Probably highly unpopular opinion, but as a user I've never had anything but positive experiences with AMP-enabled sites. They load massively faster than normal sites, especially on poor mobile connections where main sites sometimes hang indefinitely trying to load javascript, ads, etc.
While content publishers are continuing to overload their sites with further trackers, ads, javascript, remotely loading assets which slow down performance, AMP seems like one of the few counterbalances and is pro-user, even if Google's endgame is self-enrichment rather than benevolence.
Content publishers could easily fight back by independently improving their own performance and not forcing mobile users to suck down megabytes of trackers on shaky connections, but they seem to be choosing not to.
I'm not a fan of Google's proprietary web, but it's worth pointing out that this is largely a response to the increasingly shitty way publishers treat their users. Just reading basic articles on the web has become a painful exercise in dodging "Subscribe" faux-pop-ups; trying to scan text while your vision is bombarded with unrelated video; and user-hostile scroll capture effects.
For much the same reasons Google AMP is a thing, I use Apple News for most of my news reading. The web has overcome commercial broadcast television as being the shittiest way of consuming content.
It's tough to work-around the unilateral-disarmament problem here: if supporting AMP gives you a boost in Google SERPs it's difficult to boycott AMP if your competitors don't.
This is what is so insidious about what Google is doing here and seems to me to maybe make a good case that Google abuses its monopoly power.
(INB4: "It's a bad idea to make your business depend on Google traffic because that's fickle and outside of your control." Sure, that's true, but still, organic Google traffic is a pretty rich vein to completely ignore or cede to competitors.)
I agree with all of this, but until google provides a way to appear in the discover box without having AMP-published pages, this is a non-starter for publishers. Ironically, by creating AMP, google has disincentivized publishers from making their canonical pages faster.
Publishers hate that google holds them hostage with AMP in this manner, but the situation is what it is, until someone from the Justice Department starts making the lords of Mountain View antsy.
I would like to point out that it is possible to have web pages that load faster than AMP. It has not been made easy but many publishers have figured out (in some cases publishers have web pages that load faster than their AMP ones...)
Take a look: https://webperf.xyz
I have a number of issues with AMP but I will just mention two:
1. If Google addressed how their ad system was being mis-used (and in many respects as-intended) that would have gone a long way to addressing webpage performance. Instead they pushed more work on the publisher to adopt yet another new format (add it to Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News JSON formats, Google News MediaRSS etc.)
2. AMP helped killed some early momentum to make pages faster. They sold a bandaid solution that was 'good enough' for management and undercut engineering efforts to address the root cause.
I used to use Google hundreds of times per day, literally everything I wanted to know I would type into Google.
Between their A) political activities (opinion influencing, censorship, etc.), B) business activities (user tracking, ruinous ads, etc.), and C) search quality issues (they have a major conflict of interest between providing good search results and maximizing A and B), I didn’t even have to try to stop using them out of principle; I literally just don’t get any value out of using Google search anymore.
I use DuckDuckGo (starting circa 2013), which provides a fairly similar/mediocre quality search experience, but without all the other aforementioned problems. The truth of the matter is that these search giants ruined search so bad that I don’t even really use search as much anymore. I’ve gotten to the point where I realize that I can no longer rely on finding things easily. This is not a problem of “the Internet has just gotten too big”. This is a problem created by Google, which has now set a low benchmark.
I have been using the "Redirect AMP to HTML" extension:
My experience with AMP, immediately before seeing this article:
1. On desktop, I clicked through a link on Facebook, leading to an AMP page
2. The page was clearly meant for mobile, and looked bad on desktop; the images were full-screen size, the font was too big, and the text line length went all the way to the edges of my very wide browser window.
3. I used Ctrl+Minus to adjust the zoom, which fixed the font size but not the images or the line length.
4. I looked at the top and bottom of the page for a "desktop site" link, and couldn't find one.
5. I looked at the address bar, and saw that the URL was an AMP URL. This is the first time I have noticed that I am using AMP in more than a month.
6. I closed the tab and went to HN, where this was the top article.
When AMP works well, it's inconspicuous, so it's not so surprising that most of my remembered experiences with it are negative. Still, I think google needs to invest a bit more in preventing this sort of bad experience, because currently it comes across as "google breaking the web".
