse the web gobbling down javascript and all the other third party javascript being pumped at you.

Which conveniently ensures that the only way you can effectively monetize AMP articles is via Google's own advertising networks which don't have constraints on running javascript.

See the list of natively supported Ad networks in AMP: https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-ad/#supported-a...

There are about 200 in that list and any network can submit a config to be added, it's just a pull request away.

so AMP is like the play store but for advertisers?

Yes. The readers are the product.

> For those interested in security - AMP basically forces the iframe javascript sandbox security model.

AMP is the wrong way to address this. Using a good browser is the right way.

My parents use IE, my friends use Safari - both have high market share - are these good browsers? Should users of these browsers be forced to fight through flyover ads that autoplay audio, repainting pages that jump around like crazy, huge sets of third party javascript with total access to their page / session?

Now that we finally can run JS in AMP. That's been a big no since we can't run our normal funnel using AMP.

"How to make your sites faster than AMP without using AMP" leaves out "locally cache a copy of your site in a CDN that is geographically close to your users." Which is the actual mechanical part of AMP that makes it technologically interesting / valuable to content providers and countries distant from the creation of most content.

It also omits the part where google starts preloading and rendering the AMP page when the user is still on the search results. Without that, AMP is often no faster than many non-amp pages.

This should be higher. By googling, you are using way more data because of AMP pages, that is big minus especially if you are on mobile plan

Otoh, without AMP that would bring even a PC to its knees.

This technology has been available to anyone via Akamai, CloudFront and other edge caching networks for years. It shouldn't require Google threatening AMP to get content publishers to adopt it.

I work in the news industry and have literally never published anything to the public without a CDN. It's basic, easy, and cheap. AMP is a scam.

I think there needs to be a real alternate solution from Google for longer term change. (if Google wants to stay relevant)

Can they just penalize slow/large file size sites in their index?

This seems like the underlying goal behind AMP and Chrome's Lighthouse (site audit tool) any way.

This would make a lot of sites fast in the next couple months. But maybe Google doesn't really want that?

Page speed is already a penalty factor in ranking. Think they introduced this last year

edit: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-i...

But what does Google say about AMP affecting your ranking? If they don't explicitly state both sides, then we are left to guess.

And I would say (considering how Google search looks on mobile in Chrome) that AMP is a far higher effect on rank than page speed.

So what is the motivation to make your page speed faster when you can just have an AMP page and then a super fat page for everything else?

AMP's current goals are stated to make pages load faster, but it's obvious that the goal is only a start. It's essentially the second part of Microsoft's old "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" where Google is wanting to extend the third party advertising and content that exists on the web so that they may extinguish it.

Google's mission is to "organize the world's information". How can you better organize the world's information when other companies control it? Nothing better than taking control of that information directly. Now you can organize and reformat it to your own wishes. Nothing evil about that, mind you, but it does make you think about their next steps.

The reason that they do not just penalize slow loading sites in a big way is because those are the sites that they directly profit on.

Most page weight seems to come from tracking and ads. Google IS the most popular tracking and ad provider on the web.

If google penalized slow loading very much, they'd be hurting their own revenue and data collection. It's a conflict of interest.

AMP allows these big, ad-driven, heavy-weight sites to still take all the top spots on the web. Meanwhile terrific content is buried because it's failure to implement AMP.

Google's self-interested ranking of sites is shaping the web very negatively - towards more tracking and more ads.

You’re correct. When making a site you have to make a trade off between “Advert supported” and “lightweight”. Pretty damn sneaky of them!

> Can they just penalize slow/large file size sites in their index?

Well, that would be bad for the independent web, wouldn't it? I mean, you'd be penalising sites with large amounts of content, that aren't on a CDN. Large images or videos, for example, might be the entire point of the page in the first place. I don't want to be directed to to a webpage about an artist (for example) that has the crappiest, smallest and fastest loading images, I want the one with the best images.

Html <img> and <picture> elements already have the ability to serve larger or smaller images (srcset) based on your browser's perception of your network performance.

I agree with the other comment here replying to you. In the olden days people had to explicitly link to larger content. Isn't that was AMP does anyway?

The reason Google has penalties for page weight and loading time is that they have extensive user research on customer behavior related to loading time. If a flat page studded with a few dozen giant PNG’s takes a minute to load, most people are going to click the back button.

It’s worth spending some time optimizing your landing page so that it loads fast and renders cleanly on mobile, if you want people to see your content. That doesn’t mean it has to use JS, or AMP.

> The reason Google has penalties for page weight and loading time is that they have extensive user research on customer behavior related to loading time. If a flat page studded with a few dozen giant PNG’s takes a minute to load, most people are going to click the back button.

Why is then basically every single page created by Google is a bloated monstrosity with multi-megabyte Pangs routinely embedded in them and loading megabytes of shitty JS?

well no, not really? Perhaps you could imagine a world where it default loads a smaller file and right underneath there is a link to a larger file? This used to be a more common thing...

