Hacker News Reader

Seriously, is html performance a real issue? Mobile traffic keeps growiong and growing and growing, according to google, who now crawls most sites mobile-first! Phones have 4 cores and download 300-MB games daily. There is absolutely no need for this abomination. If it cared, google could threaten to derank slow sites for slow phones and the average website size would be slashed to half in a week!

> AMP gives little guys, the ones starting blogs and trying to grow, a shot at freedom of speech.

woosh, i now realize u re joking

Yes, it was a huge issue and many websites were unusable on anything but an expensive iPhone for a long time. Especially a few years back.

While this might not be a problem with most Apple-toting frontend engineers, most people of the world can't afford to constantly pay for very expensive phones just to browse the web. And until AMP there just wasn't a way to make anyone care it seems. Even here on HN.

Just to be clear: I dislike AMP. But I dislike the crap attitude towards users the web developers have shown time and time again more.

> just to browse the web.

I must be crazy because i never had a catastrophic issue with an iphone 8 - with an adblocker. If ads are the problem, well guess who is serving those ads.

AMP doesn't even scale anyway - it will bloat like HTML pages bloat over time, because web ppl have a bad habit of only adding things to sites, not removing. What happens then? We invent Amp-html2 to fix amp? AMP is a very-ill-thought bandaid to a culture problem that can be solved with simple nudges (have people forgotten what seismic changes happen to the web every time google rolls out a new SEO algorithm?). Amp s probably the silliest tech idea of the decade.

Yes, of course you didn't have an issue with a new Apple device, that's exactly my point.

Did you try browsing the non-AMP web on something like Nexus 4? Motorola Moto E? Oppo and Xiaomi lowend units from 2015?

there are so many better ways that google could solve this issue other than amp (derank sites for slow devices / mark them as slow / pass a parameter for slow-phone visitors / create a chrome version for slow devices). AMP is a dictatorial attempt to keep websites forever bound and limited to what google is offering.

Yes, Google did whatever maximally benefits Google. They're a corporation and behave as such. Just like Apple won't de-DRM their cable protocols just because it's "right".

The question is - what can the web community do to make AMP redundant outside of complaint posts.

> to make AMP redundant outside

First, AMP is already redundant. it doesnt offer anything that stripped-down html can't do. The primary reason sites choose it is because google ranks the pages higher! it's purely coercive.

Second , it's not as if AMP has taken over the web. But this coercion has to stop. Third, it's real easy to make a faster website with 10 minutes of work. I 'm not sure we need some kind of activism to stop amp i do believe it will crash on its own as soon as most sites look exactly alike and start losing revenues. But until then ... maybe ban AMP links?

If it's so easy then why have so few websites done it? Google has understood what Google/AMP haters refuse to see: web performance is not an engineering problem, it's a product and marketing problem. Coercion is exactly what's needed to push website owners to prioritize performance, because HN's monthly whinefest isn't cutting it. Here's two basic things AMP offers that stripped-down HTML can't do: a world-class CDN that many website owners won't justify investing in, and a clear, marketable incentive to develop a mobile-efficient website that VPs, marketers, product managers, and other business stakeholders can immediately understand.

> why have so few websites done it?

Because the vast majority of websites are reasonably fast on mobile? Loading times of 1,2 or 5 seconds are a non-problem that amp is addressing. The worst offenders i see are too high res images and autoplay videos, but frankly i cant remember seeing any of those recently. Most blogs/news sites are fine. Where is google sourcing their data that users are desperate for web-breaking solutions that bring them 200msec response times? The purpose of AMP is so that people flick a website instantly and then go back to google. That's obviously not in the interest of the publishers. The whinefest is because google is actively prioritizing amp publishers thus forcing it on the web.

> Coercion is exactly what's needed to push

this is not a defensible statement

> a world-class CDN that many website owners

facebook needs a world-class cdn, not blogs.