I don't understand how Google's AMP business strategies are dissimilar to what Microsoft got in trouble for with Internet Explorer. Would be interested in what someone who is knowledgeable on that topic has to say.
For those interested in security - AMP basically forces the iframe javascript sandbox security model.
https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/security/sandboxed-i...
Even reputable web pages tend to have a metric TON of non-sandboxed javascript from third parties. If you care about your security this is a risk.
If you stick with AMP - this is - by spec - prohibited.
Something to think about as you browse the web gobbling down javascript and all the other third party javascript being pumped at you.
"How to make your sites faster than AMP without using AMP" leaves out "locally cache a copy of your site in a CDN that is geographically close to your users." Which is the actual mechanical part of AMP that makes it technologically interesting / valuable to content providers and countries distant from the creation of most content.
I think there needs to be a real alternate solution from Google for longer term change. (if Google wants to stay relevant)
Can they just penalize slow/large file size sites in their index?
This seems like the underlying goal behind AMP and Chrome's Lighthouse (site audit tool) any way.
This would make a lot of sites fast in the next couple months. But maybe Google doesn't really want that?
Great post, although I'm a little meh on lazy-loading images. I like when the whole page is finished loading the moment I think it's finished loading. But more to the point, lazy-loading can be a crutch just like AMP is, for solving problems that shouldn't exist, such as: your page is big & bloated. If you keep it small, there's no need for lazy-loading. But you have to limit the number of images, and optimize the ones that are there. And probably only one video per page. Horrors! Obviously none of this works when the page is effectively infinite in size - such as when you're trying to give the user the addictive excitement of scrolling through a continuous, visually-rich "feed".
On the topic of lazy load. If you are using non native lazy load, please have some kind of fallback if javascript is disabled. It stinks to have a page load and just get blurry images, and need to enable javascript for a couple pictures to render.
I find it sad that Google bloats the web with all its analytics and fonts, and then offers a solution to fix the bloat by providing AMP instead.
And there are so many other third-party elements that are detrimental. It's sad that we have to use things like Firefox's tracking protection to remove all this bloat that people insert on webpages just because it's possible to do so today and it wasn't fifteen years ago.
It feels like a Pandora's Box at times. We can complain a lot but nothing is stopping you from adding just one more JS package to your app if you want to, because it's as easy as 'npm install' and you don't see the downsides.
I moved away from all Google services (which I used to be keen to get involved with initially! How times have changed.) over the last few years. I don't miss any of them.
There are alternatives for everything. While you're at it, do the same for Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, if you can. I only have Instagram left.
Having separate URLs for the same target document is antithetical to the Web. See also TBL's essay, "Cool URIs don't change": https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
Another way to fight back against Google in general is to stop using Chrome and stop using google search.
Also stop using auto-update. Promote a diversity of browsers and browser versions.
I'd like to see a "vote with your wallet/attention" style search engine, where you can exclude certain sites from showing up based on the underlying and associated tech they use, and prefer sites that use tech you personally support, similar to ingredients lists on supermarket products. There is so much informational content out there that this kind of filtering wouldn't impact the user experience.
The most annoying thing for me, as a vision-impaired user, is that AMP pages disable zoom.
I know that can be overridden in Chrome's accessibility settings, but it's a shitty practice that something like AMP shouldn't be promoting.
The only way is to make something better. Not using Chrome, not using Google Search, etc will have close to zero impact. Fix the mess so AMP isn't necessary. How? Your guess is better than mine.
I like AMP. It's possible to write fast websites without it, and I do do that for my sites. For for big, non-tech sites AMP has provided sufficient motivation to offer a fast version. Nothing else has managed to do this before. I'd rather have fast AMP pages of all those news sites than having to load the slow default view. Experience suggests that the options aren't "fast with AMP or fast without AMP", but "fast or slow". It's for incentive reasons, not for technical reasons, but I'm still glad the fast version exists.
Marko, bravo for making that clean and readable site (and having 0 trackers, as reported by Firefox Klar)!
There's one issue I noticed when clicking the links to page sections (#anchors). Those lazy-loaded images make the page scroll away from the section title I jumped to. Is it possible to fix that by having images replaced by placeholders of the same size?