This is _literally_ what people do to game the paint speed of websites for Chrome Lighthouse tests.

They render a <p>Loading</p> so it gets a paint score of 100, then when their behemoth js app finishes loading+parsing it removes this dom element.

This is literally every WIX site on the web. 100% javascript rendered site.

> Well, that would be bad for the independent web, wouldn't it?

Google already effectively omits most of the independent web anyway. It strongly favors the large commercial websites instead.

That's a very edge case - its more that front end design and developers need to get their act together and design and build for speed!

Don't use complex but nice images designed for print on the web and not just copypasta god knows what js library.

Are you saying good, clear pictures are an edge case? I just can't agree, as I find them hugely relevant to a large number of subjects.

I don't think images are the problem, megabytes of third-party javascript is.

Crawlers are smart enough to measure various types of slowness; images/video are non-blocking so although they're bandwidth-heavy, adding a bunch to your site is probably less "damaging" than a slow initial server response or first paint.

> I don't want to be directed to to a webpage about an artist (for example) that has the crappiest, smallest and fastest loading images, I want the one with the best images.

There are several technologies available for progressively-enhanced images, and Chrome is experimenting with lazy-loading all images[1]. This argument does not exist in practice.

[1] https://web.dev/native-lazy-loading/

W3C is working on neutral/non-locked-in replacements for AMP like feature policies and Web Packaging but standards take years to deploy.

Yes - they do this.

Slow web pages is a big signal (out of many) in SEO.

AMP demotivates page speed performance improvements though. (ie, AMP > page speed for ranking)

Great post, although I'm a little meh on lazy-loading images. I like when the whole page is finished loading the moment I think it's finished loading. But more to the point, lazy-loading can be a crutch just like AMP is, for solving problems that shouldn't exist, such as: your page is big & bloated. If you keep it small, there's no need for lazy-loading. But you have to limit the number of images, and optimize the ones that are there. And probably only one video per page. Horrors! Obviously none of this works when the page is effectively infinite in size - such as when you're trying to give the user the addictive excitement of scrolling through a continuous, visually-rich "feed".

Yeah, please don't add lazy loading.

- It breaks viewing the site with javascript disabled.

- It prevents viewing the site offline (e.g. on an airplane) without first scrolling through the whole content while online.

- Unless implemented perfectly it adds delays before content you have scrolled to becomes visible.

Deciding when to load stuff should be the browser's job. Don't reimplement the browser in javascript.

> - It prevents viewing the site offline (e.g. on an airplane) without first scrolling through the whole content while online.

I'm genuinely surprised by how many apparently considerate websites like Wikipedia seem to completely ignore this consideration. I often don't have a working internet connection. Why shouldn't I be able to read the article I already loaded when on wifi? Why should I pay for mobile data when I tried to load a page on wifi?

Meaningful, content images should be loaded on a phone when using a non-metred connection promptly so that a user need not waste their metred connection just because they want to read an article on a bus - or a subway.

Breaking the website for the five geeks who disable javascript isn't really a valid consideration, in my view, despite the fact that I ran with disabled javascript for a long time.

But your final paragraph is very much true. Mobile UA authors should consider enabling lazy loading on metred connections and disabling it on non-metred connections by default.

Long term users of web browsers can probably remember in the days of 14.4k browsers, many people used the setting to disable loading images by default. A modern version of that setting should be restored.

I'd love to see a lazy loading idiom implemented in pure HTML. But I'm not holding my breath.

What's wrong with <img src="image.png">? Maybe some kind of semantic purpose <img src="image.png" purpose="decoration"> vs <img src="image.png" purpose="graphical-content"> but you can imagine every website owner will think that their logo is graphical content and respectful UA authors will need to disregard the semantic attributes and try to guess based on the presence or absence of some kind of caption, for instance.

UAs could easily lazy load by default on metred connections.

On the topic of lazy load. If you are using non native lazy load, please have some kind of fallback if javascript is disabled. It stinks to have a page load and just get blurry images, and need to enable javascript for a couple pictures to render.

I find it sad that Google bloats the web with all its analytics and fonts, and then offers a solution to fix the bloat by providing AMP instead.

And there are so many other third-party elements that are detrimental. It's sad that we have to use things like Firefox's tracking protection to remove all this bloat that people insert on webpages just because it's possible to do so today and it wasn't fifteen years ago.

It feels like a Pandora's Box at times. We can complain a lot but nothing is stopping you from adding just one more JS package to your app if you want to, because it's as easy as 'npm install' and you don't see the downsides.

I moved away from all Google services (which I used to be keen to get involved with initially! How times have changed.) over the last few years. I don't miss any of them.

There are alternatives for everything. While you're at it, do the same for Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, if you can. I only have Instagram left.

Having separate URLs for the same target document is antithetical to the Web. See also TBL's essay, "Cool URIs don't change": https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

Another way to fight back against Google in general is to stop using Chrome and stop using google search.

