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Comment by bla3 | Hacker News Reader

AMP exists not because it's impossible to build fast web sites without it, but because it's possible to build slow web sites without it. Which means most big sites not using AMP are slow because most places don't have direct incentives for keeping their stuff fast. Against all odds, AMP convinced these sites to build an alternative experience that's reasonably fast. It's good that AMP is no longer required to get good rankings for fast pages. That was always a silly requirement. But from a user's point of view, I'm grateful for AMP, despite that being an unpopular opinion around here.

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This is a valid point but ask whether Google couldn’t have had the same effect by telling everyone that page speed / bloat was a strong ranking factor. AMP forced a large amount of unreliable, slow JavaScript into the critical path so the benefits could have gone even further.

They had already done that, perhaps for years. I don't know why it didn't work - perhaps there was a slowness oligopoly, where everyone was slow and no one was strongly incentivized to speed up.

If that were the case, there wouldn't have been incentives for them to implement AMP

They had it as a minor signal. They could have made it stronger. Posit, for example, that they’d said the carousel was only for sites which rendered in one second on mobile - do you think AMP would really have done more than that?

I think so, because the spec prevents "death by a thousand cuts" and makes it crystal clear what's allowed and what's not.

If your marketing department want one more tracking script and your execs want one more pop up banner etc and each change is bad but not egregiously so, then your average "web guy" at most non-big-tech companies will just do what they're asked to.

With AMP they get to say "it's not possible"

If Google penalized slow sites, they'd get to say that. I agree that none of this explains the need for AMP.

That social dynamic is real but it's trivially avoided: imagine if Google said that you had to consistently average, say, 1 second renders on mobile to be in the carousel or avoid being badged with a “This site is not recommended for mobile users” warning. Instead of saying “AMP doesn't allow it” you'd say “We're averaging 0.8 seconds already and this adds 0.4 seconds in our testing” and you could have a business decision about what makes the most sense for your project instead of outsourcing your project direction to Google.

If you think that’s trivial to implement, I’d love to hear where you’ve worked. Getting a change to the main .com at one company where I worked within a month was considered a rush job!

What mattered was that Google set a hard limit: do <x> to be in the carousel. I think that if they had done the exact same thing with a performance metric it would have unfolded very similarly because the key part was that it was a non-negotiable external mandate.

People might have had more room to negotiate on how to hit a performance target but the thing which would have mattered was a number in the webmasters tools console.

Or just mark slow pages. The same way everyone started using https once browsers marked http as insecure. I would bet that if Google results featured a turtle or red/orange/green indicator for the result speed, we'd see a massive shift in companies caring.

Exactly: if they had a turtle icon or a “not recommended for mobile users” warning (which would be even better fordata usage, too) it would have been a game change for many companies and it wouldn't have precluded doing anything which the AMP team didn't think they needed to implement.

Because they didn’t actually make it impact ranking. At least not in a meaningful way. This looks to be changing this year with Core Web Vitals, but it’s still to be seen if these scores will really have an effect on ranking.

Slightly irrelevant sidetrack/goalpost move: I wonder if page speed or page experience should even be a strong ranking factor, considering so much online time is spent in apps vs in mobile web [1]. There will be a time, perhaps in the past for many users, when most search results are just vehicles to open things in apps, and therefore ranking mobile results strongly by their mobile website performance/experience would make as much sense as ranking them by their non-Javascript experience.

[1] Stats for the US: https://www.emarketer.com/content/the-majority-of-americans-... (I wish I could find stats for India or other growing economies)

Same - despite all the hate I liked AMP.

Hackers / developers seem to insist on the non-AMP sites to bloat sites to absolute trash and back. If I saw the amp logo, I knew that was the one to click.

Abusing users with bloat is supposedly some great freedom worth fighting for, but AMP forcing these developers into a much smaller box that they can't screw with users as much on I just loved AMP.

I think a lot of the HN hate comes because AMP I think prohibits random third party javascript ad libraries. So obviously it hits folks where it hurts, but the web is much nicer to browse without all the junk.

> Abusing users with bloat is supposedly some great freedom worth fighting for

The thing people were offended by wasn't the lack of bloat, it was the fact that it was ceding even more control to Google.

But yet these users never deploy a non-google debloated world.

Billing on line is the same thing. Unless you are on a trusted site (Amazon / Apple) you can just get hosed trying to cancel subscriptions with jack up pricing etc.

Same thing with spam - at some point users stopped trusting the hackers and developers and migrated to more controlled worlds (ie, gmail etc) which blocks HUGE quantities of the junk.

I just wish hackers spent some time trying to make users experience and lives better rather than the constant push to spam them (EFF wanted to pass laws banning anti-spam measures), now AMP (which was amazing) is being attacked endlessly and the list goes on.

Google has a commercial reason for pushing this stuff - the web was turning into a trash bit (flyover ads with audio etc etc).

Which users? What a sweeping generalization. Your disdain for some mythical group of people is very odd.