Another way to fight back is to promote alternatives such as DuckDuckGo. I just ordered a swanky tshirt
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/community/...
If you have Android, deAMPify is great.
It seems to be abandoned, but still works for most sites.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.joaomgcd.d...
As a user, AMP gives me a better experience than non-AMP search results. It's a tough sell to tell people like me that I should prefer the worse product (the slow, tracking infested, bloated full website).
I don't particularly care to because I find it convenient.
I remember looking at the original HTML5 spec and going, there is no way lower power / low bandwidth / high latency devices will be able to handle this efficiently. Nevertheless, we moved fast and broke things, ratified the HTML5 spec and paved the cowpaths without a second thought to language or efficiency.
Somewhere along the line, things came full circle. HTML was slow again, so we needed a new new way to efficiently render content, thus AMP was born.
I'm more likely to click AMP links in search results than non-AMP links. The reason for this is the pre-loading that Google does for them. The links load almost instantly, where some non-amp link might take up to 20 seconds to finally load enough where I can start scrolling past the ads.
The Facebook instant links (or whatever they're called) have much the same effect on me. I'll usually open those if the headline even makes me a little curious.
> Just visiting a site with Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection on makes a faster and less intrusive web. It’s a built-in blocker of intrusive ads and invisible scripts.
What am I missing here? I installed FireFox, set Enhanced Tracking Protection changed to "strict", and went to typical sites that track you (news sites). I still see third-party hits in the Developer Tools (e.g. facebook) and it says it blocked 0 trackers so far.
This holiday season I'm putting DDG and FF on all the families machines. Flipped some over the summer. They hardly notice. The icon for "internet" is now orange and the search still finds all the stuff they are looking for.
The big G makes money off our non-tech associates, not us, so moving them is, IMO, more important than me and tech-folk moving.
The best way to fight back is to use DuckDuckGo. After the "controversial twiddler", Google is going to have to have to do something significant to earn my trust back. I do occasionally switch back using "g! <query>" on duckduckgo when I don't get any decent results, but for the most part duckduckgo is fine.
Everyone should start using Brave or Firefox and DuckDuckGo and stop using all Google things as much as possible.
It's funny that, if it was a net neutrality issue, e.g. Comcast pushing a new video format and prioritizing video for their own streaming service, the internet would be a warzone by now. But we all love google. And google used to be all fuzzy and unevil. But now they 're evil
I've written a similar post on how to remove AMP from your blog, without sacrificing SEO rating and performance https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance
Imagine if Cox or Comcast came up with AMP. Same technology, same idea.
If websites use the Comcast AMP framework, Comcast will cache their sites and make them faster for users. See, it's about the users! Because the Comcast AMP framework is open, and has nothing to do with the business interests of Comcast. Comcast will give a bit to open source and have a few conferences per year to make sure developers know that it's not all about the company.
I believe the fight against AMP will not be won by users or individual action -- it will be won with legislation. What are users going to do? Plain HTML pages are on the 10,000th page, below a hundred thousand AMP tracker loaded piles of shit. It is a de-facto content restriction.
Even if I use an alternate search engine -- it's results are polluted by those of Google, because 90% of search is Google. We do not have a choice.
I'm sure a Google lawyer will successfully argue that I can recieve IP addresses in the mail via U.S. post for any odd, esoteric plain text HTML pages I'd like to visit, though.
> Don't use Google search.
This is easier said than done, as the other search engines are still not as good as Google, even though Google's results have been getting worse. This may be a controversial opinion, but it's not what my comment is about. I'm going to make a more scandalous suggestion.
Don't use search engines at all.
The idea that a centralized one-size-fits-all search engine is necessary is preposterous. The Web makes available all kinds of information, and unifying it all under a single data model is difficult, and doesn't even make sense. (Does anyone remember the semantic web?) Unifying the world's information behind a single search facade is likewise a Very Difficult Task (TM), one that's likely to fall into the trap of big business, as search has done, because the required resources are so huge.
But what if it's solving the wrong problem? Information of a particular type tends to gravitate to local centers of storage, so to speak, which are specific to the type of information being stored. For example:
- Encyclopedic knowledge is in Wikipedia.