Also stop using auto-update. Promote a diversity of browsers and browser versions.

I don't think recommending people to stop using automatic updates is a good thing because it likely means users will not receive security updates.

Also stop them from buying android devices.

Good lucks with that.

I'd like to see a "vote with your wallet/attention" style search engine, where you can exclude certain sites from showing up based on the underlying and associated tech they use, and prefer sites that use tech you personally support, similar to ingredients lists on supermarket products. There is so much informational content out there that this kind of filtering wouldn't impact the user experience.

The most annoying thing for me, as a vision-impaired user, is that AMP pages disable zoom.

I know that can be overridden in Chrome's accessibility settings, but it's a shitty practice that something like AMP shouldn't be promoting.

I think the idea is that you'll either use a screen reader or use the system zoom tool. Not defending it, but I can see the logic they used.

I'll use the system zoom if I need to, but it's very awkward compared to the browser zoom. You're stuck panning around the magnified screen with one set of gestures, while also having to scroll through the page using the browser's gestures. It works but it's not pleasant.

The excuse I always hear about disabling zoom has to do with the multi-touch delay. I can somewhat see the sense of that for very particular applications, but definitely not for AMP, which as I understand it is meant for mostly static content (I'm only assuming though).

More often than not, what I find is that if I override zoom disable and then browser zoom on a site that doesn't allow it usually, it ends up breaking the layout as you zoom. This makes me wonder if they're just disabling zoom because they can't be bothered fixing their CSS to deal with it.

But what's wrong with using the web browser's zoom tool? Why is it somehow worse to get reflowing zoom? This idea that I'm using a phone optimised site so all text should be 8pt is just bizarre. It's not like the UA author has removed support for zoom: they're just disabling it arbitrarily.

The only way is to make something better. Not using Chrome, not using Google Search, etc will have close to zero impact. Fix the mess so AMP isn't necessary. How? Your guess is better than mine.

I like AMP. It's possible to write fast websites without it, and I do do that for my sites. For for big, non-tech sites AMP has provided sufficient motivation to offer a fast version. Nothing else has managed to do this before. I'd rather have fast AMP pages of all those news sites than having to load the slow default view. Experience suggests that the options aren't "fast with AMP or fast without AMP", but "fast or slow". It's for incentive reasons, not for technical reasons, but I'm still glad the fast version exists.

Marko, bravo for making that clean and readable site (and having 0 trackers, as reported by Firefox Klar)!

There's one issue I noticed when clicking the links to page sections (#anchors). Those lazy-loaded images make the page scroll away from the section title I jumped to. Is it possible to fix that by having images replaced by placeholders of the same size?

Thanks for the kind words and yeah no trackers/third-party calls/cookies etc. Have tested on regular Firefox for mobile and on Firefox Preview too (you should try it if you like Klar) and it works fine on both. I'll see if I can add placeholders when all this traffic slows down. Don't dare to touch much at this time.

Please remove lazy loading completely and instead leave the decision when to load content to the browser. Static content should never use any scripts.

Another way to fight back is to promote alternatives such as DuckDuckGo. I just ordered a swanky tshirt

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/community/...

If you have Android, deAMPify is great.

It seems to be abandoned, but still works for most sites.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.joaomgcd.d...

As a user, AMP gives me a better experience than non-AMP search results. It's a tough sell to tell people like me that I should prefer the worse product (the slow, tracking infested, bloated full website).

As an iPhone user I find AMP to be painfully buggy. Rotation doesn't work properly, the URL bar doesn't hide properly, reader mode is routinely broken, pinch to zoom doesn't work, etc. I wish I could disable it.

I don't particularly care to because I find it convenient.

I remember looking at the original HTML5 spec and going, there is no way lower power / low bandwidth / high latency devices will be able to handle this efficiently. Nevertheless, we moved fast and broke things, ratified the HTML5 spec and paved the cowpaths without a second thought to language or efficiency.

Somewhere along the line, things came full circle. HTML was slow again, so we needed a new new way to efficiently render content, thus AMP was born.

In what way is HTML5 is inherently slower than previous versions? Pages tend to be slow because of the tracking and adds addded to them as well as client-side "rendering" for static content. None of that is required by HTML5.

Essentially html5 is significantly harder to parse because the amount of branching that has to be done. If you go look at the amp specification and the reasons behind it, they designed it to be a stripped-down light version of HTML5.

I'm more likely to click AMP links in search results than non-AMP links. The reason for this is the pre-loading that Google does for them. The links load almost instantly, where some non-amp link might take up to 20 seconds to finally load enough where I can start scrolling past the ads.

The Facebook instant links (or whatever they're called) have much the same effect on me. I'll usually open those if the headline even makes me a little curious.

> Just visiting a site with Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection on makes a faster and less intrusive web. It’s a built-in blocker of intrusive ads and invisible scripts.

