Users like pages that load quickly, which amp is not a requirement for.
Amp is designed to tighten googles grip on the web, nothing more.
Amp is designed to tighten googles grip on the web, nothing more.
The performance will be greatly affected if you run some cancerous theme with endless JavaScript calls. But both of the mentioned "engines" have changed the way I see blogging with WordPress.
Best of all, this is accessible to your average user as well. DigitalOcean can spin you up an OLS instance in a minute or so...
The only way Google could proactively "solve" this problem was by creating a "standard", and then also offering to absorb end user traffic for sites that adopted the standard. FWIW, AMP is an open standard not solely owned or contributed to by Google.
I've yet to see a Google engineer, executive, or "fanboy" address this question adequately.
This thread will be no exception. Queue the crickets.
If visibility is influenced by AMP then Google benefits, users using Google services likely benefit, web developers suffer, users not using Google services to view the content continue to suffer (because companies will continue to maintain two versions of the website, a bloated version with 100 external tracking requests that will be shared on twitter/reddit/facebook/hn/etc, and an AMP version that will only appear on Googles services), and the internet as a whole suffer. Whereas if visibility is influenced by page speed+external requests then everyone would benefit.
- AMP is a transparent and unambiguous standard that leaves no uncertainty as to whether you are somehow "performant enough" to qualify for the simple but limited visibility boost (referring to the news carousel)
- AMP prevents important usability problems beyond performance, like page content jumping
- AMP can enable advanced/extreme performance optimizations by default that are somewhat rare in practice (eg. only loading images above the fold) or isn't really possible to do safely/properly without a spec like AMP (eg. preloading content before the user clicks the link without unpredictably disrupting the website's servers) or sometimes avoided due to cost (eg. fast global caching with Google's impressive CDN). Important for users in the developing world.
Addressing your other points:
- Users who don't use Google services don't suffer. AMP is not Google-exclusive, all the major search engines (like Bing, Yahoo, Yandex) are stakeholders in the AMP standard and are free to support AMP. AFAIK there is nothing in the AMP standard that favors Google over other search engines or any other platform that might support AMP.
- Not sure how web developers suffer more from AMP. I'd think web developers would suffer more from trying to wrangle their bloated website performance independently rather than use a standard toolkit that enforces best practices and enables difficult/expensive optimizations out of the box.
- It's not clear to me how the internet as a whole will suffer, but I suspect this is just general hyperbole and not a specific point.
amp.dev is owned and controlled by Google. ampproject.org is owned and controlled by Google. The core AMP team are Google employees.
How can you possibly say it's not owned by Google?
https://blog.amp.dev/2018/09/18/governance/
The TSC is independent and, at this point, the committee code commits are almost 4x the volume of Googler commits.
2. The privacy policy on amp.dev is Google's.
3. Both sites are hosted by Google.
4. The license in the amphtml repo says copyright Google.
5. The OWNERS.yaml file in the amphtml repo list 3 people, all of whom work for google.
6. Per the contributing code readme, contributing code requires signing this Google CLA: https://cla.developers.google.com/about/google-individual
7. Looking at the last few merged PRs nearly everyone involved is a Google employee. I realize this could be a coincidence but I'm not going to analyze the whole repo.
8. The TSC is 3/7 Google employees.
Regardless, until Google issues a legally binding release of the project to an independent organization it is owned by Google. The TSC and AC could be removed at Google's whim.
yeah, there's a few sites out there that are faster than amp. but most of them are not, and before amp the trend was certainly not to make anything lighter or faster.
I'm frankly shocked that people can't see this land grab for what it is.
It's absurdly slow, uses tons of unnecessary JS, and it is a privacy nightmare because now I can't just use server-side GDPR and ePrivacy guideline compliant analytics anymore, but either have to give up analytics entirely, or have to use privacy-obliterating Google Analytics.
And if a user ever loads the page with JS disabled (which all my sites are designed to support), AMP breaks and just shows nothing at all for over 8 seconds.
On a mobile device in India? Nonsense. Your page load time is dominated by latency, which the AMP user doesn't see because it is preloaded from near caches.
