I hate AMP. Not even kind of, I mean so much I've started using Bing (DuckDuckGo hasn't been so useful for me).
Beyond the distasteful navigation hijacking, and often broken or buggy page loading... I think Google throwing its weight around to force publishers to use it is an abusive use of power. I also think it's an unnecessary standard since it's nothing more than simple well wittten HTML and CSS.
Yes, we should make less shitty (meaning bloated) web pages that are rendered server side especially for mobile clients-- but that doesn't mean that if we don't we should be second class citizens.
More and more Googles search results are being materially affected by this choice. That is to say, AMP pages with no or little significance to my query are pushed to the top; while, relevant ones are not to be found. I find this primarily true with historical content or localized content where the host/author/org doesn't spend time updating things that aren't broken. Further, the companies prone to adopting AMP are doing as many things as they can simply to generate more traffic (i.e. click bait). So it's a race to the top for advertisers/media companies and a race to the bottom for quality results.
I will resume using google IFF they allow me to permanently opt out of AMP otherwise I will begin the slow arduous migration off all Google services.
Google trying to be the source of content instead of the guide to content will be its downfall from the top. I'm not saying they'll go out of business just that they'll someday be made less relevant from it.
AMP is horrible and I wish European Union or someone would hit hard on google. They are essentially forcing websites to format the sites in exactly the way Google wants, then they steal the content. All these google SEO guidelines inevitable end up helping google becoming even more powerful abusing their almost monopoly in search engine market.
When power is too concentrated in one area, its never a good sign for the common good.
I switched my default search engine on my phone from Google to DuckDuckGo because I got sick of the growing number AMP links, which I also don't like for all the same reasons you listed.
They are a bad reminder of the early days of the mobile internet when lots of websites would automatically redirect you to a terrible 'mobile version'. I certainly want better mobile sites, but not in the form of these AMP pages.
AMP is devastating blow to Publishers because not only does it marks Google's intent to steal away traffic, but also punish publishers for not allowing that to happen.
What choice do you have? Reject traffic from Google? Every time I have been to an AMP-enabled page it's been an awful experience and unwanted. But you don't "search" for something you "Google" it.
I completely agree. The fact that this cannot be disabled (like preferring a desktop site over a mobile one) is really annoying. Google is meddling too much in the website, they need to back off.
I posted a complaint here a while back and the response I got made me wonder what I was missing. Like I was the only one who didn't appreciate it.
Yeah, I get that it speeds things up. But, do they really have to prevent you from linking out to the publisher's full site? There is no legitimate reason to serve up the publisher's content and force me back to Google. Can't even share the underlying URL. They are essentially hiding sites, but displaying their content. It's a hijack and I'm not sure why publishers approve.
And, on a recent search, the SERP only showed AMP, without the site name. Had to click thru before I even knew which site it was. Don't know if that was a bug or something they are testing.
I hate the scrolling on mobile (iOS). I don't know what they tried to do, it feels like a JavaScript smooth scrolling on top of native smooth scrolling.
The worst part is that you can't choose to load the non-amp version. On iOS, since AMP links to Reddit are 100% broken, I need to URL hack in mobile safari to remove the AMP bullshit to even load the page.
Christ, I tried to visit https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/webmasters/_O8kJMSDpO... from a Google SERP to link to their forums about this issue, and there's an unavoidable Google login prompt gating it...and I use 2FA. Why in the hell do I need to log in to view a forum thread?
Hopefully the push their product cycle up a year or two and deprecate AMP in the next few months.
I often think if this would make people like you happier:
A spark icon next to the search result that would take you to the AMP page if you want to just read something without navigating to a whole new website and the behavior of clicking to a search result is the same as before ––or vice versa, an icon would still take you to a website.
I implemented AMP on my own project and we implemented it at some clients ... all regret it.
The bounce rate, time on site, average page views of AMP pages is always worse than on the responsive version. And as we now have responsive webpages + an AMP version to maintain the overall project costs got higher. Additional the AMP pages are already falling behind as devs and management just hate them.
And outside of the news vertical we haven't seen any major positive traffic impact (and as stated above, the usage values of the AMP-traffic is crap.)
Also we spoke with some users and they all were confused of "what happened to our site...".
AMP is a horrible idea with an even worse implementation.
"In the spirit of open source, we're working to help develop updates to the project to address some of publishers' and end users' concerns. Specifically, here are some features we're developing to address concerns that have been expressed about AMP: ... A way for end users who would prefer not to be redirected to the AMP version of content to opt out"
Same here. In addition, the reasoning in the article doesn't sound sincere. If Google really cared about site speed, they would already promote fast pages more in their search results. They said they would, but it seems the boost is almost negligible.