What am I missing here? I installed FireFox, set Enhanced Tracking Protection changed to "strict", and went to typical sites that track you (news sites). I still see third-party hits in the Developer Tools (e.g. facebook) and it says it blocked 0 trackers so far.

This holiday season I'm putting DDG and FF on all the families machines. Flipped some over the summer. They hardly notice. The icon for "internet" is now orange and the search still finds all the stuff they are looking for.

The big G makes money off our non-tech associates, not us, so moving them is, IMO, more important than me and tech-folk moving.

The best way to fight back is to use DuckDuckGo. After the "controversial twiddler", Google is going to have to have to do something significant to earn my trust back. I do occasionally switch back using "g! <query>" on duckduckgo when I don't get any decent results, but for the most part duckduckgo is fine.

Everyone should start using Brave or Firefox and DuckDuckGo and stop using all Google things as much as possible.

It's funny that, if it was a net neutrality issue, e.g. Comcast pushing a new video format and prioritizing video for their own streaming service, the internet would be a warzone by now. But we all love google. And google used to be all fuzzy and unevil. But now they 're evil

How can anyone categorize AMP as evil? They are improving and leading. No one needs to use Google, they have alternatives. This is how things evolve. Someone else will create another amp alternative and things will change later. Netflix was #1, then Hulu, Disney, amazon video came. No one lasts forever, everyone needs to evolve and this exactly is what google is doing.

amp is a vehicle to a) turn web content owners to gig writers for google and b) push Signed HTTP Exchanges, a dangerous protocol on the web. I can't attribute stupidity to google because they re very smart, so it must be malice

Why is signed HTTP exchanges dangerous, and indeed, what are they?

https://github.com/ipfs/in-web-browsers/issues/121#issuecomm...

> Google Chome makes SXG indistinguishable from regular HTTPS, which breaks basic assumptions around how users understand the green padlock in location bar (aka "nobody but me and the Origin server can see the payload"). UX of regular HTTPS is reused as-is, pretending that end-to-end HTTPS transport was used with Origin from location bar, which is not true.

https://blog.intelx.io/2019/04/15/a-new-type-of-http-client-...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ha00dSGKmjoEh2mRiG8FIA5s...

> Big changes need strong justification and support. This particular change is bigger than most and presents a number of challenges. The increased exposure to security problems and the unknown effects of this on power dynamics is significant enough that we have to regard this as harmful until more information is available.

> How can anyone categorize AMP as evil?

"Evil" is not a word I'd use. I think AMP is bad for numerous reasons, most of which are detailed in other comments. But the reason that is most relevant to your comment is that AMP makes the web experience worse for me.

> Someone else will create another amp alternative

Yes, I fear that this will happen.

> Yes, I fear that this will happen.

nobody showed an interest in making mobile websites fast even though they ve been slow for years. The whole javascript corporate ecosystem is still openly pushing heavy javascript apps even though sites are mobile-first today. only google cared

I've written a similar post on how to remove AMP from your blog, without sacrificing SEO rating and performance https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance

Imagine if Cox or Comcast came up with AMP. Same technology, same idea.

If websites use the Comcast AMP framework, Comcast will cache their sites and make them faster for users. See, it's about the users! Because the Comcast AMP framework is open, and has nothing to do with the business interests of Comcast. Comcast will give a bit to open source and have a few conferences per year to make sure developers know that it's not all about the company.

I believe the fight against AMP will not be won by users or individual action -- it will be won with legislation. What are users going to do? Plain HTML pages are on the 10,000th page, below a hundred thousand AMP tracker loaded piles of shit. It is a de-facto content restriction.

Even if I use an alternate search engine -- it's results are polluted by those of Google, because 90% of search is Google. We do not have a choice.

I'm sure a Google lawyer will successfully argue that I can recieve IP addresses in the mail via U.S. post for any odd, esoteric plain text HTML pages I'd like to visit, though.

> If websites use the Comcast AMP framework, Comcast will cache their sites and make them faster for users.

They probably do it with Netflix, some ISP do it with Steam too... there's nothing wrong with multilevel cache (except cache invalidation).

mmmh, I don't think this really holds up.

They do it with Netflix/Steam because they have to, because if they did not those services would choke bandwidth for everyone. With your Netflix example, there are maybe a dozen players with this type of arrangement -- it is the exception to the rule and has more to do with physical limitations of the network than political control. With AMP/non-amp websites, there are hundreds of millions of separate players, and no physical need to discriminate (my neighbor's network performance is identical whether I look at 2mb websites vs. 300kb websites)

I believe there is a fundamental difference between the two -- google's play is about control, not physical limitations.

> I believe there is a fundamental difference between the two -- google's play is about control, not physical limitations.

Control of what? The search result are from Google, they already have control over them. The existence of AMP doesn't make you go to Google (except if AMP is actually superior, but then any search provider can provide it too, just like Cloudflare does it now).

Comcast wouldn't do that because Comcast already flat out charges publishers like Netflix to not be deprioritized on their network. It would be analogous to Google charging publishers for top organic search positions.