> uses tons of unnecessary JS,
Which of the JS is unnecessary? The JS to load images allows AMP not to preload images below the fold, which is absolutely necessary for speed and for being friendly to data plans.
> now I can't just use server-side GDPR and ePrivacy guideline compliant analytics anymore
Explain. You still get first party tracking that gets fired when the user clicks to your page and can get user consent via data-consent-notification-id.
> And if a user ever loads the page with JS disabled
In that case, it's the SERP's fault for showing the AMP page instead of the non-AMP page. In the normal JavaScript-enabled scenario, the SERP would be stupid to show your non-AMP page.
My test device is a Huawei Ideos X3 on a 56kbit/s throttled 3G connection. The same effect also applies with a Pixel 1 on the same connection, or either of the devices on a modern 3.9G LTE connection. (Tested on O2 net in Germany, works reliably better than AMP even and especially while on a train — if you've ever tried using O2 on the intercity train between Hamburg and Münster you know that every third world country has better internet than, I've seen 8kbps with 13 seconds latency there)
> Which of the JS is unnecessary? The JS to load images allows AMP not to preload images below the fold, which is absolutely necessary for speed and for being friendly to data plans.
AMP uses megabytes of JS for that purpose, I do the same in under 1kiB (even including an intersection observer polyfill). And my CSS is much much smaller as well. Part of why I get a 100/100 in all pagespeed and lighthouse tests, including when simulating mobile connections, while AMP pages get only 60/100.
> Explain. You still get first party tracking that gets fired when the user clicks to your page and can get user consent via data-consent-notification-id.
I want JS-free analytics that do not require tracking or any consent (GDPR allows collecting some information without consent, same with the yet unreleased ePrivacy directive with which AMP is not compliant anyway).
What? Where are you pulling these numbers? Also, what do you mean by hot cache? I'm starting to suspect that you don't even understand that the AMP page (the JavaScript for sure, and often the entire HTML and above-the-fold images as well) is already on the user's device, while your page is not.
Obviously, this part is affected by the AMP js being in cache or not.
Still, often my own page can load faster than just this user-visible part of loading the AMP version.
AMP works best when the user visits almost only AMP pages (so the resources stay in cache), and the user has a high-latency high-bandwidth connection.
But that's almost nowhere in the world true, in reality most people have relatively low latency with low bandwidth.
Your claim that your page loads faster also reeks of wishful thinking. Pretty much every AMP page I have loaded from a SERP loads instantly, not just fast. For someone on a worse connection, the page will have started loading before the user clicks on the link from near caches versus have not started loading at all from a far server. In the rare case where the AMP JS is not in the browser cache, it will be after loading the first result.
If you say pretty much every AMP page you've loaded has been instant, please post the specs of the devices and network you've been using for testing.
Additionally, if the latency between the device and the nearest server is over two seconds, the latency to a far server as well as the click latency don't even come into play anymore at all, instead the number of connections needed becomes much more important, and bandwidth also becomes a much larger factor.
Your claim that HTTP/2 would have worked towards better latency on lower connections is also false, on bad mobile connections HTTP/2 actually increases latency, which was a major reason for QUIC aka HTTP/3 in the first place.
And as I've mentioned, you've been testing the wrong thing by not understanding the whole point of AMP (safe preloading).
> instead the number of connections needed becomes much more important
A page preloaded from an AMP cache needs at most one TCP connection, usually zero if it uses QUIC.
> and bandwidth also becomes a much larger factor.
Which also works in AMP's favor because the device doesn't need to load your custom JavaScript or potentially unoptimized images, just the tiny HTML and optimized images above the fold. The weight of this (and the associated gain) is tiny, which is why bandwidth is a relatively unimportant factor.
> On bad mobile connections HTTP/2 actually increases latency
You're mixing up dropped packets with high latency. That's neither here nor there because Google's and Cloudflare's AMP caches both use QUIC — my point was that latency is the key factor that all modern web speed technology has attacked, including AMP.
Basically this. AMP sets a hard upper bound for how fast your webpage can be. Have a purely static HTML+CSS blog but want to get the page rank boost from AMP? Just add reams of unnecessary Google Javascript to what should be a very simple site.