The concept of AMP makes a lot of sense. It does speed up browsing and prevents sites from being terrible. The prloblem is that the implementation isn't great and it's Google driven. But the concept is sound.
Content would furiously jump around as the page was overcome by advalanches, videos on autoplay would pop up in all the corners, as you scrolled, the page would often break at paragraphs as even more videos would load, secretly sliding in the content like some infestation. If you tried to highlight text to copy, you'd see interstitial popups of yet again more ads and then discover your clipboard was populated with ad after ad.
Then when you copied the URL, it was full of fingerprints and UID hashes from all these providers so it was hundreds of excess bytes, usually leaking personal information. You'd have to chop it off or just give up and share the extra tracking garbage at the end of the url
And this was essentially all of the local news sites. They were indistinguishable from the click here to download virus typosquatting sites. It was horrific. Often loading an article would lock up and crash the browser, it was totally completely unusable. This was the post-flash web that we all desperately wanted, here ya go!
I really don't like amp, but it has fixed that problem so effectively that you have to remind people in detail that it actually once existed.
The only way around a centralized solution is a magical "disable garbage" ad block extension in the browser, and those also exist, and are maintained once again, by a centralized group.
Ok so another solution, just stop indexing or boosting the garbage sites forcing them to change, that's what amp does yet again.
I agree that I want some greener pasture alternative from over yonder, but what?
I also think you have an exotic definition centralization.
> sites
Sites is plural, so this is not a centralized solution. There are multiple competing options.
> just stop indexing or boosting the garbage sites forcing them to change, that's what amp does yet again.
No it doesn't. AMP is faster, so AMP sites get boosted based on being faster. It's an indirect effect, at least according to Google. Google could have stopped at applying a big penalty to dog slow sites. No lock-in promoting tech required.
There was a huge missed opportunity for Firefox here to do some aggressive garbage removal in these sorts of pages. They'd probably have a much bigger share now if they had
I always say there are two parts in AMP, a very sensible set of guidelines for good design, enforced by code, and Google services. The first ones benefit users, the second benefit Google.
The unfortunate thing is that when I hear complaints, it is more often about the former than the latter. Something about "creative freedom", like the freedom to put up annoying pop-up ads and mess up with the "back" button and scrolling I guess.
As a user, I am very happy with AMP. Now we just need someone to take all the good bits, remove all Google crap, and make websites that are even better. AMP is open source, at least the good bits are.
- You want to be at the top of our search, in the search carousel? You must implement AMP. We don't care how fast or beautiful your website is. Oh, and only news sites may apply.
- You want to show people the canonical URL? To show the source of the website? No. We will show that it comes from Google, we will actively try to discourage people from finding links to your website, and we will actually launch an initiative in Chrome to kill the URL altogether
- You want to measure activity and engagement on AMP pages? Oh, no we're going to send you a different, very limited and reduced set of analytics data
- You want to show ads in your AMP pages? Oh, it will only be from the ad providers that we, the largest ad provider, allow.
- Do you want to engage in how AMP is defined and designed, and change how it works? No, you can't, we go through a totally opaque process, and we only deliver final decisions that you have no say on. Oh, yes, once we've made all the big decisions (including things like AMP for Email) that actively harm the web, we will create a token "governing organisation" that will do everything in the open, fingers crossed. Not that it matters at all.
And so on and so forth. This is a good article with links to other articles highlighting the many issues with AMP: https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/amplified/
Having it enforced by Google actually makes it easier to get funding by organizations since now administrators can’t simply just tell their devs to ignore standard.
It’s too bad the sites just couldn’t do that on their own and avoid the need for amp.
Instead they created their own monster in response.
A reasonable person might ask why they didn't go the simple route.