They should, but they didn't. Before AMP most of the web was unusable on slower Android phones and frontenders just laughed at you and told you to drop 800$ on an iPhone if you want to see their pages. Is it a surprise that Google shoved a technology to fix web on their platform down developers throats?
Nothing else before AMP helped. Why do you think those developers will suddenly wake up and start building lightweight web pages now? Instead of ad bloated, video playing monstrosities?
Web developers were slothful. This is how purgatory looks like. ;)
I've downvoted this post because it lacks substance, and the resulting arguments will derail the thread and bury actionable information that was shared below. It's depressing how most of these threads could initiate action but seem to be derailed.
Of course no one is _against_ good performance, but web devs obviously don't care enough to do anything about it. There's no practical difference between the two.
Just to be clear, I hate AMP, but I also feel a sort of pleasurable vindication in the pain that developers and companies must now go through because of the horrendously slow trackers and ads they used to fill their pages with.
Google offers both the poison and the antidote, and each of their solutions, see what they're doing with request blocking in Chrome, happens to erode user liberties and privacy rights to concentrate power around Google properties.
FYI Personal opinion not Google's.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/ublock-origin...
Firefox for Android is a UX and performance disaster which is likely why Mozilla has chosen to start from scratch and develop a replacement browser for Android.
That speed matters to user behavior has been known for a long, long time. This knowledge existed long before AMP did. It had surprisingly little effect on how pages were implemented.
So perhaps our princess is in another castle.
To my thinking, ahat AMP does is create a political context that enables developers to push back. By setting an unambiguous standard and clear advantages to complying with it, developers have a weapon to push back next time Marketing wants to ad fifteen trackers or whatever. This is leverage that just was not present previously, and it can change decisions.
Yeah, I think this is exactly it. Just like web developers don'' t care about disabled people until law threatens penalties, they didn't care about performance until Google threatened penalties.
The question is - who else could provide same incentives as Google? How could an independent, non-corporate entitiy create the same pressure?
The other answer is "Browser makers"... but that's also Google. And maybe Mozilla, which is arguably the "independent, non-corporate entity" you'd like.
Really though, this works because Google has the technical chops to make it work and the positioning to make people want to do it. I cannot think of a single "independent, non-corporate entity" that's both positioned to do this and capable of it.
But that's not an appropriate role for Google. They aren't, and shouldn't be, the web equivalent of fashion police.
AMP avoids all of that. It also brings security benefits by getting rid of basically every tag that can be used to mount attacks on the browser.
Also, it's been known for quite a long time that users like faster sites, resulting in much lower bounce rates. Was that not enough for you to optimize the hell out of your site? It's been my experience that in a lot of companies, it isn't enough. Marketing or publishing or whichever department can attach dollar amounts to the tracker or ad or whatever they want to add, and devs can only handwave around experience.
It's not a winning proposition.
It would be ridiculous to down-rank the exact thing the user is searching for just because the user would have to wait 800ms longer for that information. Or up-rank something the user isn't looking for just because it loads faster.
The best Google can do is bluff about how much perf matters.
It may just be unfounded cynicism on my part, but this does not sound like a better web experience. It sounds like the web circa 2009-2015. It sounds, to me, exactly like all the things we'd like to get away from with something less intrusive than AMP.
When you say that it was unusable, surely it's hyperbole.
I might be in a minority maybe, but I never had a problem with it and I've been a heavy user. And especially now that 4G connections are everywhere and smartphones are overpowered.
I mean I watch HD videos on the web while riding the city bus with no interruptions.
Are you telling me that a phone with better performance than the desktop I had 10 years ago, with a 4G connection able to stream hundreds of MB of data on a moving bus isn't capable of loading freaking text content without AMP?
Surely something is missing from this picture. I'm replying to you on Hacker News by loading the website in my browser, no AMP in sight. And I read HN, including all websites listed on HN, from my phone with no AMP.
And sure some websites can take a second or two to load due to crappy ads mostly. I remember a time when I waited for 5 minutes to load a website, when all we had was dial-up. And even that was awesome ;-)
N.b. I avoid AMP on purpose. I started using DuckDuckGo on my mobile to avoid AMP, as I had no other way to turn that shit it off.
HN is an exceptionally fast website and not representative of the Web at large.
Compare HN to something like reddit, a website which provides very similar functionality but is an order of magnitude slower. Then ask yourself why reddit has to be so slow.
Also if Reddit is slower than HN, that's probably because they don't care (law of diminishing returns ftw) and I'm sure they'd rather drive people to their mobile app instead. All of this isn't the fault of the web technologies used and neglect can't be solved by AMP.