> a clear, marketable incentive to develop a mobile-efficient websit

the "marketable incentive" is the de-ranking of the site. It's entirely unnecessary to force amp for that, a simple page speed deranking would do

Google knows load performance is a critical user need from the ample data they collect from Google search users, they've talked about this before. I forget the exact number, but every 100ms less load time drives significantly more traffic and engagement. I have no idea what data you're looking at that implies 5s load times are not a problem. I, for one, am overjoyed the Google is tackling this problem and succeeding at it.

Google has applied performance penalties to sites before and it still does. It's not enough, and there are limits to the penalties they can apply because these websites are ultimately very useful and relevant, it would worsen search quality to derank useful but bloated websites. The carousel is a good balance of incentive and penalty.

I don't recall ever noting any issues with my Nexus 4. In my opinion, this is a better options: https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/11/google-chrome-to-identify-...

It's funny. Google is thinking of marking slow loading sites. I analyze my sites with their own page speed tool the biggest blocker is Google/DoubleClick ads. I'm probably going to completely remove AdSense (auto ads are terrible) but can't they optimize their own code?

HTML no, Javascript yes.

Javascript for front-end frameworks, and especially for tracking.

Nice card-stacking.

Seriously, nothing is going to kill the mobile web more than Google continuing to overreach and use bait-and-switch tactics on publishers. Oh, sure, AMP is good for the "google-mobile-web experience", but bad for an open web.

If Google has an option for logged in users to bypass AMP pages, I would not blame Google. They stubbornly refuse to do this, thus it is Google that is ruining mobile browsing for me.

(I would have written an iOS Safari extension that bypasses AMP years ago if Apple supported such a thing…)

Change your user-agent to mimic Firefox.

> If Google has an option for logged in users to bypass AMP pages

Not just for logged in users, for all users. Really, if Google provided some way to avoid getting AMP pages (through a cookie or something), I would have no problems with it.

I tried to find the real URL behind an AMP page to bookmark, but couldn't find it. I think they've added a tiny (i) since then, but they're really trying to hide it.

> AMP gives little guys, the ones starting blogs and trying to grow, a shot at freedom of speech.

> AMP is one of Google's most anti establishment services

You're either writing satire I don't get, or work for Google.

How exactly does a walled garden give you free speech? Especially when it's provided by who profit the most from you not leaving said garden? While also forcing you to bypass standard practices?

Utter nonsense, unless it's a joke I'm not getting.

> If you want to rant, blame the bloatware mess that is HTML, it has almost at killed The mobile web, not AMP

The author of this article is pretty much praising the bloatware mess that we have and wants more. I'm also puzzled.

To an end user, this article just gave the best highlights about AMP.

> AMP gives little guys, the ones starting blogs and trying to grow, a shot at freedom of speech

How so?

> AMP is one of Google's most anti establishment services

It looks like the exact opposite of that to me. This is Google's attempt at remaking the web in a way the enhances Google's control and power. That's pretty pro-establishment.

What I think he meant is that, most of the news website became slow and bad user experiences on mobile, pushing users to download wall-gardened native mobile news apps by established News Corporations to experience something fast and kind of pleasant. This is a problem for Google and for "freedom of speech", because you're not googling for news anymore, you go straight to your established news native application, preventing you to see other competing results (like blogs or smaller news websites for instance)

Pushing them to have cleaner and faster websites makes the user stay on the web. It is a clear benefit for Google, but to his point, to the user too. (At least that was the goal)

Meh.

It was the third party ad networks that caused performance issues on the news sites, as well as distributing malware.

There were alot of Flash ads for awhile, as well.

Definitely an issue prior to 2015.

AMP absolutely does not give the little guy a leg up.

In fact, it’s only the massive news sites that have the developer time to support AMP, meanwhile the little guy has to play around with terrible Wordpress plugins and spend hours fiddling with it just so Google will properly crawl their site.

