Google AMP Can Go To Hell (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Google AMP Can Go To Hell (2018)

polemicdigital.com

244 pointsfranze91 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21703345

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17920720

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

> AMP pages are fast to load (so fast to crawl), easy to understand (thanks to mandatory structured data), and devoid of any unwanted clutter or mess (as that breaks the standard).

Oh, how horrible it would be if the whole web were fast to load, easy to understand and devoid of unwanted clutter or mess.

I hate AMP because it makes my web experience slower and worse - lately it seems like Chrome on android has taken to loading broken "offline" versions of any suggested pages, making me refresh to read anything, and whenever a search takes me to reddit I have to edit the url to get a version that respects my page settings (and, strangely enough, loads a lot faster than the AMP version). But I don't see the chaos of the current web as inherently virtuous; encouraging web pages to load faster and be easier to read is absolutely something Google should be doing, and I'll certainly favour a search engine that prioritises fast, easy-to-read pages over one that doesn't.

> encouraging web pages to load faster and be easier to read is absolutely something Google should be doing

Completely disagree. They should focus their energy on fixing their search engine. And all the bugs in gmail. And the bugs in their advertising engine. And maybe stop tracking everyone. and...

> I'll certainly favour a search engine that prioritises fast, easy-to-read pages over one that doesn't.

I won't. I'll favour a search engine that gives me pages that have the best information on them. A search engine that helps me to find the hidden nuggets of information that are hiding in the far corners of the Internet, even if they don't appear on a fast, popular site that earns revenue for google through google ads or by harvesting user data via google analytics.

> I'll favour a search engine that gives me pages that have the best information on them. A search engine that helps me to find the hidden nuggets of information that are hiding in the far corners of the Internet, even if they don't appear on a fast, popular site

What use is the "best information" if it's on a page that takes forever to load and is so cluttered that you can't actually find the information there? I don't search for the sake of searching, I search because I want to find a particular piece of information, which means the end-to-end process - not just finding the "right" page, but finding and understanding the part that I actually wanted from that page - is what's important.

> that earns revenue for google through google ads or by harvesting user data via google analytics.

That sounds pretty backwards - IME the fastest, least cluttered sites tend to be those with the fewest ads.

Are you serious? Even in really bad examples the info is still there and readable even after closing several popups and muting videos. It should be punished to some extend, but giving you pages irrelevant info is a complete failure.

Completely irrelevant info is a failure, sure. But slightly less detailed info on a significantly better page is probably better than slightly more detailed info on a page that's a pain to deal with. There's a balance to be struck; a fast-loading, uncluttered page is not the be all and end all, but it's not nothing either. (And frankly those tend to be the pages with the best information anyway).

My main annoyance with AMP is reddit because their version is especially shitty if you expect the logged in version. I've found the easiest way to get normal Reddit is to click the upvote button.

I havent got any amp in a while and thought it went away only to realize that it was because I use Duckduckgo. Its a true relief, Amp is a horrible excuse to accaparate the web. Down with amp and the google supremacy.

Not that reddit web is much better than AMP.

I've switched to their android app for this. Much faster and better experience.

Thats the idea. They cripple the web version so you use the app that can spam you with notifications. I use i.reddit.com which loads up a super fast version clearly designed to work well with an iphone 3.

I switched to Compact reddit a few years ago - much easier ride than the full site or needing a separate app.

https://www.reddit.com/new/.compact

Faster relative to the website but reddits app just seems... ill. Just not very good.

I have been on connections ranging from 500k, to 500M, to ~2.1G (presumably bottlenecked on the wifi but you get the idea) and the app seems to load at exactly the same rate for me.

Barely related but I've yet to find a home run of an app for this site. I'm using materialistic at the moment but it's nigh impossible to manage replies and I can't see votes.

Google could have given its users the same advantages of AMP without AMP just by saying: we'll penalize slow and cluttered websites in web searches, in favour of fast and clean ones.

That would have been equally painful for the developers, but not for the users.

They actually do penalize slow and cluttered websites but not enough. I've seen some companies websites download 20mb for a simple landing page and still come up higher than other pages that are way faster.

They should penalize more instead of forcing us to use AMP almost as a power move from them.

AMP is fundamentally broken.

