I am so happy I have been able to avoid AMP my entire career and this ensures that I will probably will never have to bother with it in the future. This 'web inside the web' stuff is so antithetical to what the web is supposed to be, I hope Google will just pull the plug like they do with just about everything else that isn't the search engine or G-mail.
Please don’t let your excitement take your focus off this part of the story:
> The good news gets even better; non-AMP pages make considerably more revenue per pageview than AMP pages. Initially, I assumed this was due to the nature of how ads load on AMP, however, recent Antitrust lawsuits have proposed that hindering ad competition was a feature and that all non-amp ad tags, such as my company, Ezoic’s, were delayed by 1 second to make them less effective. It is also alleged that Google let their own exchange win, even when someone else bid more!
Somewhere, in a parallel universe, people are going to jail and paying substantial fines for this behavior. In this universe, however, politicians don’t seem to think there is a moral hazard in the fact that those of us who work in this industry see what happened and think, “if you get big enough, it doesn’t matter if you get caught.”
There are active lawsuits going on by something like 49 out of 50 states. That's how damning evidence like this -- as well as Facebook offering to share unencrypted WhatsApp messages with Google (through the "backup to Drive" feature) -- came out to light.
Unfortunately a lot of HN readers are dismissing this or calling it partisan grandstanding, just because it's Texas that filed it.
> all non-amp ad tags, such as my company, Ezoic’s, were delayed by 1 second to make them less effective
This is really not true. I was able to find the previous discussion on HN where someone linked to the Github issue about this design decision: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/3133 . Note the root goal of this was actually to get non-AMP ads to run faster. This was all fully transparent, and was not some nefarious hidden functionality that Google tacked on in the hopes of tanking other ad networks.
Look, I hate AMP as much as your average HN poster, and I don't really disagree that Google is willing to make "technological improvements" as long as they hurt the other guy, and not Google. But I think the discussion gets better, not worse, when folks are more honest about the real reasoning behind why something is implemented the way it is.
So basically you want people to go to jail for not blasting ads into your face immediately and actually loading web content first?
Seems like a horribly awful world to me - would you extend this to Ad blockers as well? And when was the last time you've seen how horrible mainstream web is, with its autoplaying video popups?
AMP isn't the best solution, but what you're proposing is just horrifying. If anything, we should standardize this behaviour in browsers and make sure the ads never interfere with loaded contents. Let's not destroy the web even more so ad peddlers get more money.
Having AMP controlled and intermediated by Google was always a bad thing. It tainted what ultimately was a good effort, which is taking the enormous scope of web technologies we have now and winnowing them back down again for optimized publishing purposes.
And this article does what is often done in the AMP discussion and (disingenuously) demonstrates that you can make a non-AMP page that's smaller/faster than an AMP page. No one ever contested that. No one ever doubted it. But AMP isn't the alternative to your minimalist page, it's the alternative to the grotesquely overloaded media site where over time every single web technology gets smashed into a monstrous, massive pig of a page. Comparing the AMP pages of a news source and what they serve in their "full" web experience and it's absolute night and day.
I do wish we had a "web lite" mode that we could turn on, if only for certain domains.
1) Google clearly leveraging it to take over more of the web,
2) The scroll hijacking that made it feel worse-performing (plus just otherwise unpleasant) than middle-weight websites normally do,
3) That some of the sites I most commonly accidentally end up viewing through AMP are useless in their AMP version, so it just adds a hunt-and-click for no reason (Reddit is a big offender)
Google is one problem, one is a technical implementation problem, and the other is an ecosystem problem.
> I do wish we had a "web lite" mode that we could turn on, if only for certain domains.
There are some options for activating reader view even before loading a web site[0]. I imagine it would be a pretty light lift from there, to create an extension that keeps a domain list which automatically prepends the reader view URL prefix.
AMP was about keeping news content on the web competitive with Facebook instant articles.
When Google was forced to cut a deal with News Corp last month (the Australian debacle) that would bring News content from the open web into their News app, AMP became much less important to them anyway.
All in all, yes, another loss for the open web, but I think the picture is more complicated then the "AMP is evil" meme.
Re-inventing a bunch of tags, just because, is a good effort?
It had a good claimed goal: make heavy sites load faster, particularly on low bandwidth/high latency connections.
The approach taken was, like everything Google does, heavy handed, tone deaf, and instantly defended by fanboys waiting for another chance to suck on the google teat.
The thing that gets me is that AMP isn't even necessarily that fast. It appears fast because the Google search results page preloads AMP articles, which it's able to do because they are served from the same google.com domain.