> Don't use Google search.

This is easier said than done, as the other search engines are still not as good as Google, even though Google's results have been getting worse. This may be a controversial opinion, but it's not what my comment is about. I'm going to make a more scandalous suggestion.

Don't use search engines at all.

The idea that a centralized one-size-fits-all search engine is necessary is preposterous. The Web makes available all kinds of information, and unifying it all under a single data model is difficult, and doesn't even make sense. (Does anyone remember the semantic web?) Unifying the world's information behind a single search facade is likewise a Very Difficult Task (TM), one that's likely to fall into the trap of big business, as search has done, because the required resources are so huge.

But what if it's solving the wrong problem? Information of a particular type tends to gravitate to local centers of storage, so to speak, which are specific to the type of information being stored. For example:

- Encyclopedic knowledge is in Wikipedia.

- You can find places by searching Foursquare, Yelp, Apple Maps, OSM, ...

- Q&A about programming (and lots of other topics) is on StackExchange.

- News aggregators have been beaten to death, and multiple are available.

- You can search Twitter using Twitter, and Facebook using Facebook.

I can go on, but the point is clear: every single Web-connected system offers a search function of its own, one that's likely specialized to the type of information stored in that system. It'll most certainly do a better job at searching that local store, and will do so more quickly and cheaply than a centralized, generic search engine. This also avoids the moral hazard of search centralization.

This leaves the little guy: the random small website or blog, where the majority of true gems are found. Google locates these by sheer brute force: they literally index the entire web. They've taken a relative eternity to do so, but it's a problem that could have been solved by something better than mere force.

Does anyone remember webrings? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring What if "the little guys" organized in webrings and directories? This doesn't seem like a technical problem, as a webring or directory is trivial to build. Could this be a UX problem that hasn't been solved to the satisfaction of a modern Web user? Is anyone or anything taking another stab at this?

In closing, I'll throw out one last vague notion: that of an openly federated search. How cool would that be? We don't need Google for that at all.

!bangs in DuckDuckGo enables you to do searches right on the destination website

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Why even ddg? Chrome and Firefox support this out of the box in the browsers.

Most importantly, DDG comes with a host of bangs, whereas firefox And I assume chrome as well) require some configuration. Secondarily, bangs work regardless of their position in your query. At least in Firefox, they must be the first word. Finally, I can use DDG with bangs from anyone's device, that I might not want to do any setup on.

I do primarily use bangs from Firefox's address/search uni-bar, so if they added bang support from there, I would start using that feature without changing my habits at all.

Nice! I had no idea.

I like the idea, but I often find search results on the sites themselves crude and lacking. For example the wikipedia or reddit search, both are not so great.

And what about if I want to search for a band, and I don't know if they have a website, a facebook page, a soundcloud page or if they have most of their material on youtube. Do I manually need to search and check and compare different platforms until I find the one where the band chose to host their content?

And as far as the "little guy" goes, there is plenty of research on network science which shows that the (original) Page Rank algorithm does not provide meaningful rankings for anything except big guys. The algo accurately scores/ranks the most connected web pages, but scores for the "long tails" which make up 95% of the web are pretty close to random.

That thesis can’t be true as stated. I’m regularly able to find pages on sites in those 95% tails based on my vague memory of a title or important quote.

The web is large, and my processor is so very, very small.

If you're one of "the little guys" with a niche website or blog, you already host it somewhere that serves Web traffic. Answering federated search requests cannot possibly be more expensive than that, considering that your niche website or blog doesn't have more than a few megabytes of actual information.

If you're purely a consumer, I don't see how your equipment has anything to do with search at all. Searching using one system isn't more expensive than using another.

Try: https://www.startpage.com/

It uses Google search, but privacy on level of DuckDuckGo.

https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-gro...

Are you sure it's still a valid choice (genuine question)? Most of the research around search engines seems polarised, so I'm not sure which sources to trust, even DDG is considered a data mining tool but some.

Nope. I'm not sure at all that it is a valid choice.

This is new news to me.

The client I'm assigned to has resigned themselves to using AMP. Nobody likes it, it breaks so much working code, and I personally hate it. Thankfully our SEO is top-notch, so we're doing well without it, but I'm not looking forward to implementing it.

I figured how to avoid amp as a user years ago. Switched to DDG and its bangs are very convenient. Google, in its efforts to customize user experience often gives worse search results than it did ten years ago.

Despite the tracking, I'd suggest allowing google fonts, it's not that much different than other CDN content (assuming you're only using the CSS).

Yes, and use https://webtest.app to show the world we can speed up the web by blocking ads.

Also make sure to sign the AMP letter: http://ampletter.org/

Also, Bing is really good! I'm the only guy in the company that uses it, but seriously I love it!

Bing also uses AMP. That might be why you love it.

Interesting. Maybe it is, but wouldn't I be able to see that in the url?

The AMP standard doesn't need use URL hijacking anymore: https://www.cloudflare.com/website-optimization/amp-real-url...