- You can find places by searching Foursquare, Yelp, Apple Maps, OSM, ...
- Q&A about programming (and lots of other topics) is on StackExchange.
- News aggregators have been beaten to death, and multiple are available.
- You can search Twitter using Twitter, and Facebook using Facebook.
I can go on, but the point is clear: every single Web-connected system offers a search function of its own, one that's likely specialized to the type of information stored in that system. It'll most certainly do a better job at searching that local store, and will do so more quickly and cheaply than a centralized, generic search engine. This also avoids the moral hazard of search centralization.
This leaves the little guy: the random small website or blog, where the majority of true gems are found. Google locates these by sheer brute force: they literally index the entire web. They've taken a relative eternity to do so, but it's a problem that could have been solved by something better than mere force.
Does anyone remember webrings? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring What if "the little guys" organized in webrings and directories? This doesn't seem like a technical problem, as a webring or directory is trivial to build. Could this be a UX problem that hasn't been solved to the satisfaction of a modern Web user? Is anyone or anything taking another stab at this?
In closing, I'll throw out one last vague notion: that of an openly federated search. How cool would that be? We don't need Google for that at all.
The client I'm assigned to has resigned themselves to using AMP. Nobody likes it, it breaks so much working code, and I personally hate it. Thankfully our SEO is top-notch, so we're doing well without it, but I'm not looking forward to implementing it.
I figured how to avoid amp as a user years ago. Switched to DDG and its bangs are very convenient. Google, in its efforts to customize user experience often gives worse search results than it did ten years ago.
Despite the tracking, I'd suggest allowing google fonts, it's not that much different than other CDN content (assuming you're only using the CSS).
Yes, and use https://webtest.app to show the world we can speed up the web by blocking ads.
Also make sure to sign the AMP letter: http://ampletter.org/
Also, Bing is really good! I'm the only guy in the company that uses it, but seriously I love it!
Gatsby.js could be added as a solution to make sites load faster, it's awesome what it does
How it's this not copyright infringement? Can't we fight it on those grounds?
Sorry for the dumb question, but:
What does Google gain with AMP? How does it make money with it?
Serious question, what is a free alternative to Google font?
If you run a NAS at home, you should also setup syncthing. It's replaces Google drive for your phone's camera, seemlessly.
Is the answer, just say no. ?
Here's one great takeaway:
> Treat the cause: Third-party requests slow down the web
> ...
> - Google owns 7 of the top 10 most popular third-party calls
> ...
> So you can see why there must be some kind of internal struggle at Google. They understand the value of a faster web but they also cannot go after the main cause of the slow web. And this is how technology such as AMP gets invented and makes things worse.
It blows my mind how many devs around here are devoted to their browser and search.
Stop using chrome. Honestly, wtf?! Firefox is awesome. FF dev tools are awesome. FF, like Wu Tang, is for the kids.
STOP USING google SEARCH! USE DUCKDUCKGO! Use the `!gm` google maps bang when you need it. Use the `!g` google bang in a pinch, but for all of our sake, please wean yourself off of google search.
These two steps are immensely easy to do, and yet a MAJOR investment in all of our future.
I really doubt google will become "irrelevant" anytime soon. What most of us nerds forget is that tech products become popular when they solve real life issues for non technical people. We can sit here and debate all day what protocols are better, and which browse is cooler, and why Google is evil, because it will not become irrelevant anytime soon unless there is a better end user product. Happy bashing Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc because no one cares, really. What they care is "how to cook potato soup" showing relevant results, and having their pictures generate likes and their unneeded products delivered tomorrow.
I worked on amp for a leading newspaper, and everyone who says that amp is about "making the web faster on mobile" is either very naive or doing marketing for google.
For publishers, amp is about trying to top the results on google search and capture traffic, it's their only motivation to publish their content using amp, and the only metric they look in order to evaluate the results.
Once they have their amp content, they will look how to load it with ads and tracking, which very conveniently is supported on amp, just as they do in their regular sites.
So the "fast" part, besides using their CDN, actually comes from limiting what you can do on almost every other part of the site, you can only do the stuff that is packed in the amp components controlled by google, which in practice means that google controls the web behavior.