Twitter rolls back AMP support, no longer sends users to AMP pages
searchengineland.com
searchengineland.com
I thought AMP was a trojan horse from the beginning. Happy to see it dying off.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/pryy44/megathread_ap...
oh, I didn't realize that was something that existed. thanks, that will help.
I feel a little bad for publishers. This is the second[1] time in recent memory they've followed the pied piper of a big tech company into wasting money on ultimately useless ventures. I hope someone in management learns a lesson from this and is more skeptical of FAANG in the future.
[1] The first time being the Facebook video push that was based on faulty metrics (https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-overestimated-key-vide...).
* typo. trying out a new keyboard, SwiftKey. so far so bad.
And this is huge.
Non-technical users that don't care about the shady things Google did involving AMP probably think AMP is a godsend, if they even know AMP is even a thing.
AMP pages load incredibly fast, are incredibly responsive, and are far less annoying. Your typical end user will likely prefer AMP.
Thing is...we don't need AMP to get those features. But somewhere along the last 10 years, web developers lost the plot and now seem to think a static blog needs to serve several megabytes of JavaScript. They think they need to implement smooth scrolling in code, when every browser already does it natively.
Thank goodness its falling out of favor.
I addressed this in another comment thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29269423), but I disagree. The fundamental problem is one of incentives—individual companies don't have the leverage to fight back against ad companies and advertisers that want to implement bad user experiences and slow loading JS. Google's adoption of AMP forces publishers and ad networks fall into line, by enforcing limits on floating ads, popover, interstitials, custom JS, etc. Is this self-interested on Google's part? Maybe. But it's hard to argue that it's not ultimately better for the consumer.
Compared to an unfiltered web experience. AMP content is still burdened with mountains of unnecessary JS that hurts performance.
That's not my experience. Every time I try reading a long article on an AMP page, the experience basically crashes. Text rendering stops and you're just scrolling through a blank white pages.
It tries to be too clever with its rendering. And it fails almost every time.
Kind of, some of the time. In practice, that massive amount of render-blocking JavaScript made it slower - I noticed this on a daily basis using the web on the subway here in DC. The Washington Post loaded consistently faster without AMP, but the big win was the long tail where you could read content on normal pages but AMP was either blank until you reloaded, or took 5-10 seconds longer because once the AMP JS loaded it then had to fetch all of the resources it’d blocked behind a lazy-loader.
Theoretically there's a marketplace where better/faster news sites would be preferred by readers, but in actual fact all the news outlets are owned by the same guy.
No, the reason for that, almost all of the time, is ads. It's true that local news rarely hires talented developers (they don't have the money) but even if they did they'd still be at the mercy of shitty ad code written by shitty ad providers. One of which is Google! So they generously solved the problem they created by setting up a new walled garden.
Don't forget how they sit on top of piles of money bags twirling their mustaches, taking lollypops from children, and cackling "Ha ha ha ha ha!" while looking down on the plebs below. Don't forget that!
Preserve Google’s control of the ad exchange monopoly; according to allegations in the latest antitrust case.
https://mobile.twitter.com/PatrickMcGee_/status/145161991699...
Imagine all those budgets that were spent on implementing AMP on major websites. Yikes.
Reminds me of the bogus "Facebook feed will be all video in 5 years" baloney that Zuck et al started promoting in 2016, which resulted in publishers firing journalists and retooling newsrooms for video ... and getting massively burned later when the farce was revealed.
https://mashable.com/article/facebook-video-five-years#IOpNs...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/10/was-the-medias-big-p...
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/03/13/facebook-is-killing...
As to what fuelled the change, those of us outside will never know. Quite plausible this was always the plan and page metric functionality needed to catch up first. Equally plausible that Google backed off once they sensed regulatory action would be coming their way if they didn’t.
It simply is a technology that naturally over time will become less and less relevant.
I don't care whether AMP "helps publishers"—I think AMP holds publishers accountable for their (accidental or careless) UX disasters, and prevents them from happening in the first place.
All of this crap is because sw engineers don't have a professional association with an ethics board. Can you imagine if you could put the experience of your users first and tell your business to fuck off when they ask for this nonsense secure that they really can't just fire you and find someone who will sell out.
