Google tried to fix the web – by taking it over (AMP)

theverge.com

49 points·throwaway2056··7 comments

The problem was that some (news) sites were/are designed by myspace profile artists. Elements jump around the screen 15 seconds after the content loaded.

How many display ads do we want to show on a page? Yes.

…and Google’s now solving this in the way they should have from the start: by penalising (via CLS metrics) sites with this behaviour in the search results.

AMP was an attempt to link hijack the whole net, funnelling everyone through a demostarably worse google implementation. Dystopian is to soft a word.

AMP was a cool piece of technology that was actually faster, they (Google) just had to infect it with bad intentions.

I don't recall AMP ever having a "cool, uninfected" form — it was pretty clear what Google's intentions were from the start, using the promise of "rank higher in Google" to strong-arm adoption.

AMP was a shitshow from day one: when every instance of the product had to load a piece of JS from Google’s servers[1] unless you wanted a 8sec delay[2] then you knew that you were in for a bad time.

[1] <script async src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script> is required on every AMP page

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21714264

IMHO Matle Ubl will in the future be known as 'The Web Thomas Midgley Jr" for the damage done with AMP - and his relentless push to make it a thing.

Now he's left Google, and they are abandoning it - that's another decade of web content that will just die without the chance to be archived.

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