Overall it just feels like hack upon hidden hack with a sliver of standardisation on top.
i disagree with 4.
Sites need maintenance and evolution. i don't know a single dev that won't eagerly drop something as impacting as amp as soon as it's an option.
Whenver i am trying to share a news article with a friend, and Google throws up the AMP page at me, I take the time to select the original article link and share that.
Is that very different from "Whenever I find a site hosted through CloudFlare, I look up the origin server's IP address and link to that. Webservers deserve traffic, not CDNs."?
> I’ve had the pleasure of working with more than twenty thousand publishers in the five years since AMP’s launch, and I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a single reason that a publisher uses AMP other than to obtain this priority placement.
If there's no reason to use AMP other than to waste money, it's very likely it will be used less and less. And then it's just a matter of time before Google pulls the plug.
In fact, I suspect it will only affect the small minority of sites that work better without AMP, the ones everyone who dislike AMP talk about. But for most mainstream news sites, I find AMP better than the typically bloated non-AMP version. And I bet Google will have the same opinion when ranking sites.
This is excellent news, but unfortunately, I don't think it will change the situation much. I wish it would, but most websites owners simply don't care about performance.
The criticisms of AMP regarding how evil Google has been with it are all valid.
But to the average user that doesn't care (Remember, HN users are anything but average!), AMP is an absolute godsend. Normally when I view a news article on mobile, it's plagued with the scroll jumping around as things load, obnoxious controls, frequent freezing, and just overall a terrible experience.
AMP for the most part fixed all that. Pages load in only a second or two, and once they've loaded, they're smooth to scroll though and STAY smooth.
I don't do web development (Professionally anyways, I've got a couple small <3K LOC pet projects), so I don't understand why the current world is such total garbage. I just went to a few news sites, and the front pages sent me anywhere from 3.5 to 6 MB of JavaScript, and that's even with my ad blocker disabled. And then some of them started sending me even more once I started scrolling.
There's no reason for all this bloat. It does not take 3.5 MB of JavaScript to load content asynchronously and create some menus. And that's minified JavaScript.
So yeah...AMP is here to stay, and the users are grateful.
I've seen it happen more than once that web devs create a website that's very performant, only to be maimed and slowed down to a crawl by the marketing department's trackers and ads...
Thank god and I am honestly surprised it took this long. If it was ever purely about page speed (which we all know it wasn’t but play along) then given the choice between “analyzing a one-time metric per page” and “inventing a new parallel HTML, CSS, and JS standard and still analyzing pages for usage of this standard,” I think it seems pretty obvious the former is better in about every way. Site-specific functions like login/auth still work, there’s only one URL for a given page (not to mention the countless amp.google.com/blah links scattered about forever now), less caching required on Google’s part, and you put the power of the web to express yourself back in the hands of the sitemasters. I don’t know what possessed Google to think they knew page design better than publishers but AMP pages are seriously ugly. Good riddance!
> AMP also came with the unfortunate requirement that publishers let traffic sources such as Google cache their content and serve it from their domain, such as google.com.
At least with Chrome, one related performance advantage will remain, given AMP pages will remain preloaded from Google results pages, whereas non-AMP pages won't be.
Why is this related? On mobile, Google preloads AMP pages in the carousel that are in the Google cache, which will obviously give them a page-load time advantage. Why not do that for more sites? Avoiding third-parties (i.e., third-party v. the Google results page) from being able to detect when they appear in search results and getting data (like IP) from the user regardless of whether or not they click on the result.
Is this insurmountable? Can you outperform it? Sure, but it's inevitably going to be harder as a result.
Kind of depressing when you think of all the money and engineering hours that went into trying to make websites work with AMP that could have been spent on just making their existing code less shitty...
"Who is gonna go first" seems to be an issue. I'm unable to produce a query that sticks any non-AMP result into the front of the carousel. So, everyone seems to be waiting for some notable publication to go first.
It would be such a blessing. Not even going into the obvious ethical and political implications of an AMP-powered web, it simply has broken UX on mobile. On iPhone it is possible to horizontally scroll the pages and then they are stuck in an unreadable state until reload. Seeing only "google.com" in the header is just the icing on the cake. Instead of one click to go to the source page you need to open a menu to go there. It makes me furious every time. IMHO Google really jumped the shark with AMP. Claiming it is for the users good and speed of the web is just hypocrisy. We would not need "accelerated" mobile pages if it was not for the garbage 10mb of trackers that are on every page because it helps them monetize with Google.