That is more of the same IMO: yet more code to wipe off a symptom of a problem that we created with more code, as opposed to solving the problem.

Gatsby.js could be added as a solution to make sites load faster, it's awesome what it does

How it's this not copyright infringement? Can't we fight it on those grounds?

Websites choose to use AMP because it has favourable search results.

Sorry for the dumb question, but:

What does Google gain with AMP? How does it make money with it?

Google is trying to monopolize the internet, and they also sell data / ads. So inherently "spending more time in google ecosystem" leads to inherent value.

Google makes money by people browsing the Internet. If they can make browsing easier/better/faster, they will do it.

This is why they built Chrome and Android too.

Serious question, what is a free alternative to Google font?

You can still use Google Fonts, but download the font files and host them yourself to prevent your users/visitors from being tracked by Google:

https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com/fonts

https://github.com/gabiseabra/google-fonts-webpack-plugin

Ahhh, I wasn’t aware that it is possible to download Google fonts. Is it copyrighted though?

Directly linked on that page: https://fonts.google.com/attribution

If you run a NAS at home, you should also setup syncthing. It's replaces Google drive for your phone's camera, seemlessly.

I've been looking into doing this, have you got any pointers to setting this up? I'm trying to do it with a raspberry pi and a big external hard drive. Darned thing keeps shutting down on me though, and the pi won't boot with the HDD plugged in. Thanks for reminding me to pick up a powered USB hub...

Is the answer, just say no. ?

Here's one great takeaway:

> Treat the cause: Third-party requests slow down the web

> ...

> - Google owns 7 of the top 10 most popular third-party calls

> ...

> So you can see why there must be some kind of internal struggle at Google. They understand the value of a faster web but they also cannot go after the main cause of the slow web. And this is how technology such as AMP gets invented and makes things worse.

It blows my mind how many devs around here are devoted to their browser and search.

Stop using chrome. Honestly, wtf?! Firefox is awesome. FF dev tools are awesome. FF, like Wu Tang, is for the kids.

STOP USING google SEARCH! USE DUCKDUCKGO! Use the `!gm` google maps bang when you need it. Use the `!g` google bang in a pinch, but for all of our sake, please wean yourself off of google search.

These two steps are immensely easy to do, and yet a MAJOR investment in all of our future.

Preach brother preach!

I made this move myself many months ago & never looked back. There is basically nothing I miss about dropping chrome/ google search. My web experience is indiscernible using Firefox & DDG.

One of the only minor things I've had to adjust to is prefixing searches with my local city & state when I'm searching for things in my hometown (Imagine that! My search engine website isn't tracking my physical location!). A small price to pay for a HUGE gain in privacy & peace of mind, knowing I'm no longer being exploited and rolled up into a package, sold to advertisers.

I got so sick of seeing targeted ads in EVERY website I visit. Something I searched the day before. Maybe a website I visited a few days ago. Then I have to look at ads for those things for the next week straight!? No thanks.

After making two super easy changes, Chrome -> Firefox & Google search -> DDG, I almost NEVER see creepy, annoying targeted ads anymore. It's amazing!

> Stop using chrome. Honestly, wtf?! Firefox is awesome.

I do not use Chrome, but I don't think Firefox is awesome. While I use FF, partly for moral reasons, my experience is average and I saw many flaws and bugs. I prefer the features of Vivaldi, which is based on Chromium, but does not phone home to Google.

> STOP USING google SEARCH!

While my default search engine is Duck Duck Go, I don't recommend it to friends and relatives. My experience is that searching in any language but English gives very poor results. Other patterns also need to be redirected to another search engine, so it's not a a smooth migration.

My estimates are that 50% of my searches are for DDG, 25% for Google, and 25% for others (Bing, Qwant), not counting specialized searches like Wikipedia. That is enough to prevent being profiled.

> STOP USING google SEARCH! USE DUCKDUCKGO!

I want to stop using Google, but please realize that DuckDuckGo is only competitive with Google if English is your only language (maybe even only if you're American?). There are loads and loads of people on HN for whom DDG is a poor experience.

In my experience DDG is extremely poor for localized results, especially those in other languages than English. Previously I recommended StartPage.com for my fellow Europeans, but StartPage has been bought by a shady company [1] and should not be used anymore either. I have no recommendation anymore.

[1]: https://reclaimthenet.org/startpage-buyout-ad-tech-company/

I switched to DDG many years ago and stopped needing to use Google search for anything maybe 2 years ago. The every day experience of using DDG is so much more enjoyable than Google - made clear every blue moon when I do run a Google search and see all the ads, poorly placed results, and feel the heavy weight of Google's invisible hand.

> It blows my mind how many devs around here are devoted to their browser and search.

Are they though? Or is AMP just a storm-in-a-teacup? There a handful of people on Earth that will stop using Google search (in particular) and Chrome as a protest against AMP.

