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Comment by piyush_soni | Hacker News Reader

I know HN hates AMP (overall), and I understand it from an ideological perspective (they trying to be the 'gatekeeper of the web' and all), but I think it's because the audience here includes many content 'creators', not consumers alone. Purely as a user, I love the fact that when I click on an AMP'ed page, it loads almost instantly on my mobile, as opposed to a few seconds that I have to wait before they load completely. How it could have been done in a way that didn't hurt publishers is not a consumer's concern. For an end-user who doesn't know much about tech, they 'made the web better'.

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I wholly disagree as primarily a consumer. Page speeds? Good.

Everything else about it? Awful.

How do I share the page I'm on without sharing the amp link. It's an extra 2 clicks and heavily obfuscated.

When browsing history, if I'm expecting to see something from news org but instead see amp garbage?

Human readability (for URLs but also in other contexts, like json) is a feature.

Amp throws away most features of web browsing in exchange for page speed. It's a devil's bargain, and it's not even a necessary transaction. You can get fast web pages without sacrificing everything else.

That last point is literally the drum that hn has been banging since amp came out. If Google wants to reward pages for being fast, then do that. Don't reward them for being amp.

> You can get fast web pages without sacrificing everything else.

The thing is, no one was stopping the websites from having fast pages before, but they were just not doing it. Google kind of forced them to be fast (again, it's the end result that I'm talking about, not the ways to reach there).

Google could have forced them to be fast by using the same lightning logo if a page met speed criteria

They instead pushed a proprietary page format

Web pages adopted amp because of the seo carrot

That carrot could have motivated page speed without the existence of amp

The thing is, you totally ignored the entire critique. They could have achieved the same thing without forcing the garbage iframe.

> How do I share the page I'm on without sharing the amp link. It's an extra 2 clicks and heavily obfuscated.

What are you talking about?

At least on iOS Safari, I can use the regular browser share button (1 click) and it shares the regular (non-AMP) URL.

AMP also provides a share button of its own in the upper-right hand corner (also 1 click) that brings up the identical iOS share sheet, again a non-AMP URL.

So sharing works perfectly at least on iOS. Zero obfuscation, zero extra clicks. Is it different on Android or something?

Honestly, TIL

I usually prefer to share links via copy/paste vs the Android share button (it's much easier to switch to the app I was just using vs the share button, which is a bit hit or miss) -- and bizarrely copy does one thing while the share button does what I want (something I never learned because when I see that ugly url I've always clicked out and tried to use the amp link)

Finally, the amp link on android/chrome is also abysmal. It's like a worse version of the default android share where you have to swipe to a more (...) menu where you can access the normal android share menu

This counterintuitiveness & needing to reinvent the wheel for how to share pages (meaning change user habits) -- these are all reasons why I hate amp

It just doesn't need to exist. And if you told people "from now on Google will reward pages that load more quickly" you can bet that seo seeking news organizations would make their pages faster, without amp

> Is it different on Android or something?

Sharing from the browser share button works correctly in mobile Chrome but not in mobile Firefox, which is my preferred browser.

As a user, I fucking hate searching on mobile google now. I was trying to find some information on something, can't remember what, and all I got on the first 3 pages were amp links to news sites talking about the thing, but nothing to do with the info I was looking for.

I ended up opening duckduckgo and it was on the first page.

Did google just forget that static article content does not exclusively make up the internet?

I'm gonna re-post the rant I posted last time this came up:

> As a mobile user, I hate it.

> I hate that every fucking google search result on mobile web has its stupid little icon

> I hate that there is no way for me to disable it as a user

> I hate that it has muddied the waters in what the url bar means

> I hate that it has trained users to not question fake url bars.

> I hate that cloudflare so thoroughly jumped on its dick

> I hate that we invented a way to fake the address in the url bar just for this stupid fucking feature.

> I hate that we now have a system where somebody can share a page url with a friend, and that friend can view it on the same device model using the same browser with the same settings, and will get a different page because one was viewing an amp page but shared it's real url.

> I hate that every fucking amp page is lower featured in some way, and almost never works in desktop mode.

> And most of all, I hate that it leads to everybody offloading shit onto google's servers.

> AMP is not fast because it's served from google's CDN. AMP is fast because it's incompatible with 99% of the bullshit client cpu heavy tracking and ad libraries, so they don't get included inside AMP pages.

> AMP is fast because it's incompatible with 99% of the bullshit client cpu heavy tracking and ad libraries, so they don't get included inside AMP pages.

That is wrong. AMP is fast because it prerenders. Everything included in AMP is designed to enable safe prerendering. That is the entire point of AMP markup.

https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...

> 211. Google falsely told publishers that adopting AMP would enhance load times, but Google employees knew that AMP only improves the [redacted] and AMP pages can actually [redacted] [redacted] [redacted]. In other words, the ostensible benefits of faster load times for cached AMP version of webpages were not true for publishers that designed their web pages for speed. Some publishers did not adopt AMP because they knew their pages actually loaded faster than AMP pages.

The AGs of 10 states disagree with you.

https://developers.googleblog.com/2019/08/the-speed-benefit-... they are wrong

The AGs of 10 states don't understand how the web works. This is a technology site, so we can do better. How are you going to beat prerendered pages in speed?

I don't know, from that perspective my biggest gripe is that it breaks a lot of functionality.

It breaks zoom on a lot of pages, and the pages don't load with whatever settings you have saved on the site (nothing fancy, maybe a night mode or something).

It also removes the url, which is really annoying.

It's full of little things like that, I'd be interested in knowing if when consumers encounter things like that they'd even know to blame google.

It might just be your perception. I usually get similar or better loading times from opening the original URL, and this has been shown to be quite common by independent benchmarks, AMP pages have acquired a lot of bloat.

Here's a different way to think about what you're saying:

They are reducing margins and removing control from those content creators.

So that content you love so much? Over time there will be less and less of it, as less and less publishers can stay afloat in a world of rent-seeking and monopolistic Internet gatekeepers.

Enjoy it while you can...

The other option to get instant article loading for publishers to publish via Apple News, which gives publishers far fewer monetization options.

As a user, I've found tons of problems with AMP sites. I don't know if this is the website's fault or AMPs, but frankly I don't care.

Some issues:

- back button breaks

- difficult to share links

- when sharing with others, the URL prompts distrust

- parts of the page broken (this happens on a lot of Reddit amp pages where I try to expand comments and nothing happens)

Correct me if I'm wrong but it is a publisher's choice to be on AMP, no? Publishers can choose to not support it.

Why does the community hate AMP if publishers opt in to it?

Also, publishers could easily create fast-loading pages without AMP as well if they just reduce all the bloat -- GDPR popups, banners, flying "subscribe now" popups, third-party ad libraries (use first-party ads for much faster loading times), weird JS scrolling effects, trackers, all that crap. That's why pages get slow.

HTML alone is fast -- AMP isn't necessary for a fast experience.

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