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Comment by tssva | Hacker News Reader

Going to be an unpopular opinion here but as an end user I am disappointed to hear this because AMP was a great improvement to the performance of my mobile browsing experience. I understand that AMP isn't required for a great performing mobile site but before AMP no one seemed to take the steps to deliver one without it.

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AMP was one of the things that pushed me off Google search and off Google Chrome on Android. The experience was mostly worse; especially reddit AMP is really awful, even given how awful non-AMP reddit is.

The few things that bothered me the worst were, blank white pages while loading, to earn the 'one contentful paint'; fonts loading late; and it's difficult to share links, because they had the garbage urls because google was proxying. The fake address bar was the icing on the cake.

Reddit AMP flat out doesn’t scroll on my phone. The whole page is actually totally broken.

This. It infuriates me to no end.

Reddit is the reason why I un-AMP every single site IMMEDIATELY as soon as I open them.

To me, completely breaking down when I use the very normal browser feature "pinch to zoom" on iOS has always seemed wild. I have no idea how they get away with this.

For me the biggest problem with AMP was that it was not delivering comments on a given article. Often the mainstream journalists have an agenda and if you see that comments are disabled under an article, it is a strong indicator that it is a propaganda piece. If comments were enabled, however, you could see many counter opinions to a given article that would give you pointers where to look for the true picture of what happened. AMP makes for lower quality news and just because of that I avoid it, but it also cuts Ad revenue from the outlets that use it.

I have to, begrudgingly, agree to that point. Most major news sites are barely usable without multiple content filters (ad blockers, etc.). AMP really pushed them into making things load quicker and with less weight.

If a site is able to reach the same performance without AMP (which is certainly possible), then I don't see what the issue is. At the end of the day we want fast pages. AMP with the incentives was a good way to force sites to be faster, but if they want to achieve it their own way, I don't see an issue either. As long as the overall bar is not lowered.

Interesting – my own AMP experience has been one of ugly and/or functionally broken sites.

Maybe this is platform dependent? I'm using iOS.

My experience is with Chrome and the chromium based Microsoft Edge on Android. Of course ugly is also in the eye of the beholder.

It's definitely no better on Android.

I have the same experience: unbelievably broken on iOS.

It just has to be better on android because somehow their own engineers have to use it day to day and ship it in good conscience at the same time, right?

The point of this change is that it now allows more high-performance sites into Google Search, by allowing both AMP and non-AMP sites that are high-performance. It's good news.

Nothing here makes AMP less able to deliver high-performance pages.

It should have been a generic "If your site takes too long to load or lags while scrolling we will heavily derank your page and visibly show you this so you can improve"

Page speed is the one metric you want SEO nuts optimizing.

I hope that as a user, I can specify that I prefer AMP pages.

There are plenty of major sites where AMP is flat out worse, even beside the inherent clumsiness of AMP caches. Reddit and The Guardian spring to mind.

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