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Isn't that the point, though? I'm more than happy for Google to use loading speed as a signal in their search rankings. The issue was that sites were penalized for not using AMP even if they had equivalent or better performance.

If AMP becomes a lower bound for performance and non-AMP sites slim down their pages to compete, great. If sites that don't compete on performance die off as their search ranking decreases… also great!

Or if everyone continues to use AMP because they are not able to match the performance, that’s also great? :)

The entire AMP design was driven by the need to make same origin serving of the content possible in a safe manner. That is where the performance gains come from, not from having lighter markup. And that is still just as true now as it was five years ago.

AMP pages are bloated compared to browsing with NoScript and ads blocked. It isn't hard to deliberately beat AMP performance with enough motivation to make it happen. There needs to be an upheaval of ad vendors to make self hosted images without JS viable.

Same origin loading also allowed Google to take over the top of your page, hijack swipe actions (to send your visitor to a competitor), and so on. Some publishers may value moving away from AMP to prevent that sort of thing in the future, despite perhaps a small cost in performance.

The entire AMP design was driven by a desire to put Google in charge of publishing, heading off Facebook. Putting 1MB of render-blocking JavaScript in the critical path was never good for users - just ask the Chrome developers! - but it was a strategic play which fortunately failed both because it wasn’t as fast as claimed and most publishers didn’t want to cede control of their UX.

Why does the same origin matter? There's no substantive difference between my page being served from Google's edge network vs. from Cloudflare's or Amazon's.

At first I thought 5 seconds was a long amount of time, and then I loaded my company's website and noticed it really does take 5 seconds to load. It's a self-hosted Wordpress site on the GB business internet in our office.

How can I possibly compete with AMP? I notice that even Reddit.com takes about 3 seconds to load. cnn.com, 2 seconds

Making WordPress fast requires some pretty serious caching effort, in my experience. Your internet connection might not be quite up to snuff for server hosting either, although you can test that with ping and checking the time to first byte.

Also, Reddit isn't exactly fast—it takes six seconds to load for me. Wikipedia and HN are better examples.

If you want the very lowest bound possible on latency for your internet connection, try loading https://cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/trace. That should load in milliseconds. From there, you can do a little more profiling work on your site.

There are plugins that help automate the easy stuff and provide lots of bang for the buck. I took a day a while back and got my local gaming league’s Wordpress site down from something like 6.5 seconds to 0.99 seconds by switching hosts, removing heavy plugins, compressing images, and lots of caching. Totally doable if you are mostly static content (which should be all news sites).

Ahhh, ye olde yslow... http://yslow.org

Do you know why your site is so slow?

1. Static rendering

2. Use a CDN and size images appropriately

3. Avoid JS as much as possible, use it only for enhancements

> even if they had equivalent or better performance.

How are you going to achieve equivalent or better performance than instant? The whole point of AMP is that it can be safely prerendered.

Why can't non-AMP pages be safely prerendered?

Because doing so would communicate with the publisher's web server before the user has clicked on any results, deanonymizing the user to the publishers of all the results on the page.

This is the entire point of AMP, yet 90% or more of the commenters on AMP articles don't understand it, which makes the comments completely useless.

Is there a source for this claim? I’ve never read anything about AMP that claims the intent is privacy.

Furthermore, I don’t see why AMP specifically is needed for what you describe — it seems to me that Google could do the exact same thing with normal webpages.

> I’ve never read anything about AMP that claims the intent is privacy.

Why else do you think it loads from Google's cache?

> it seems to me that Google could do the exact same thing with normal webpages.

Nope. The publisher needs to opt in to having their content served by Google; and the ad metrics, analytics, and login need to be delayed until the user clicks on the result. That can't happen without cooperation from the page. Hence AMP. I don't even do web development, and the design of AMP is mind-numbingly obvious even to me.

> This is NOT ending AMP, and I don't know where anyone's getting that idea.

Where the idea might come from would be that many (particularly large) websites would have implemented AMP reluctantly, and currently incur extra maintenance cost for AMP as part of a deliberative ongoing cost-benefit analysis. This removes one of the major obvious benefits in that analysis (AMP pages may still benefit but it's harder to qualify), so there may be a stronger technical argument within companies to drop support.