I've said this before, I'll say it again: companies are not people. Once a company reaches a certain size, the rule is to assume bad faith. Always.

In the present case, the failure to provide an opt-out speaks volumes.

If AMP was a good faith attempt to improve UX, it would have been provided early on.

The faceless imposition of AMP is a clear signal of malign intent, IMO.

malign? I think the imposition of AMP was the only solution to a problem with 3 constraints:

1) make web pages fast, without shitty popups on mobile 2) make this happen for large coverage of heavily visited pages 3) make this happen quickly (OKRs are on quarter/annual cadence)

Imagine you owned Google Search and you were afraid for your life that everything was moving into native apps because the experience was better. As a search engine, you only control the front door and not the content. What do you do?

...start punishing slow websites by de-ranking them? The same way they have punished poor content in the past? The same method that worked every single time they've done it?

You seem to believe that they don't have any other options which is wrong. They have a lot of options at their disposal and they intentionally chose a very hostile one.

it isn't about slow web pages. It is about unwinding a shitty user experience that mobile magnified. How do you punish a shitty UX?

If you want to avoid looking like malware, you can attempt to improve mobile browsing but let the user choose to opt out via search settings.

Pretty simple solution, no?

C.G. Jung once wrote that the moral capabilities of a group of people is 'obviously' inversely proportional to the size of the group.

C.G. Jung was a funny guy. He would write a controversial statement and prefix it with something like 'obviously' or 'as everyone knows'.

C.G. Jungs statement would also apply to nations and it sounds pretty much correct in that case too.

AMP was the final straw to get me to switch to DDG. Which was a GOOD decision IMO.

On the one hand - yeah, AMP can go to hell. It's a massive overreach and, as pointed out, is getting awfully close to an actual attempt to rewrite the Web.

On the other hand, we probably wouldn't be in this situation if website owners didn't try to bog down their own websites with tens of MB of sheer garbage. Trimming the fat isn't a priority for website owners, so Google is trying to make it their priority. As long as sites think it's OK to lard up their sites with trackers, video ads, and all manner of nonsense, AMP will continue to be attractive to the end user.

Don't think for a moment AMP is a technical solution to counter sites being bloated - it's a strategical solution for Google to lead audiences into their walled garden, like they always do eg. Usenet/DejaNews and XMPP/Hangouts. The bloat is something that Google themselves are responsible for, by the incentives and economies of scale they set upon the web (after they hijacked HTML and attempting to transform it into a shitty app platform for like 15 years now). News publishers should be aware that giving Google exclusive access to your content via AMP is very shortsighted and in fact just demonstrating basic failure to comprehend what should be their very core competence - winning audiences for your site and independent, sustainable journalism in this era of the attention economy. All the more since Google's reign as a privileged portal to the extant web is coming to an end (as demonstrated by this desperate AMP initiative itself). If you as a journalist cannot make it in a free and undiscriminating medium, but rather give in to a walled garden like CompuServe and AOL used to be in the 1990s, then this doesn't inspire confidence in the journalistic quality of your content, and I don't want to read it (I could as well go elsewhere, link to other publishers, and I do). The same could be said for news providers in bed with Facebook. For example, German public broadcasters (themselves on a roll to expand their web offerings to a degree that private publishers went to court over this) have absolutely no reason to be on Fb, and lead their audience into privacy minefields, yet on their site, the same publishers make grand essays on privacy and fake news.

Google owns 7 of the top 10 most popular third-party calls on the websites today. They’re things such as Google Analytics, Google Fonts and Google’s DoubleClick advertising scripts. So they're at least partially responsible for the websites being slow with lots of garbage in the first place.

You can say this all you want but Google's assets aren't really the ones slowing websites down. Websites download megabytes and megabytes of garbage.

Your second point comes up every time and you’re right. The bloat is a problem. Also Google can fix this. They can simply add load times and page size to their ranking algorithm. Problem solved.

AMP is not the solution.

I don't even need it to be part of the ranking algorithm. Google could simply display a number of megabytes as a grey, boring number underneath a page. I think mobile users would be especially appreciative; those of us stuck on metered connections could avoid bloated news articles in favor of leaner sites covering the same story.