I am worried by the attempts of several huge companies (Google & Facebook, mostly) to get more of the open internet under their control.
Google can't offer the full amp experience where pages load instantly without controlling the domain. Otheriwse, none of the optimization they outline in the blog post would be possible since it is the proxy that performs them.
Looking at this from the users perspective, the URL is becoming less noticeable anyway. On mobile you don't have the screen real estate for it. And I don't see the average user complaining about the sub-second loading times. If anything, this is a step in the right direction.
There's a lot of hate going on in this thread towards Google ... maybe unfairly.
Keep in mind, a huge reason why Google created AMP is because website bloat has gotten out of control. It's not uncommon for a simply Wordpress blog to be 4MB in size and have 70 requested objects to fetch.
I live in a geography that has LTE and web site are painfully slow to load on mobile devices. I can't even imagine what the Internet experience is like in parts of the world still on 2G or 3G.
If people would stop for a moment and question to themselves "do I really need to use 5 different JavaScript frameworks just to post to my simply personal blog", there's a good chance AMP would not need to exist.
You have a valid point about page bloat, but its a distraction and a poor excuse for hijacking the entire web. My hate for AMP is because Google is using its might to break a fundamental contract for how the web works - the URL bar shows what site you're on, and content is coming from that domain.
No other site has gotten away with this. The last time I can recall someone attempting something similar was Digg (remember them?) with the "Digg bar" which added a toolbar linking back to Digg for all of the internet, and well, what happened to them?
Now, I'm visiting https://news.google.com/news/amp?caurl=htt%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcne.... in order to get content from NBC News, while http://www.nbcnews.com works just fine. The writers of the article I'm reading are (ostensibly) hired by NBC news, not news.google.com, and there's no way to get to the same article on www.nbcnews.com unless I do something really awkward, like go back to Google and hunt and peck (I'm on my mobile phone, remember?) to type in "site:www.nbcnews.com article name".
I have hate for the UI of AMP itself (they broke scrolling down to get to the URL bar somehow), but that's also a distraction from the fundamental contract that AMP breaks.
Google would (rightly) get pissed if I made my own search page which "rebranded" Google search results to have my advertisement and then present the Google search results as coming from me; I hate them for doing the same thing to news publishers.
If google thinks page bloat and loading speed are a problem, they could have come up with a set of recommendations (likely most of the ones in AMP) and use PageRank to promote websites that adhere to those standards.
Instead, they created a way to hijack the mobile web and become the de facto content presenter for any publisher who doesn't want to be punished by Google.
This is not the problem. You can easily use i.e. React and some related libs on mobile without slowing down the experience at all. Everything will be fast and responsive, loading times and the mobile site itself (if done right). The problem Google tries to address (and this is a real problem) are the cascaded ad networks on webpages which load hundreds of JS libs once a page is loaded. This is a huge problem and yes, it needs to be solved. Just go to any news site and open Chrome Inspector's Networking tab, then you'll be shocked about the millions of resources still being loaded. AMP is solving this by putting Google as the gatekeeper in front of all this networks. I am ok with this, those ad networks created the problem and I am fine if they now need to deal with Google's monopoly but I am not fine with being restricted in using JS in general because you can do it right, even on mobile.
It's not Google's responsibility to fix the bloat.
If something is painful, let it be painful; when they start losing visitors, they'll see something is off.
This is _not_ a solution and google should not be doing anything with this.
Sure, but Google can offer tooling and best practices to push people in a certain way, like they do with everything. The best way to encourage people to move to new technology on their own is to change the search algorithms to provide positive incentives to implement those changes. Look at SSL. A lot of people don't care about encryption, but they care about SEO improvements more.
Google's AMP policy has been aggressive and heavy-handed. You can appreciate the technology and Google's desire to make the web faster and disagree with how they are implementing it.
Anecdotally, client-side bloat is mostly going to be ad tech -- not React & company. Since Google and Facebook have such a tight grip over ad tech these days, maybe a better fix than AMP would be encouraging server-side, rather than client-side, ad delivery.
Edit: In a way, AMP feels like a scheme by Google to force content providers to enforce the solution to a problem that Google created. They're trying to speed up the web with their right hand while slowing it down with their left.
If the issue were really about page speed, google could penalize the rankings of slow sites. No need to shovel a broken, self-hosted version of the site onto me.