AMP puts websites under Google's control and nobody asked for it, being shoved down on people's throats due to an imaginary problem.
---
> You were not browsing the Web on "slow android phones"
Note that even the shitty, stock Android phones today are better than the iPhone that I had back then. Such is the progress of technology.
I know because we have a ton of low cost Android phones to test with.
The only performance problems we encounter are in the third world countries of Africa and possibly in other emerging markets, but that's only a temporary issue and I predict that in another 3-4 years from now it will be a non-issue even in those countries, hardly a reason to give up on our web standards. And it's not like you can't design super lean websites anyway.
Sure, but people don't.
Okay, great. You had one of the most powerful phones at the time. How was the experience for people with a "feature phone" in 2008? (I'll tell you from experience, it was terrible).
How would the experience be today, with your iPhone from 2008? Terrible. Why? Is the web more powerful as a result? Can you do more things? Nah, it just looks flashier.
I'd like to think similar ends could have been achieved by setting and rewarding standards around #'s of included scripts, size of the page load, etc. But that wouldn't have achieved the goal of keeping people on google.com even when clicking search results.
I'm using the word "purgatory" because it's not too late to get rid of it. But it does demand the web devs to get their act together. Will they?
Take twitter for example. A tweet takes about 10mb to load. Based on something I did about a year ago. To put that in perspective, information transfer wise, war and peace is like 800kb. The whole book. 280 char or whatever, of a single page tweet being 10mb is moronic. Reddit bit the same stupid bug with their redesign.
The biggest problem, everyone is complacent and thinks "this is what progress looks like and you're a curmudgeon boomer if you think otherwise." Forethought in real sustainability, both environmentally and sociologically is looked on as impeding progress. Just like when small amounts of devs a decade ago said we need to be careful of big tech companies with our data. They were shot down and that push for "break things fast" became the name of the game. Now everyone says tax dollars must be spent for 5g because "we need the bandwidth". No, more people need to be less stupid. Mostly consumers. But devs need to start taking a stronger stance in outing bullshit tactics these businesses are implementing and quit going on their knees to pray to the silicon valley giants as some great saviors of society and their wealth is an indication of their genius. Ugh... got into a rant...
But as a web user, I resent Google's efforts to put me in purgatory as well.
I had this client with content WordPress website, 50-so plugins and regular blog post would have 1 MB JavaScript.
It's crazy. WordPress is epic mess and at the same time one of the most fascinating software platforms.
I don't even know what to compare it with.
Compare it to any consumer operating system. It puts a lot of power into the user's hands.
https://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2019/11/18/google-and-fwupd/
It would be great if these companies had enough good taste and pride in their work to at least try to build something great by default. What we get instead are minimum viable products built in the cheapest way possible and it takes a Google to force them out of their complacency by imposing policies.
On the other hand, Google is at least partially responsible for the current web situation: they normalized advertising and tracking malware on the web. Because of them, publishers think it's totally acceptable to make people download 10 megabytes of ads and javascript to read 10 kilobytes of text. The correct solution is to block all that stuff by default by shipping uBlock Origin pre-installed with browsers.
To be fair, I would say a lot of this is a result of marketing/sales trying to push a lot of BS on the page, and managers or devs failing to push back. Is the developer guily of creating a "ad bloated, video playing" webpage? Yes, a lot of them don't care and make it bloated, but even if you tried, you can't do much to improve the perfomance of a bad idea.
This has been an ongoing trend since ever, Viz. YSlow and Firebug Speed Tab.
Fuck Google, fuck amp
It's more to avoid bad networks not so your phone can load a page any better.
So let me understand this: Google allows OEM's to ship Android on shit hardware with terrible performance, is rightfully complained at for rubber-stamping hardware with no oversight, no standards of quality, and no requirements of suitably good UX, and then Google passes the burden of supporting the shit hardware they by-virtue-of-silence gave permission to onto a ton of unsuspecting content publishers, who now either face delisting from the dominant search engine not because their content is bad, but because their website requires resources not met by Google's, proxy, shit hardware? And you're okay with that?
I'm fine if supporting people with older and slower devices costs more development time for developers in Silicon Valley.
But if you install a browser add-on such as uMatrix, you can see that surprisingly many web sites will still work just fine if you disable JavaScript (even first-party JavaScript). One example is nytimes.com.