Wish granted! https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/05/evaluating-page-ex...

I don't have an issue with providing amp as a service if it doesn't get treated more favorably than fast non-amp pages.

Wasn't load time already part of the algorithm? I have thought making a site not-slow was step 0 of SEO for quite a long time.

Maybe they could have increased the penalty for slowness though.

I am not sure that is much better than AMP in the burden it puts on content generators. AMP at least gives them a helping hand in being faster.

I want a useful search engine not a political one. If the most relevant result to my query is loaded with garbage web design I still want it at the top of my search results because I can decide if I want to return to that site for myself whereas I can't magically correct some unseen ranking parameter that I don't care about.

Taking page load times into account is not political in any way. Faster load times provide a better user experience.

Who is this mythical universal user for whom it provides a better experience? Your parent poster is a user and it seems his experience is better when he gets the most accurate results, not a subset that is fastest. I tend to agree.

Leaving Gmail open for 15 seconds = 220 requests and 28MB of information over the network for me.

Google is the absolute last company to lecture anyone about website bloat.

Right but other websites load bloat in the sense that it's all trackers, ads and other useless crap that doesn't add anything to the UX. Gmail on the other hand all, if not most, of what is being downloaded is to have the rich UI that it gives. It's mostly not ads, and likely only GA or whatever they use internally as a tracker. I doubt those add up to more than a couple of MB.

Other websites use many different third parties. I've seen some sites use over 10 different analytics tools on top of other other ad networks.

A significant portion of those requests are multiple trackers on multiple domains.

Gmail is an application, not a web page. The distinction isn't a technical one, but based on how users interact with it.

It's still fair to complain about bloat and performance issues, but users generally load Gmail once per browser session, making a large, slow load more excusable than it is for say, CNN.

Unless you're using an incorrect definition of application, then CNN is also an application. Arguably with far more functionality.

The old version of Gmail had 90% of the features and was at least 3x faster and more responsive.

If you load the new Gmail, immediately click the search when it's available and start typing it stutters and misses half of your inputs because they're totally pegging JS threads loading in all the bloatware. It's a far worse experience for almost no benefit (other than for the Google engineers who made the site 3x slower to use as leverage for promotions).

Here is Gmail basic HTML for legacy browsers: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/1pq68r75kzvdr/?v%3Dlui

> Trimming the fat isn't a priority for website owners, so Google is trying to make it their priority

No, Google is not. At least not with AMP.

AMP was the answer to Facebook News. If you want to get into the top spot in Google Search (the carousel) you have to 1) be a publisher and 2) use AMP.

That's the entire extent and purpose of AMP, no matter how much Google may pretend otherwise.

Website owners are not mostly software developers. They just want features for their business to rest on. They may not even understand how ranking works in tech detail. If only developers were motivated to create and use decent code instead of using modern multilayered garbage technology...

Some browsers like Kiwi browser on android now give you the setting to redirect AMP websites to their normal URL. This is a very good feature that I always have enabled[1].

More browsers should add this feature to fight this non-sense. I think for FF, Chrome extensions like this must already exist.

[1] https://kiwibrowser.com/features/ [2] https://kiwibrowser.com/wp-content/uploads/elementor/thumbs/...

Is there some Android/iOS app or a simple web app that de-AMPs URLs? My process for just sharing an article these days is to find the tweet button if they embed one for the article, click through them, pray that it's not to tweet about the publication or the author but for the article itself, then get the normal non-AMP link from the tweet draft to share a normal URL instead of the AMP link.

There are Firefox addons that do that, I.E.: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/amp2html/

I agree. What concrete steps can I — and other technical people like me — take to help hasten its demise?

Last paragraph in the article has a few suggestions:

Or you could fight back. You could tell them to stuff it, and find ways to undermine their dominance. Use a different search engine, and convince your friends and family to do the same. Write to your elected officials and ask them to investigate Google’s monopoly. Stop using the Chrome browser. Ditch your Android phone. Turn off Google’s tracking of your every move.

And, for goodness sake, disable AMP on your website.

So I read this as being a fight that only the web publishers can wage then.

A minuscule fraction of people are going to write to officials and change their browser / search engine. Even far less of that fraction are going to throw away an expensive flagship phone (And what are they going to buy? Apple? That's sure to go down well amongst the hackernews crowd).