I think HN crowd doesn't fully appreciate the benefits of AMP to people having slow connections. In third world countries still on 2G networks AMP has been an absolute boon. Additionally, lot of these users have limited data packs so they're better served by pages which are light in data consumption. This is true even for a lot of low income neighborhoods in the US. Making AMP opt-in would defeat the purpose as a lot of the target users would be unaware/unable to opt-in.
I think you are missing the disagreements with AMP entirely. Google, with less effort, could have released a series of requirements for a page to be considered "AMP"ed: (examples) 0 blocking script requests, less than 500KB in total page load, page loads in under 1s, etc. Once your pages meet these requirements, they gain the AMP moniker.
Instead, google built an entirely new presentation method itself. This engineering effort can not be ignored and it was not on accident that this happened. They are quite literally stealing the traffic of users who implement AMP.
It's a huge benefit with long-term negative consequences. It's the same reason the HN/EFF crowd is opposed to things like T-Mobile's "Binge On" program, where video traffic from certain providers doesn't count against your bandwidth: it's unquestionably great for an individual end user wanting to access that site, but it sets up a system where certain incumbent providers have structural advantages against newcomers—i.e., it violates net neutrality. In the future, that same end user is likely to consider getting content from another site, and be dissuaded because Binge On (or AMP) doesn't apply. A provider-neutral solution wouldn't get in the way of competition and growth.
This is the same logic behind monopolies being bad. Nobody thought AT&T was bad for providing phone service to everyone in America; that was unquestionably great. What was bad was the way that nobody else could provide potentially-better phone services. Nobody thought Microsoft was bad for giving people a web browser in the IE 4 days; what was bad was abusing their OS monopoly to gain a web browser monopoly, because IE 5 and 6 started implementing MS-specific technology.
There are lots of ways to implement the benefits of AMP without the vendor lock-in Google is pushing. It's certainly technically much easier for Google to implement it in the way they're currently doing so, but that's a short-term and short-sighted gain.
I think HN and much of the tech crowd also forget how unreliable internet connections can be. I don't know what it's like in silicon valley, but here my 4G connection will drop out several times on my short commute to work and webapps generally don't cope with it well, or at all.
The most annoying thing about AMP is that there is no way to get the original link easily. I don't necessarily mind reading the AMP version, but if I bookmark or share the link I want to be able to use the original and not Google's copy. Whose to say the AMP link will work as long as the original copy? And what if I explicitly want to use the result as an entryway into the site because I might be looking for other similar articles on the site or need other aspects of the full site experience? AMP seems like it could be maybe be a good thing, but the lack of a method to get a link to the original article exposes AMP, IMO, as the traffic and power grab that it really is.
I have a bad feeling. Google is creating a proprietary version of the mobile Internet, a layer between them and us. Looking at the specs, it's open but paired with the AMP cache and Google's ranking algorithm which already clearly prefers AMPed pages it doesn't feel like a free choice.
What if I don't want to use Google's AMP cache and rather my own CDN? What if I don't want this useless AMP banner at the top of my AMPed pages which takes 25% of the screen estate for nothing? What if I can build fast mobile sites without following the AMP spec?
"At Google we believe in designing products with speed as a core principle. The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) format helps ensure that content reliably loads fast [...]"
Yeah, that's certainly one way to look at it. Yet in my book, the "AMP 'format'" (emph. mine), above all, ensures the continued assimilation of the open web, and with it most of ad revenue collected there, into the huge moloch that is Google (and its AdWords and Analytics infrastructure). I think it's a disgusting technology to adopt, and none of its supposed benefits are worth the drawback that you're giving away control over the end-to-end communication with your actual users.
To me AMP feels like embrace and extend for the whole mobile web. I find them caching things this way both pointless and dangerous. I find it hard to believe that publishers so readily lifted up their skirt for Google controlling their content... however I suppose search engine rankings are everything now.
EDIT Also I'd add further that at some point, this "free" and compulsory AMP cache will start inserting google ads directly into pages and Google will pay publishers a small percentage of what those slots are worth.
AMP is breaking the web, and while it offers great speed, I think the consequences of breaking and hijacking all urls greatly outweighs the advantages.
Really can't be in favor of it until those issues are fixed.
Contrarian view: I love AMP and I find myself clicking AMP links far more often because I can get the information I want much faster. And this is on LTE.
AMP should be supported by CDNs and toggleable in the browsers though.