> ... and yet a MAJOR investment in all of our future.

[citation needed]

Personalized search is not inherently bad. Use Google search without being logged in if you really care. Harder to do with Chrome but Chrome is actually a great user experience. It still blows my mind that FF prompts me to restart to install an update when I start it up.

No I don't want to install an update. I want to use the browser. That's why I opened it. How many years has it been since Chrome added auto-update on restart with silent updates?

Beyond Search, GMail, Maps and Chrome though I just won't use another Google service and take the risk that some automated system will decide my account is in violation of some ToS no one has ever read and shut down access to every single Google service I use.

Whoever signed off on doing this through the Google Plus boondoggle needs to be fired (although, to be fair, I think ad accounts getting suspended arbitrarily and in some cases incorrectly was already a thing by then).

DDG is worse than Google for me and totally useless for any searches in my native language.

Firefox has 50% worse performance for me in WebGL applications. Media isn't also accelerated still on Linux. Where is the "awesomeness" in that? I really wish those caveats didn't exist for what I use daily.

I've been using Safari and Duck Duck Go for the past six months. I've also moved my email to Fastmail. Happy to become less reliant on Google.

>Stop using chrome. Honestly, wtf?! Firefox is awesome.

I think plenty of people have found Mozilla to have made some poor decisions over the years. It feels as though you have to choose between two options that aren't great, so is there a point in switching? Take the add ons situation. At least on Chrome I can run my own add ons.

I never used chrome because I saw no reason to switch away from Firefox. I use Firefox since 2004ish. My move to DuckDuckGo came together with my decision to delete my FAcebook profile. I use Firefox containers to keep amazon and my work google apps in check. I’m very happy with this setup.

I switch to FF a few weeks ago and (this time!) haven't looked back. It's as good if not better. I had tried to switch multiple times a year for a few years, and I think now is a good time, finally.

I was going to switch to duckduckgo as you say, to realize that OH! I had switched to duckduckgo when switching to FF but had forgotten... that's... how easy and seamless it is now, I even just forgot I was not searching on google anymore.

I would say also STOP using Google Analytics, Google CDNs, Google fonts, Youtube for hosting your content and all the spying 3rd party services. It's perfectly doable to have a commercial website without them.

I tried DDG for a day on my phone. I follow stocks and will often enter "[ticker] stock" and Google search shows me that nice chart at the top.

DDG doesn't have anything like that and forces you to click into a financial website.

I had to switch back. If it added that widget, I'd probably make the switch full time.

> FF dev tools are awesome.

I switched back about a year or so ago. There are some nice things in the FF dev tools compared to Chrome, but on the whole, even a year later I still find myself opening Chrome to do something specific here and there in dev tools.

The real challenge here is that for the most part, AMP gives a better experience to users than publishers are willing to provide. As such, Users click on AMP links and expect good things to happen. Your pitch is, "stop using Chrome so that publishers have more options for making the web slower and instrumented because it's morally right."

That is a tough sell. Users do not really care (nor should they) what publishers want to do to make sites profitable. That space is so fraught with abuse that it's not going to get any sympathy from the user side, anyways.

It's more about stop earning money, because large userbase still use Chrome and Google Search regardless of individual dev preferences.

What's the point of switching to DDG, though? Under the hood it's just a combination of Google and Bing, isn't it?

This is just a sliver of the perversion created when you rely on advertising for profits. Everyone thinks free stuff is great but it means you're the product and an entire global economic ecosystem is being built on that.

> Use the `!gm` google maps bang when you need it

That is not how it works for me. One of common things I might do is look up a place, like a bar or a restaurant or theater or whatever. When I do this in Google, I immediately get a link to the website, a link to the reviews, pictures of inside and outside and a link to the map. Right at the top of the page. With DDG, all I get is a link to the website if the place has one and possibly a link to a yelp page. I have to do multiple additional searches and then cut and paste the address into a separate tab to open the map to get the same result.

> Firefox is awesome.

Not if you’re a macOS user, in particular one that cares for automation. The lack of AppleScript (the bug report that tracks it is old enough to vote) prevents people from considering it as a daily browser. And I’m not just talking about developers. I regularly steer non-technical people away from Firefox because when they ask why my tools—which they want to use—don’t work on Firefox, I have to tell them the truth: I’d like to support Firefox, but I can’t.

one of the most trivial annoying problems with switching between the two is the difference in how bookmarking works in FF vs chrome.

I have to use chrome for work cuz of a security rule of questionable legitimacy (to me).

in FF, you bookmark a page by dragging the tab into a folder.

in chrome afaik, you have to star it and then select what folder it goes into.

Ok.

Another thing, In chrome, if you context click inside of a bookmarks folder and create a new folder, it creates a nested new folder within the folder you clicked.

In firefox, thats not the case, wherever you click, i believe it creates the new folder at the top level, and then you can drag it to a sub folder. Its a small problem but if you're like me with lots of bookmarks[1], it is a pain in the ass.