Well if there were one big website aimed at developers that was out of reach of Google, that could be a start.

Imagine a service like stackoverflow, except it's (suddenly) not accessible through Google Search and Google Chrome. That could trigger a lot of developers to move away from Google.

Google's big argument for AMP is that web pages are big, bloated messes of large javascript chunks an unoptimized images, etc. And indeed they are. Single pages that weigh 10-20 MB are quite common.

There is a trend to go back to simplicity and lightweight, elegant sites consisting of mostly plain html, some css and with just a sprinkle of JS in them.

These sites are oftentimes faster than AMP versions. There is a broad toolset of static site generators to choose from, and still have sites that look & feel like a SPA. Other than that in many cases you don't even need the frameworks and tools, and could hand-craft in a text editor.

If that was the case , they should show fast light pages even without amp higher , amp is not only to make pages faster and lighter .

If preference was anything fast then I would agree with you, instead of just amp

The argument Google uses to shove AMP down our throat would not exist anymore.

If the page is light, w3c-compliant, accessible and has good SEO and still Google says "turn this into less-light, less-simple AMP for our convenience and your page-ranking" then it would strengthen an anti-trust against them.

That's exactly what Google is doing: you can't get into the carousel at the top of the search unless your page is AMP.

Use Firefox instead of Chrome, then Google have less control over web trends.

What's going to happen to all the url's if Google ever decides to announce they are getting rid of AMP? So annoying that you copy the link and it grabs some google url, so it's a matter of time the internet gets littered with those redirecting urls.

It shouldn’t be true that copying the link grabs a Google URL, right? At least in Safari, it copies the real website’s URL.

On iPhone, if I search for "Webb space telescope" and switch to news tab, look for the ars technica link, and tap it, I navigate to this url (which I copy and pasted here). https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/science/2020/07...

I did the same on my iPhone but searched for “AMP website” then clicked the first result with the lightning bolt and copied this URL:

https://amp.dev/about/websites/

In my experience the url bar sometimes keeps the google url or if I click the share button thru their website ui and then copy that one to clipboard it sometimes grabs the google one. Not exactly sure but I've seen this in a couple of newspaper sites on the mobile experience. I'm always going out of my way of looking up the non-amp domain via other means.

This sounds like at least one rationale for an anti-trust case.

At least.

It'd be splendid if antitrust cases happened more often, Google must be due a dozen at least.

Also: Gmail's spam filters are one especially egregious abuse of power. Email is another technology Google hates and which deserves to survive without Google hamstringing it

Email spam filters seem non-functional right now. Before I added a "allow all" filter to Google, the majority of email got sent to spam.

Microsoft isn't better in this regard though: they don't have an "allow all" filter possibility, and will delete spam emails after two weeks. I've gotten invoices, personal email, and job offers deleted this way.

AMP solves problems that existed 10-20 years ago. Not today. Websites load fast enough (when using an ad blocker). Sure that Google doesn't like that.

AMP messes up data science analytics too. Now we have a mix of the following formats,

   google.com/amp/s/...
   amp.domain.com/...
   domain.com/amp/...
   domain.com/.../amp

I guess it could even be a query parameter although I have not yet seen this. Does anyone know if there is an "AMP url normalizer" library or write-up?

It seems a little weird that they are asking website operators to add the very same bloated functionality that AMP claims to try to eliminate

I would like to know what the average user thinks of AMP. We techies are ok with a uncontrolled freewheeling web, but a lot of people have a problem with that and hate that experience.

I'm one of the less-technical and least techno-political, compared to most HN posters. I personally despise AMP for two reasons: the URLs are fugly when I send them to someone and take longer to parse when reading, and AMP hijacks my mobile browser's address bar and prevents me from accessing my tabs until I scroll all the way up the page. It's a thinly-veiled method of forcing me to look at the web page twice before closing it and I wish I could get my hands on the son of a bitch who thought it up.

> I wish I could get my hands on the son of a bitch who thought it up.

Malte Ubl (@Cramforce) would like to have a word with you.

My guess would be that the average user doesn’t know about AMP or have any opinion about it.