I'm against AMP simply because it doesn't work with Safari on iOS. In fact, I switched to DuckDuckGo as a default search engine because less accurate search is still better than a list of accurate results that simply don't open.
I've been critical of AMP in some previous posts, but an AMP like infrastructure has the impressive advantage of trying out such optimizations and solutions, without a large affect on the users.
I'd still like to push for an open, standards based approach to tackling the issue of content delivery under resource constraints.
I tried to share an AMP article from Gizmodo with my wife the other day. I just texted her the link that I copied from my Firefox Mobile browser. She said it was broken. And sure enough, it was broken. What a pain, the url only works for me?
Edit: wording
I absolutely hate AMP. I don't understand it at all. In fact, I completely ignore the benefits – this is simply due to the UX. Any link I see with AMP in it makes me want to not tap on it on my phone. It's seriously a horrible experience on iPhone. The entire navigation is uncanny valley territory. I don't have a detailed reason why, but I know that when trying to use the browser I'm frustrated and want to leave. This feels like a poor move.
It'd be far more useful if they benchmarked rendering speed for pages (game-able, obviously, but so is everything), and just favored faster ones. AMP could be one of many systems then, instead of taking as much control as possible.
Instead, we have a one-size-fits-all that they control utterly. No option to do something that works just as well, via different means (your own image compression, optimized http2 support, etc).
I definitely agree with the overall feeling on HN – AMP is probably one of the worst things to happen to the open web.
I could even just ignore this problem if there was a way for me to say "I have a 10Mbps 4G connection, please show me the actual site and not this broken half-implementation of it." Even then, it's sketchy.
I think the root issue here is that most websites are now designed by people who don't even know HTML. ("You had one job!")
From there, we get years of unoptimized, bloated websites made by people drawing pictures with HTML editors. They are exclusively focused on visual presentation and ignore any mechanics under the hood. Not everyone, but most. Finally Google can't take it anymore and creates AMP as an angry middle finger to these people. ("I drink your milkshake!")
IMO the right solution is to use speed as an increasingly more important ranking signal. Push crummy bloated websites to the bottom where they belong. I read the article but didn't see Google address this rather obvious idea.
"We remove image data that is invisible to users, such as thumbnail and geolocation metadata. For JPEG images, we also reduce quality and color samples if they are higher than necessary."
Great.
Except that that information might be deliberately a part of the image.
To everyone who's against AMP - try opening any article on an extremely slow 2G connection when you're travelling and try the same with AMP. The difference is night and day.
You may be against some principles, but it's an absolute life-saver sometimes.
[+] [-] rubyn00bie|9 years ago|reply
Beyond the distasteful navigation hijacking, and often broken or buggy page loading... I think Google throwing its weight around to force publishers to use it is an abusive use of power. I also think it's an unnecessary standard since it's nothing more than simple well wittten HTML and CSS.
Yes, we should make less shitty (meaning bloated) web pages that are rendered server side especially for mobile clients-- but that doesn't mean that if we don't we should be second class citizens.
More and more Googles search results are being materially affected by this choice. That is to say, AMP pages with no or little significance to my query are pushed to the top; while, relevant ones are not to be found. I find this primarily true with historical content or localized content where the host/author/org doesn't spend time updating things that aren't broken. Further, the companies prone to adopting AMP are doing as many things as they can simply to generate more traffic (i.e. click bait). So it's a race to the top for advertisers/media companies and a race to the bottom for quality results.
I will resume using google IFF they allow me to permanently opt out of AMP otherwise I will begin the slow arduous migration off all Google services.
Google trying to be the source of content instead of the guide to content will be its downfall from the top. I'm not saying they'll go out of business just that they'll someday be made less relevant from it.
[+] [-] grezql|9 years ago|reply
When power is too concentrated in one area, its never a good sign for the common good.
[+] [-] macNchz|9 years ago|reply
They are a bad reminder of the early days of the mobile internet when lots of websites would automatically redirect you to a terrible 'mobile version'. I certainly want better mobile sites, but not in the form of these AMP pages.
[+] [-] colept|9 years ago|reply
What choice do you have? Reject traffic from Google? Every time I have been to an AMP-enabled page it's been an awful experience and unwanted. But you don't "search" for something you "Google" it.
[+] [-] eeeeeeeeeeeee|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unclebucknasty|9 years ago|reply
I posted a complaint here a while back and the response I got made me wonder what I was missing. Like I was the only one who didn't appreciate it.