I was mildly disgusted when required reading for freshman orientation at Akron U included a book called Nickel and Dimed. The gist was something like "get your education or you're screwed". But people made it that way in the first place! Everyone supposedly needing formal higher education in order to have any decent future isn't something that just happens, it's something the human race is doing to itself. Leave it to a higher education institution to push the idea that "this is just the way it is, do the right thing if you know what's good for you".
edit: obvs I didn't read the book, it's not exactly like I said. I think I bought the book but dropped that "class" anyway
In a similar way, stupid "trends" like social media buttons and Like buttons are just examples of how everyone is ruining the web together. These days it's the aforementioned massive JS frameworks and SPAs and of course the obsession with "analytics." In a way it's nice for me and my workstation because it helps drive up the current average affordable densities of RAM and storage, but ...it's slavery. And Google seems to be less and less bashful about it.
"you are slaves of whatever you submit to by obeying" --that guy
It does, but it also means that RAM and storage isn't available to be used for other things. Think about what you could if you had current hardware back in the XP days...
But you apparently aren't okay with getting $50 worth of smartphone, since you're demanding a ton of companies you erroneously claim to be in California expend thousands of dollars in labor to support a framework they never agreed to support, have little to no say in how it's developed, in the name of a supposedly "open" web, so that you can have a good experience consuming content more than likely for free. That, to me at least, reeks of the worst kind of entitlement.
This is, in my mind, like buying a Tata Nano, which is a perfectly acceptable if limited car, and subsequently demanding all the road ways be limited to 65 mph, so that you don't feel slow. If you want to drive with the pace of traffic, the absolute cheapest car you can possibly buy brand new [1] is probably not what you want.
[1] That I'm aware of.
Developers don't need to put in more work to support cheap phones
You just have to install an ad-blocker, and you can surf the web lightning-fast on even an old, slow piece of crap phone
Most of the content (in time spent on it) is still text (remember what HTTP stands for?), and text takes hardly any processing power!
The solution to slow web pages isn't AMP, it's Firefox with an ad blocker. Google doesn't like this solution, obviously, but that's not my problem.
If you don't like Google AMP, it is fine.. (of course I too prefer to browse with only HTML & CSS whenever it works).. If you don't like low end hardware standards, it is fine.. But they have solved real world problems, whether first world problems or not. Not everything is black and white..
And just because you live in the US doesn't mean you can afford a top tier iPhone. That's why the secondary market is so hot for them.
> If you don't like Google AMP, it is fine..
I don't really care one way or the other.
> If you don't like low end hardware standards, it is fine..
I do take some issues with the fact that Google employs no standards at all for a baseline level of quality with their devices, and then places the burden of supporting those devices on others under threat of delisting.
> But they have solved real world problems, whether first world problems or not.
Ends do not always justify means. Lest we forget that the winner here is not limited to people with low end hardware getting to consume AMP content, it's also Google, who profits directly off of that consumption. And THAT is where I believe the ethical lapse is. Google isn't doing this so people can get content easily on low end hardware, they're doing it under the guise of that, while laughing to the bank as they're breathlessly defended by people who refuse to accept for some reason that Google is a business, and it acts in every way to forward it's business.
Just like Stadia is not Google setting out so that people who can't afford game consoles can still play the latest games, they are inserting themselves in a user's market so they can be the provider, and get that sweet, sweet engagement.
Most of the content (in time spent on it) is still text (remember what HTTP stands for?), and text takes hardly any processing power!
The right thing is to build good web sites. Publishers obviously don't care about doing it right and we ended up with system requirements for web sites as a result. Google is now making it expensive for them to not care. Publishers are not a blameless victim of Google's monopolistic power, they actively contributed to the current state of the web.
People should not need a $1000 phone to read a news article. The only situation where it's acceptable for web sites to not work on "shit hardware" is when it's a WebGL application. In those cases, people know that powerful hardware is required before they even load the page.
Also yeah I'm pretty happy that cheap smartphones are available for the masses to use. I have zero sympathy for content publishers with bloated websites.
but then don’t hate publishers.
Well, now there's an interesting complaint in this context. I thought Google was evil because they forced strategies on people, but now they're evil because they don't restrict hardware?
I think the collective web will eventually fix the problems without Google.
The root of the AMP issue is placement in Google’s search engine. Personally, I use DDG, and would be willing to pay a sizable subscription fee to keep it from being more like Google or from being acquired. But, most people probably would not - they are used to the web being “free”.
This is just another “embrace, extend, extinguish” effort, like the ones we have seen in the past. These attacks are transparently self-serving and should be “routed around”. It will require commitment to do so!