Perhaps not a overt opinion, but do they prefer using AMP sites or not? If we sat them down and had them use 5 with AMP and 5 without, which would they prefer?

The answer to this should obviously depend on the chosen set of test websites.

But even if there are websites where the AMP version would be preferred (and I'm sure there are), that's not the whole story. In order for a user to make an informed decision about their preference, they have to take into account the whole cost -- not just the immediately observable part of it. That includes all future ramifications of an AMP-centric future, many of which would definitely not be good for the user.

So while I'm sure there are examples of egregiously bloated websites that would be superficially improved by AMP, I'm not convinced the user comes out with a net benefit.

For most non-technical users this is all out-of-sight, non-existing as an issue.

I am often surprised when I browse on the laptops or mobiles of friends and family, and see totally ad-infested, slow-loading crap. It is a different web than I have.

When I say "Dude, what's going on here? I can improve your life. Let me install FF and an ad-blocker" they just shrug and say "Nah, its okay like this". Aboslutely frustrating.

Who are these people and how did you determine that they have a problem with the web?

From my experience, the average user does not understand the web nor AMP, but once the difference is explained, they almost always react negatively to AMP. Of course, there is definitely some bias involved here since it's usually me doing the explaining.

Most average Joe/Sally's seem to like it, it is predictably fast to load. After all, what's not to enjoy when all you want is to quickly view a page's content without paragraphs jumping around because of late-loading ads...

An AMP or regular page is an implementation detail that mostly us care about.

Does the WebExtensions standard permit us to release extensions that bypass AMP URLs when they are visited by the browser?

Could someone please charge me money for that extension on the iOS and macOS App Stores?

I'm not expecting this to be maintained for free, I don't want to install a full-blown ad blocker, I just want a single-task de-AMP-er that just de-AMPs.

(Yes, I use Firefox, but I want to de-AMP all iOS and macOS webviews, not just the ones that load in Firefox.)

Safari 14 will add support for the WebExtensions API but alas, on MacOS only (where presumably you will never see AMP pages anyway).

I have idly wondered if it's possible to use Safari content blockers to trick the page into redirecting to the real site by blocking certain JS bundles, but I would assume not.

Ugh, good point re macOS.

Just request the desktop site or use DuckDuckGo. Problem solved.

Luckily Google still serves the desktop site to my phone. Twitch won’t do it even if I spoof my user agent because they want you to use their shitty app. So, I just stopped using Twitch on my phone or tablet. Problem solved again.

I had never heard about it before reading the article, looked it up, and I agree with the article. This is yet another wretched idea like jsx. Kill it before it lays eggs!

JSX seems to work just fine for a whole bunch of people.

So does heroin from the perspective of even more people. That doesn't make it a good idea.

You're just getting caught up in a battle of ideological preferences and implementation methodologies. A lot of people disagree, a lot of people agree. Nobody gets hurt, different tools serve different purposes and audiences.

We can leave absurd drug parallels out of that conversation.

Side question: is it still considered "cool" to work at Google?

I'm asking since the answer in case of Facebook seems to have shifted.

Depends on what you mean by "cool". The compensation is not the highest, but it seems to be the company with the widest variety of high-impact and technologically exciting projects.

And I wouldn't say that it's objectively "uncool" to work at Facebook. They have definitely taken a beating in terms of perspectives on their company's morals, but very few people are willing to go without using at least one Facebook product. And they continue to be known as the company that has a pretty good WLB with top tier pay, good career progression, and great benefits, relative to similar-sized companies.

I had to read read that quote 3 times before i got what was being said and by who...

I never encounter AMP sites because I don't use google search anymore.

Please add [2018] to the title.

I agree that Amp can go to hell, but I'm very unsympathetic to these particular complaints:

> “The canonical page allows users to view and add comments, but the AMP article does not. This is often considered missing content by users.”

> “The canonical URL allows users to share content directly to diverse social media platforms. This feature is missing on the AMP page.”

> “The canonical page contains a media carousel that is missing or broken in the AMP version of the page.”

As far as I'm concerned, all that stuff is trash. I use ublock origin cosmetic filters to remove all that crap on every news site I read.

Exactly. "Canonical" content should be what the user wants to read, not what marketing hacks want to stuff the website with

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