And don’t even get me started on static site generators. AMP support is shoddy at best and a giant PITA for 99% of static site generators. Wordpress is one of the main reasons the web is so slow, yet AMP gives power to Wordpress since it’s the only way non-technical blog owners can support AMP.

AMP forces small time blogs and content sites to waste time building two versions of their website to rank alongside the big boys. How does this help the little guy?

> Wordpress is one of the main reasons the web is so slow

That's a funny way to spell advertising.

> AMP gives little guys, the ones starting blogs and trying to grow, a shot at freedom of speech.

As long as the big guys aren't on AMP yet. But an overlooked tradeoff is that the little guys are forced to play by Google's rules in terms of how and where they display ads, even the ones that aren't sourced by Google's ad network. It creates a completely uniform policy that undeniably benefits the scale of Google. A small publisher simply cannot differentiate their ad offerings. If you view that as a good thing for the end user, that's fine, but it's certainly not in favor of the little guy. Little guys depend on differentiation in every area of their business to effectively carve out a niche against a giant like Google's ad network.

I think you are dead wrong. 2015 didn’t mark some ah-ha moment when AMP came along finally we were able to use web on mobile. Most of the websites that did and still do have problems are auto-playing video news sites or sites with way too many ads than necessary.

AMP is just a step above the top results boxes Google puts on the results page that are scraped from other websites. See the other front page article about Google repeatedly stealing Genius lyrics.

Google shouldn’t become the new AOL.

Wouldn't ranking results by size of page have pushed sites towards more mobile friendly lightweight pages?

Yes! You're absolutely right that page size, coupled with something like time-to-render metrics, could do that!

Of course, there might be a wrinkle or two. How do you propose to evaluate the size of a page when large amounts of something like a newspaper article is loaded by reference, dynamic, and depends on third parties making independent run-time decisions? How can you know a page's size won't vary 50% minute-to-minute in a world like ours? And how can you meaningfully measure load time in such a context?

You're absolutely right. Page size and speed could absolutely be better ways to do this! It's just maybe possible that there could be some minor obstacles to doing so.

> How do you propose to evaluate the size of a page when large amounts of something like a newspaper article is loaded by reference, dynamic, and depends on third parties making independent run-time decisions?

You downrank them immediately because that's slow.

Great idea!

Of course, there might be an issue here because the amount of things that work that way is huge. So now you have a scenario where everyone is angry at Google for trying to dictate how they can build web pages and writing angry digital polemics about how this is an unreasonable standard and abuse of power. Nobody actually wants to re-implement massive chunks of how their website works, so everyone will resent this incredibly artificial imposition.

Which is to say it's a wonderfully straightforward answer, but perhaps not better than AMP in practice.

> everyone is angry at Google for trying to dictate how they can build web pages

But we're already doing that because Google downranks results that don't use AMP. We're generally OK with Google downranking sites on actual metrics (such as HTTPS) but not when they're pushing their "solution" that clearly has a number of issues with conflict of interest.

Are you saying you'd be completely fine with the above scenario, where Google downranks each webpage based on the number of external assets it loads and the amount of dynamic content it has? Instead of using AMP?

Personally, I prefer AMP for security reasons. It's tightly restrictive and does a lot to limit the available space to mount attacks aimed at browsers. But I understand that's far down most people's lists, and tends to fall under the same sentiment as "devs should just write fast websites".

Yes, because I think that is a pretty accurate way to measure how much I would hate to go to that page, and it doesn't require AMP to work.

I suspect you may be an outlier, as most people seem to deeply resent the strong incentives to change how they author web pages. Shaping them slightly differently strikes me as unlikely to generate a dramatically different reaction.

Rewriting a page to use amp is not shaping it slightly differently.

You're absolutely correct. Please accept my apologies for being uncolear. I was speaking specificially and narrowly of strong incentives to build weg pages differently being shaped slightly differently under a hypothetical regime.

Again, please accept my apologies for my failure to communicate my point clearly.