AMP is more than just cleaner and faster - it gives Google control. They could discriminate on cleaner and faster without it, but they purposefully don't mention that, since it would undercut the push for AMP.
Why? AMP is roughly speaking a subset of HTML that's somewhat easier to cache, and nothing more. Ideally it should be possible and encouraged to serve most webpages from a cache, to optimize Internet traffic on the global scale. It should be okay to fetch them from a cache without breaking anything. I don't see why the AMP Cache is hated so much. Publishers shouldn't care whether browsers hit their servers or some third-party cache, as long as they can have proper analytics. And guess what? AMP does provide a way to do proper analytics. You can even send analytics data to an in-house URL: https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-analytics/#send... I think most of the hate against AMP in unjustified. Any search engine could decide to cache AMP content.[1] AMP in and of itself doesn't give search engines "more control" over the web (whatever that means), it just makes the web easier to cache for everyone, all search engines, all end-users.
Edit: [1] not only Google caches it, Bing does it too: https://blogs.bing.com/Webmaster-Blog/September-2018/Introdu...
> What's in a URL? On the web, a lot - URLs and origins represent, to some extent, trust and ownership of content. When you're reading a New York Times article, a quick glimpse at the URL gives you a level of trust that what you're reading represents the voice of the New York Times. Attribution, brand, and ownership are clear.
> the recent launch of AMP in Google Search [has] blurred this line
> Google AMP Viewer URL: The document displayed in an AMP viewer (e.g., when rendered on the search result page). https://www.google.com/amp/www.example.com/amp.doc.html
Google has inserted itself in the URL. Copy and paste that, submit it to reddit or Hacker News, or just read it to a friend, and what do you get? A connection to Google.
1: https://developers.googleblog.com/2017/02/whats-in-amp-url.h...
You can't even make the argument that AMP degrades privacy, because regardless of whether you click an AMP link or a non-AMP link in the search results, in both cases many search engines will ping back or use a redirect through a search engine-controlled domain, so they will be aware of the URL you click anyway, AMP or non-AMP.
I guess you're making a minor technical point, and it's technically correct. Someone else could do AMP better. But until someone does, why not shorten "Google's implementation of AMP" to simply "AMP"? Is there any other?
I agree that there is a UX problem to solve (the address bar should show the original URL, copying it should preserve the original URL, etc) but whether the webpage got loaded from the original site or from some AMP cache is irrelevant.
It looks like Bing has the same problem, and serves AMP from bing-amp.com.
Perhaps not, but as a regular web user, I care a lot about this.
I also want to avoid AMP pages themselves, and the URL is the easiest way to see if I've hit one or not.
If Google only cares about a faster, more semantic web, then why not just give an even bigger ranking boost to faster, more semantic websites? Where does the need for a new standard come in, other than to gain more control?"
The above is a comment found in the OP.
Is there a requirement that AMP sites host resources with Google?
If there is, then Google has hijacked the purported goal of of promoting websites that consume fewer client resources (and are therefore faster) -- arguably a worthy cause -- in order to promote the use of Google's own web servers,[1] thereby increasing Google's data gathering potential.
If there is no such requirement, then is it practical for any website to host an AMP-compliant site, without using Google web servers?
If not, then AMP sure looks a lot like an effort to get websites to host more resources on Google web servers and help generate more data for Google.
1. When I use the term "web servers" in this comment I mean servers that host any resource, e.g., images, scripts, etc., that is linked to from within a web page (and thus automatically accessed by popular graphical web browsers such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, etc.)
Bing's AMP cache doesn't load any resources from Google.
Currently, there are two AMP Cache providers:
* Google AMP Cache
* Bing AMP Cache
AMP is an open ecosystem and the AMP Project actively encourages the development of more AMP Caches. To learn about creating AMP Caches, see the AMP Cache Guidelines.
How do I choose an AMP Cache?
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."
The above is from amp.dev, formerly ampproject.org
As the dominant search engine/web portal (excuse me, "platform"), already having the largest web cache and the infrastructure to maintain it, it looks like Google therefore becomes the dominant AMP cache as well.
Dominant AMP cache is a meaningless concept. You as the link aggregator have to have your own AMP cache to implement instant loading.
You lost me there. By "link" you mean URL?
Doesn't matter. Google will penalise against not AMP sites. Let's not pretend there's a choice if you want people to find your content.
More broadly, I consider this yet another reason to avoid using Google properties where possible. They have shown themselves to be bullies and bad actors who want to control the internet and oppose an open web. I recommend simply not building AMP pages at all, but instead working to build high quality, performant websites which gracefully handle device size changes and lack of javascript.