Besides, does blocking ads and trackers not at least partially alleviate the issue? Works well for me and, in combination with a reader view, is a significantly better experience than AMP. I'd argue that those "hackers" you very much hate are the exact ones fighting against corporate bloat on the web.

"blocking ads and trackers" on the phone means that there's basically only one choice which is firefox, no? not saying firefox is not good but it's at least not for everyone.

I'm using Opera on Android, it has ad-blocker built-in. I think Vivaldi has it too.

I know those browsers exist, but how much percentage of mobile web browser traffic are coming from browsers with the ability to block ads?

So because Google's browser is hostile to making the Web useful except for the stuff under Google's control, we should cede control to Google?

> "blocking ads and trackers" on the phone means that there's basically only one choice which is firefox, no? not saying firefox is not good but it's at least not for everyone.

I'm blocking a good percentage of ads in Safari on my iPhone via third-party apps Hush[0] and Magic Lasso[1]. I typically read articles in Reader mode. Because of this, I can't give a great accounting of how many ads actually get through. Certainly, the number is small enough that I don't think about it.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hush-nag-blocker/id1544743900 [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ad-blocker-by-magic-lasso/id12...

Apple is a complete walled garden, and plenty of folks have migrated to their phones for example - they actually want an experience that is very predictable and can be trusted. Apple charges HIGH amounts of money as a result of this level of user trust. I also think users are more likely to spend money inside this garden - I know I do because it's much harder to get screwed there. I'll subscribe to an apple app long before I'd do the same on a random website.

This is true. AMP is a punch in the gut for someone who advocates for the open web. It says: the roadmap you implemented wasn't right for users. It let publishers abuse the user experience. We are taking a step backward, hiding many things that are too powerful, and making it more restrictive.

I completely understand why open web advocates would not greet AMP with a warm welcome. That doesn't mean it wasn't necessary to fix the problems. The problems were and are real.

I'm still confused what problem AMP was fixing.

Google could just make page speed more important in their rankings. They probably don't because page speed isn't as important as content quality in regards to what people are looking for in search.

I still struggle to see how AMP has anything to do with improving the search experience and everything to do with Google abusing their market dominance.

Focus was on a "user first" - NOT developer or hacker first approach.

So a ton of the stuff that HN folks demand (being able to do dynamic third party javacript ads and tracker loads, DOM modification after render - gone - you just are totally blocked.

If you try targeting AMP (or just consuming AMP) you'll pretty quickly get what they are going for.

For example - AMP websites really do not reflow that often (or at all). I've never I don't think had something move when I was going to click it even early in page load.

I've found a lot of complaints about AMP are developed / hacker focused complaints. If you switch your mindset to users, including non-tech types, the value becomes more obvious.

That doesn't address my point: Couldn't Google just have increased the rank of pages with minimal Javascript and faster load times?

I think you might be strawmanning why some HN folks don't like AMP. To me, at least, it looks like someone abusing their position as the dominant search engine.

AMP lightning icons didn't get attached to pages with just one tracker and fast renders. They were attached to pages served by Google that only supported Google tracking.

Faster load times is really only part of the AMP story. If you do a diff of whats possible between an AMP page and a plain HTML5 page load, you will quickly realize there is a large functional difference. Especially in the early days of AMP. It wasn't trying to steer the user towards Google tracking. A huge effort was put into bootstrapping the AMP ecosystem with 3rd party ad trackers, from day 1. There were some issues with cross-domain user tracking, but that wasn't something Google desired, it was a reality of how the web worked. There was no easy workaround, without turning the AMP cache off completely.

It really makes me realize HN is not user focused. You can have tiny code and fly a popover ad into a users face with a 20 second cooldown before the x to close appears. Users HATE this. Pages are ALREADY scored on speed etc. AMP was a subset of HTML that simply removed entire classes of features that hackers and developers abused to shove crap at folks. Honestly, the size difference, request count differences also were FAR higher than I expected on the AMP side as well - which also illustrated that developers left to their own devices will push whatever garbage they can - go to the media sites pushing the anti-google messaging - you are SLAMMED with trackers and crap on their regular sites. Privacy they yell as they track everything with MULTIPLE trackers.

There was a win with the AMP user experience. The fact that it had to come from google is embarrassing.

> There was a win with the AMP user experience.

You can tell people don't use AMP in the real world with mainstream websites when they say this.

Can you point to a bad site as an example?

I’m also interested- I consumed primarily on IOS via google news carousal - that icon meant fast and clean

> hacker focused complaints

Most people I've seen who I would consider hackers have web sites that don't do all the things you're complaining about.

I hate the "throw on another library, and stack some ads" attitude as much as anyone else, but AMP isn't the way. I would be less offended if Google had just down-ranked pages with heavy JS load, and boosted pages that didn't move content around.

How is “does not allow a bunch of useful functionality” “user first”?

And frankly, if the argument is that news websites should be text only, then maybe Google shouldn’t have killed off Google Reader, because that was a much faster way of loading news articles.

This debate comes up repeatedly on HN - HN is really not a good spot for it I don't think.