> It will continue to rank by "page experience signals", and presumably AMP pages will continue to be the standard to beat.

This is a tricky prospect. A concrete "we will treat your AMP page preferentially" is a lot easier for tech managers to grok than "AMP stands a good chance of scoring well on metrics we prioritise, so may be preferred, if you believe you can't achieve these metrics without AMP".

On the flip side, it's completely conceivable that Google could continue to treat AMP pages preferentially while claiming it's due to proxy metrics, since their algorithms are not public.

I as a user hope for AMP to die as soon as possible. It is annoying to have to edit url on mobile each time to get the real version.

On most AMP sites it is possible to share the original url directly.

Not to share it. To freaking see it in the first place. Amp comes with limited functionality and outdated content.

Plus, you loose whatever customizations you turned on (dark mode) in web site settings. It is particularly bad on reddit.

This is a smart play by Google now that they're under antitrust scrutiny. Instead of abuse their market position by forcing AMP down publisher's throats, they can do much the same thing but with an appearance of neutrality.

I think most of us here know that 99% of publishers will not be able to match AMP in performance, so the incentives haven't changed.

I like the change though because this will force everyone to pay attention to website performance - something that's often an afterthought. We used to be able to use the internet over a dial up modem and it was OK, not great, but OK. Now that would be nearly impossible.

It's ending the biggest incentive to bother using AMP. Over enough time there's not much difference from ending AMP.

The article has a quote from the New York Times that suggests they will move away.

It's not, though. If the fastest pages still get promoted to the top, and AMP results in the fastest pages, then the incentive remains just as large as before.

And the NYT quote doesn't suggest they'll move away at all. It just says it's "important" for Google not to make AMP a "requirement".

> If the fastest pages still get promoted to the top, and AMP results in the fastest pages, then the incentive remains just as large as before.

The first two components of your sentence are conditionals. Even IF they're both true, the very fact that they are uncertain, whereas before they were certain, makes the incentive MUCH MUCH smaller than before.

Any uncertainty at all will make internal discussions with technical leadership on maintaining AMP infrastructure weaker in companies like NYT. If they don't drop it immediately, there will at least be a ongoing internal dialogue about potentially doing so, brought up any time bugs need fixing in, or resources need reassigning to, AMP infra.

This is exactly how it should be. Let sites use normal web standards to create great, fast experiences and rank them on their merit.

Is a great, fast experience compatible with ad supported?

LWN and HN both have ads. They just aren’t third-party ads.

>I do hope sites do that, because sites loading instantly rather than taking 5 seconds is a huge win.

>But in practice non-AMP news sites are still filled with bloat that makes them take 5 seconds to load.

I wish people would stop saying "AMP means pages load instantly" as though it's an absolute. My experience with AMP pages has been the opposite; increased loading time, or pages that often don't even load at all. Come to find out in a HN thread from last year[0], AMP pages add an 8-second blank page delay if the user disable's Googles third-party js.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19919881

Yeah I hate AMP on principle but unless I’m really mindful about it my brain unconsciously clicks the AMP links because the experience is so much better

I continually get emails from Google, "Search Console has identified that your site is affected by 1 Mobile Usability issues: site: Content wider than screen"

The thing is, the software I have on http://doomlaser.com is only for desktops. And I just noticed that a direct search for one of my apps, Cursorcerer, is now ranked #2 behind an entry for it on MacUpdate. A little frustrating. I guess I could redesign for mobile, but I would really rather not. Over 90% of my traffic is from desktops for a reason. Whatever happened to getting "the full Internet, not a mobile Internet" on your phone?

I wonder if this ranking varies for mobile versus desktop users?

Just tried in a private tab on a phone: #1 result on mobile, #2 on desktop search. Weird

Maybe the #1 desktop result is worse on mobile? Or something else entirely.

I've noticed that without the benefit of blockers, pages load quickly and then progressively degrade as intrusive assets roll in. I hope this change punishes that behavior as well.

Yeah, AMP sites I get load really fast. But that's not really useful when they come without all of the original page functionality or don't even show all of the content. That's my gripe with AMP pages.