Yeah, I get that it speeds things up. But, do they really have to prevent you from linking out to the publisher's full site? There is no legitimate reason to serve up the publisher's content and force me back to Google. Can't even share the underlying URL. They are essentially hiding sites, but displaying their content. It's a hijack and I'm not sure why publishers approve.
And, on a recent search, the SERP only showed AMP, without the site name. Had to click thru before I even knew which site it was. Don't know if that was a bug or something they are testing.
Way too much power.
[+] [-] Lazare|9 years ago|reply
I find it works well, I don't think there's any abuse of power, and I think it's an entirely necessary standard.
[+] [-] cygned|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanp2k2|9 years ago|reply
Christ, I tried to visit https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/webmasters/_O8kJMSDpO... from a Google SERP to link to their forums about this issue, and there's an unavoidable Google login prompt gating it...and I use 2FA. Why in the hell do I need to log in to view a forum thread?
Hopefully the push their product cycle up a year or two and deprecate AMP in the next few months.
[+] [-] alpb|9 years ago|reply
A spark icon next to the search result that would take you to the AMP page if you want to just read something without navigating to a whole new website and the behavior of clicking to a search result is the same as before ––or vice versa, an icon would still take you to a website.
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] franze|9 years ago|reply
The bounce rate, time on site, average page views of AMP pages is always worse than on the responsive version. And as we now have responsive webpages + an AMP version to maintain the overall project costs got higher. Additional the AMP pages are already falling behind as devs and management just hate them.
And outside of the news vertical we haven't seen any major positive traffic impact (and as stated above, the usage values of the AMP-traffic is crap.)
Also we spoke with some users and they all were confused of "what happened to our site...".
AMP is a horrible idea with an even worse implementation.
[+] [-] saycheese|9 years ago|reply
Beyond that, universal opt-out should be possible and stats on the percentage of users opting out should be published real-time.
As such, until this is addressed, I am against AMP.
[+] [-] ParadoxOryx|9 years ago|reply
"In the spirit of open source, we're working to help develop updates to the project to address some of publishers' and end users' concerns. Specifically, here are some features we're developing to address concerns that have been expressed about AMP: ... A way for end users who would prefer not to be redirected to the AMP version of content to opt out"
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/
[+] [-] jwr|9 years ago|reply
I am worried by the attempts of several huge companies (Google & Facebook, mostly) to get more of the open internet under their control.
[+] [-] ec109685|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wcbeard10|9 years ago|reply
As kludgy as that is, I've found it a worthwhile workaround until this is fixed.
[+] [-] ClassyJacket|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] applejuicestand|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanp2k2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiffanyh|9 years ago|reply
Keep in mind, a huge reason why Google created AMP is because website bloat has gotten out of control. It's not uncommon for a simply Wordpress blog to be 4MB in size and have 70 requested objects to fetch.
I live in a geography that has LTE and web site are painfully slow to load on mobile devices. I can't even imagine what the Internet experience is like in parts of the world still on 2G or 3G.
If people would stop for a moment and question to themselves "do I really need to use 5 different JavaScript frameworks just to post to my simply personal blog", there's a good chance AMP would not need to exist.
[+] [-] fragmede|9 years ago|reply
No other site has gotten away with this. The last time I can recall someone attempting something similar was Digg (remember them?) with the "Digg bar" which added a toolbar linking back to Digg for all of the internet, and well, what happened to them?
Now, I'm visiting https://news.google.com/news/amp?caurl=htt%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcne.... in order to get content from NBC News, while http://www.nbcnews.com works just fine. The writers of the article I'm reading are (ostensibly) hired by NBC news, not news.google.com, and there's no way to get to the same article on www.nbcnews.com unless I do something really awkward, like go back to Google and hunt and peck (I'm on my mobile phone, remember?) to type in "site:www.nbcnews.com article name".
I have hate for the UI of AMP itself (they broke scrolling down to get to the URL bar somehow), but that's also a distraction from the fundamental contract that AMP breaks.
Google would (rightly) get pissed if I made my own search page which "rebranded" Google search results to have my advertisement and then present the Google search results as coming from me; I hate them for doing the same thing to news publishers.
[+] [-] djrogers|9 years ago|reply
Instead, they created a way to hijack the mobile web and become the de facto content presenter for any publisher who doesn't want to be punished by Google.