HIGHLY predictable behavior - some users like that. The apple walled garden, the apple billing flow, the AMP subset of HTML etc - all hated here.

Too many users have been burned by developers flying interstitial ads over the content (still happens) with a tiny unhittable x in a corner that comes in 10 seconds later. It's not the size of the content (that was already ranked), it's the absolute crap that hackers and developers shove down users throats.

I get it, you don't see or chose not to see the value in this. But there is value, at least for me and I'm sure many others started learning that the AMP icons meant less crap.

> Focus was on a "user first" - NOT developer or hacker first approach.

The number one user first request was "let users turn off receiving AMP pages." It was never implemented. The AMP advisory board item on it just... disappeared, without explanation or resolution.

AMP was not user first in any way.

> If you try targeting AMP (or just consuming AMP) you'll pretty quickly get what they are going for.

So if I go to Reddit, then the AMP site is basically unusable and pollutes search results. The AMP site removes all the useful comment information in place of application ads. Multiple clicks are required to restore the content.

The Guardian also strips comment content from it's AMP pages.

Reddit's AMP pages have lots of design bloat and much less information than the non-AMP pages.

That's not uncommon.

I mostly consumed news stories via google news - so my exposure was relatively narrow

The slippery slope of bloat is back. "We're currently at a score of 87 so surely a few more ad dollars are worth losing a few points." (one year passes) "Adding just one more chumbox will only drop us from 70 to 66 so we really can't turn it down."

I wish they added not just page speed but also "how many obnoxious popups does the site show" as a strong scoring factor.

popups have their positive uses. Security on banking websites, anti-cheating on web games, and social logins are a few good reasons I can think of to have popups on a website.

How does security and anti-cheating require (or is helped by) pop-ups?

Social logins are user-initiated. That's fine.

What's not fine is that as soon as you visit the site, a giant in-frame "GIVE US YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS" newsletter popup shows up, covering the content.

Google have now said they'll allow any web page in the carousel if it's fast. Which means companies have the same incentives to invest in performance, with the added benefit that the faster experience is on their main web site, not the AMP sidecar.

From a pure performance perspective AMP had one secret weapon: Google could safetly prerender content before the user clicked on it. This was offset by the fact that AMP made lots of other page speed optimisations impossible.

AMP sites still load slower than with surgical application of NoScript because of all the JS bloat and superfluous image assets they still manage to deliver. There is a better way that doesn't involve AMP.

As a user I am not interested in disabling scripts or digging through the dozens of umatririx rules.

As a user I just expect things to be fast and working out of the box.

Sites didn't get fast "against all odds" but rather due to a very clear incentive from Google – adopt AMP and you will be ranked higher.

Instead of going that route, Google could have said on day 1 that they would just rank based on the site's experience score (as they are doing now), and the end result would be the exact same.

In terms of full web sites, AMP isn’t that helpful.

However, it is impossible to beat AMP’s speed when doing something like loading an article from a Google search result.

The AMP spec makes it possible for a search engine to preload an article safely, and as a result, the article can be shown instantly when the user clicks on it.

Yeah, it is: just make your website load faster than AMP can hydrate a news page.

Google could just penalize websites for being JS heavy or loading slow but instead they built a walled garden they have control over.

I get some happiness about it but hopefully we can have nice things without such massive sacrifices.

You know what makes most sites slow? Ads and tracking.

You know what the biggest ads and tracking provider is on the internet? Google DFP and Google Analytics.

AMP is a solution to a problem of their own making, a clever solution that gives them even more control over search results and data collection (since it never leaves Google domains) while pressuring publishers to spend limited dev resources on a limited subset of viewers while making no impact on the existing website and apps they also run.

There's nothing good about AMP beyond technical experimentation. If incentives are a problem, then fix the incentives.

I don't agree with this, ads are just a part of the problem. Bloat on the web is insane. Open any site using WordPress with a popular off the shelf theme, they weigh in many mb of CSS and js just to show a text article before you count in any ads. Incidentally these sites are the ones who get to benefit most from amp.

Most of that doesn't affect the site UX. Visit any "static" site that are tremendously popular today and you'll see tons of JS files.

It's ads/tracking with their complex network payloads and rendering that create the slowdown.

The only thing I noticed when I used AMP instead of the regular site, is that the comments are missing. Never saw an advantage of this, as 'slow websites' is not an issue in my country.

With luck, this will move emphasis to fast web sites, rather than web sites using a specific technology stack controlled by Alphabet.

Using the AMP libraries has never been the issue. Google hijacking the URL's has.

Who would not like to see white amp page with three old comments when he already configured dark theme on real page and real page has also 20 new comments on it.

If that was their goal they could just have banned javascript. Much easier and faster.

Would also improve the web dramatically.

Shameless plug for my Chrome Javascript toggle extension, JS Toggle. No unnecessary permissions required, very small footprint, and easy to audit (5.48KiB). Feature set is complete (it does one thing).

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/js-toggle/bnhjfamo...

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