AMP definitely does not hold anyone accountable. Look at Reddit. Absolutely atrocious UX after AMP from what is just a basic forum. Instead, AMP makes everyone - regardless of content, design, or purpose - obey the same Google-approved standard of design, using Google-approved fonts and Google-approved CSS. In my view, AMP is the UX disaster because I hate the way it looks and have to remove the AMP from every news article I read. Oftentimes, publishers have a better idea of how their content should look than Google does. Especially smaller ones which have a strong focus on design.
This is just completely false. You can use webfonts and custom CSS on AMP. There are some common-sense limitations, like limiting the total size of the CSS, but I've never run into an issue where I had a design that I couldn't achieve on AMP due to CSS constraints.
> the constant pressures from ads departments is the issue
The problem is that sales departments don't work in isolation—they're beholden to the broader pressures of the marketplace. It's a classic coordination problem—the industry is caught in a race-to-the-bottom of ad quality, and as long as you can make a few extra bucks per month by adding more and more intrusives ads, you're going to do so. Google has the ability to set different incentives for publishers, because they control a lot of traffic, which turns into revenue.
If AMP only was a stricter subset of HTML with some limits on page size I don't think the backlash would be so hard. Instead it's a framework that includes massive overhead, third party dependencies, explicit carve-outs for ads and a unnecessary 7 second load delay if you choose not to load their js.
EDIT: Also built in scroll-jacking, hiding the actual origin of the content, and a bunch of other anti-features.
This is one of those things where google might have started with a good idea, but the reasonable person left the room after a single-sentence pitch and left it up to whatever braintrust of marketers and LOC-counting managers stayed.
> The speed benefits Google marketed were also at least partly a result of Google’s throttling. Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a “nice comparative boost.
Page 91: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.56...
Also, on my hate list, articles with an ad under a paragraph that somehow moves to the top when it gets half-way up the screen or something, so it's really hard to scroll down while reading. Blerg.
As a user I've always disliked AMP and how it was never the original page. Websites always have a separate AMP page and a separate real page.
When in reality what I, as someone who supports AMP, is saying is that I don't care about the technical aspects about it - the truth is that with AMP the pages load faster, and are slimmer - with no exceptions. And that's literally all I care about when I need to look up some information on a shitty connection.
I'd rather have a slightly slower page.
I'm not sure this is as universally true as you think it is
If you are looking to develop a specification for preloading go through the browser standards process, instead of unloading this proprietary crap on the rest of us.
and i just saw here they slowed down ads on non-amp pages, that’s not good for business
"As a publisher, you don't choose an AMP Cache, it's actually the platform that links to your content that chooses the AMP Cache (if any) to use."
"Caching is a core part of the AMP ecosystem. Publishing a valid AMP document automatically opts it into cache delivery."
https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/learn/amp...
> it's actually the platform that links to your content that chooses the AMP Cache (if any) to use
Twitter (the platform that links to AMP content) could choose which AMP cache if any to use.
Oh, I guess maybe the confusion here is that your argument is that as a page publisher you cannot opt out of the Google CDN? I read your original statement as "it is not possible to view AMP content without using the Google CDN"
In this case Twitter is the platform, not the publisher, and would absolutely have been able to not use the Google cache.
> Now, when using one of Twitter's mobile clients, users will be sent to the amphtml URL in their browser, instead of the link that was shared in the Tweet. Users will load this link directly, not via a page cache. [0]
[0] https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-for-websites/a...
I mean, it's never going to go well.
Is it some sort of deranged catharsis in trying to convince yourself?
I'm also glad the community mood shifted about it, no longer than a year ago negative comments about amp where drowned in downvotes
luckily vote count doesn't make ppl right or wrong.
This is the strangest case of revisionist history I've ever seen.
https://mobile.twitter.com/simonw/status/1451947624513167363
I'm just hoping that the death of AMP on the web will also kill Google's ambitions for rolling it into Gmail[1].
Google did promote some improvements to web standards but they were never tied to AMP, even though they were things AMP would use.
AMP being built into browsers wouldn't be an improvement.
These technologies are built on top of web standards. It's a different level of the stack.
The DOJ filing accused Google of this; that's not the same as it being true / there being damning evidence.