[+] [-] greenspot|9 years ago|reply
This is not the problem. You can easily use i.e. React and some related libs on mobile without slowing down the experience at all. Everything will be fast and responsive, loading times and the mobile site itself (if done right). The problem Google tries to address (and this is a real problem) are the cascaded ad networks on webpages which load hundreds of JS libs once a page is loaded. This is a huge problem and yes, it needs to be solved. Just go to any news site and open Chrome Inspector's Networking tab, then you'll be shocked about the millions of resources still being loaded. AMP is solving this by putting Google as the gatekeeper in front of all this networks. I am ok with this, those ad networks created the problem and I am fine if they now need to deal with Google's monopoly but I am not fine with being restricted in using JS in general because you can do it right, even on mobile.
[+] [-] pmlnr|9 years ago|reply
This is _not_ a solution and google should not be doing anything with this.
[+] [-] eeeeeeeeeeeee|9 years ago|reply
Google's AMP policy has been aggressive and heavy-handed. You can appreciate the technology and Google's desire to make the web faster and disagree with how they are implementing it.
[+] [-] tboyd47|9 years ago|reply
Edit: In a way, AMP feels like a scheme by Google to force content providers to enforce the solution to a problem that Google created. They're trying to speed up the web with their right hand while slowing it down with their left.
[+] [-] monochromatic|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maverick_iceman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] liquidise|9 years ago|reply
Instead, google built an entirely new presentation method itself. This engineering effort can not be ignored and it was not on accident that this happened. They are quite literally stealing the traffic of users who implement AMP.
[+] [-] geofft|9 years ago|reply
This is the same logic behind monopolies being bad. Nobody thought AT&T was bad for providing phone service to everyone in America; that was unquestionably great. What was bad was the way that nobody else could provide potentially-better phone services. Nobody thought Microsoft was bad for giving people a web browser in the IE 4 days; what was bad was abusing their OS monopoly to gain a web browser monopoly, because IE 5 and 6 started implementing MS-specific technology.
There are lots of ways to implement the benefits of AMP without the vendor lock-in Google is pushing. It's certainly technically much easier for Google to implement it in the way they're currently doing so, but that's a short-term and short-sighted gain.
[+] [-] fragmede|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flukus|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jzl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greenspot|9 years ago|reply
What if I don't want to use Google's AMP cache and rather my own CDN? What if I don't want this useless AMP banner at the top of my AMPed pages which takes 25% of the screen estate for nothing? What if I can build fast mobile sites without following the AMP spec?
[+] [-] c0l0|9 years ago|reply
Yeah, that's certainly one way to look at it. Yet in my book, the "AMP 'format'" (emph. mine), above all, ensures the continued assimilation of the open web, and with it most of ad revenue collected there, into the huge moloch that is Google (and its AdWords and Analytics infrastructure). I think it's a disgusting technology to adopt, and none of its supposed benefits are worth the drawback that you're giving away control over the end-to-end communication with your actual users.
[+] [-] andy_ppp|9 years ago|reply
EDIT Also I'd add further that at some point, this "free" and compulsory AMP cache will start inserting google ads directly into pages and Google will pay publishers a small percentage of what those slots are worth.
[+] [-] CameronBanga|9 years ago|reply
Really can't be in favor of it until those issues are fixed.
[+] [-] zorked|9 years ago|reply
AMP should be supported by CDNs and toggleable in the browsers though.
[+] [-] MrVitaliy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anilgulecha|9 years ago|reply
I'd still like to push for an open, standards based approach to tackling the issue of content delivery under resource constraints.
[+] [-] timsayshey|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dfischer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Groxx|9 years ago|reply
Instead, we have a one-size-fits-all that they control utterly. No option to do something that works just as well, via different means (your own image compression, optimized http2 support, etc).
Kill it with fire.
[+] [-] matthewmacleod|9 years ago|reply
I could even just ignore this problem if there was a way for me to say "I have a 10Mbps 4G connection, please show me the actual site and not this broken half-implementation of it." Even then, it's sketchy.
[+] [-] Panino|9 years ago|reply
From there, we get years of unoptimized, bloated websites made by people drawing pictures with HTML editors. They are exclusively focused on visual presentation and ignore any mechanics under the hood. Not everyone, but most. Finally Google can't take it anymore and creates AMP as an angry middle finger to these people. ("I drink your milkshake!")
IMO the right solution is to use speed as an increasingly more important ranking signal. Push crummy bloated websites to the bottom where they belong. I read the article but didn't see Google address this rather obvious idea.
[+] [-] pmlnr|9 years ago|reply
Great. Except that that information might be deliberately a part of the image.
These things should be opt-in.
[+] [-] adtac|9 years ago|reply
You may be against some principles, but it's an absolute life-saver sometimes.