[1] for example, i have a folder for every year, with a subfolder for each month, and whenever i find non-specific cool stuff, i toss the bookmark in this month/year folder. at this point i have these going back to 2016, and its become a cool sort of journal or scrapbook type thing. highly recommend this practice to ppl, and its basically the use-case of many 3rd party browser adons for bookmark management, but built into the browser by default.

anyway, long like firefox!

Do you know if you use !g whether or not the request routes through DDG (not removing tracking, but hopefully reduce ir(?)) or it's like going on Google.com?

I use DDG and "bang" myself to better results if DDG fails me. Love the amount of features.

My only complaint is it sucks at helping me spell words, especially in other languages than English.

Sadly we use Google mail at my work so probably can't avoid it completely.

For those concerned about switching from Google to DuckDuckGo, maybe this article might aid in convincing you

I ditched Google for DuckDuckGo. Here's why you should too https://www.wired.co.uk/article/duckduckgo-google-alternativ...

Firefox's lousy "profile" handling is still a show-stopper for me.

> Firefox is awesome. FF dev tools are awesome. FF, like Wu Tang, is for the kids.

FF is awesome, but have they fixed the battery issues on Macs yet? It's a non-starter for me to switch.

I have switched to DuckDuckGo as mt main search engine a couple of months ago, but for complicated queries I just have to go back to Google. It's that bad.

After 6-7 years of not using google, I can vouch for this. There is just no reason to use it (I am writting this on HN, you are not the case of "just another user" by just beeing here). Their search has become mediocre due to all adwords and there was never as simple to put together a nextcloud/dovecot/postfix/searx powered server. Once I have tryed to block facebook, google, amazon ip ranges using scraped data from ASNs. It is increadible what a large piece of internet those companies have took over for their own profit. Even duckduckgo wont run (probably hosted on microsoft/amazon/google cloud), yahoo redirected me to GDPR "consent" page, which was again on microsoft/amazon/google cloud. We really dont want to live in a world ruled by their advertising engines. Fight back, block ads, on premise everything, remove google/fb/... spyware from your roms and stop pretending you have friends by number of likes on facebook. Just go away from this or we will end in corporation driven distopia you really dont want to live in.

And read this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism

It is just too late for fashion, no time for fanboyism, we blew it. We are on limit of destroying freedom of internet (I will post facebook, google and amazon ASN based ip ranges later when I come home, so you can try it on your own, it is really hilarious, from all search engines I know, only yandex was still operational. And those are RIPE records.).

Do you have any data that Google's services were the actual cause of the slowdown of websites?

Sometimes, I don't agree with n-gate and just feel home in the comment section of HN... Thanks

The rest of the time I stay away...

> Stop using chrome.

FF is great, but it's also worth pointing out that Edge has all the Google adware removed and better privacy. There was a post from Eric Lawrence detailing all the Google stuff they removed a little while back, it was about 25 separate components. There's telemetry though so make your own mind if you're cool with that.

While I agree we need to stop using chrome, I don't know that FF is the path forward.

Mozilla's continued trend away from Openness and the foundation's original goals and more towards business objectives and corporate "morals" similar to those seen in google seems like we are just replacing one Corporate master for another with Modern Mozilla, inc

Long gone are the days of the Mozilla Foundation standing up for the users against the Corporate goliath Microsoft, today they simply adopt what ever Google wants them to provided Google calls them "standard" .

> Firefox is awesome.

it is doing great now, but lost a great deal of marketshare precisely because it was a slow, bloated mess

> FF dev tools are awesome.

debatable. chrome hot code replace in debug is a great asset. mounting a local workspace to synchronize changes is situational, but when you can leverage it it's great. firefox code view's "find in files" only search linked javascript, chrome search everywhere so it can catches references in inlined javascript

I work with both regularly, for personal usage I prefer firefox, for the obvious implications, but I find a lot less friction in developing using chrome.

I really doubt google will become "irrelevant" anytime soon. What most of us nerds forget is that tech products become popular when they solve real life issues for non technical people. We can sit here and debate all day what protocols are better, and which browse is cooler, and why Google is evil, because it will not become irrelevant anytime soon unless there is a better end user product. Happy bashing Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc because no one cares, really. What they care is "how to cook potato soup" showing relevant results, and having their pictures generate likes and their unneeded products delivered tomorrow.

And that's exactly the reason AMP is so popular with end-users. It's fast, and opens instantly on slow networks with your phone. End-users don't know what AMP is, and most don't know that the lightning symbol is AMP. What they know is clicking it gives them fast results, and that's what 99% of people care about.

> it will not become irrelevant anytime soon unless there is a better end user product.

Most of the end users today never made a conscious choice about this, in the same way most people didn't question Windows as "the operating system" years ago. Google is pre-configured almost everywhere, its brand name is synonymous with web search and most people never even try anything else. IOW, it's not the superior quality of the end product that decides the market share today, it's sufficient quality and no good reason to switch.

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