The title is somewhat misleading, but if Google do not come up with a compelling reason to use the widely hated AMP, its future sure doesn't look rosy.
The most frustrating issue with web development is fads. Every month there's a new must have technology that spreads with the most powerful marketing technique: FUD - fear, uncertainty, doubt.
"Did you hear about AMP? Yeah we switched to it last week. I heard Google would start weighting pages that didn't use it down. Wait, you haven't made the switch yet? Well... I don't know, we'll see what happens..."
If I smell FUD as a marketing technique, I'm out. The odds that you're trying to sell me something I don't need are astronomical -- and in four years, management will be driving me to the next big fad under FOMO.
Make no mistake: Google could have page metrics used in search ranking years ago. The reasons they introduce these now isn't because of the kindness of hearts or because they changed their minds.
Most likely (one, or some, or any of these reasons):
- there's a potential court battle regarding AMP, and Google wants to get ahead
- publishers are leaving the platform
- there are new advertising opportunities that bring as much money to Google, or more, than AMP (or are better than potentially losing money on courts and to publishers leaving)
The article says "The largest and most talked-about item in the update is Google announcing that sites with passing core web vitals will receive a ranking boost on mobile."
Can anyone please explain what "passing core web vitals" means? It links to very lengthy articles full of SEO jargon that I don't understand.
[+] [-] jsnell|4 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560498
[+] [-] FriedrichN|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ExtraE|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] numair|4 years ago|reply
> The good news gets even better; non-AMP pages make considerably more revenue per pageview than AMP pages. Initially, I assumed this was due to the nature of how ads load on AMP, however, recent Antitrust lawsuits have proposed that hindering ad competition was a feature and that all non-amp ad tags, such as my company, Ezoic’s, were delayed by 1 second to make them less effective. It is also alleged that Google let their own exchange win, even when someone else bid more!
Somewhere, in a parallel universe, people are going to jail and paying substantial fines for this behavior. In this universe, however, politicians don’t seem to think there is a moral hazard in the fact that those of us who work in this industry see what happened and think, “if you get big enough, it doesn’t matter if you get caught.”
[+] [-] dannyw|4 years ago|reply
Unfortunately a lot of HN readers are dismissing this or calling it partisan grandstanding, just because it's Texas that filed it.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|4 years ago|reply
This is really not true. I was able to find the previous discussion on HN where someone linked to the Github issue about this design decision: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/3133 . Note the root goal of this was actually to get non-AMP ads to run faster. This was all fully transparent, and was not some nefarious hidden functionality that Google tacked on in the hopes of tanking other ad networks.
Look, I hate AMP as much as your average HN poster, and I don't really disagree that Google is willing to make "technological improvements" as long as they hurt the other guy, and not Google. But I think the discussion gets better, not worse, when folks are more honest about the real reasoning behind why something is implemented the way it is.
[+] [-] Stratoscope|4 years ago|reply
My fear is that they are not going to jail or paying fines, they are being exiled... to our universe!
[+] [-] concordDance|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Trufa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] izacus|4 years ago|reply
Seems like a horribly awful world to me - would you extend this to Ad blockers as well? And when was the last time you've seen how horrible mainstream web is, with its autoplaying video popups?
AMP isn't the best solution, but what you're proposing is just horrifying. If anything, we should standardize this behaviour in browsers and make sure the ads never interfere with loaded contents. Let's not destroy the web even more so ad peddlers get more money.
[+] [-] defaultname|4 years ago|reply
And this article does what is often done in the AMP discussion and (disingenuously) demonstrates that you can make a non-AMP page that's smaller/faster than an AMP page. No one ever contested that. No one ever doubted it. But AMP isn't the alternative to your minimalist page, it's the alternative to the grotesquely overloaded media site where over time every single web technology gets smashed into a monstrous, massive pig of a page. Comparing the AMP pages of a news source and what they serve in their "full" web experience and it's absolute night and day.
I do wish we had a "web lite" mode that we could turn on, if only for certain domains.
[+] [-] intergalplan|4 years ago|reply
1) Google clearly leveraging it to take over more of the web,
2) The scroll hijacking that made it feel worse-performing (plus just otherwise unpleasant) than middle-weight websites normally do,
3) That some of the sites I most commonly accidentally end up viewing through AMP are useless in their AMP version, so it just adds a hunt-and-click for no reason (Reddit is a big offender)
Google is one problem, one is a technical implementation problem, and the other is an ecosystem problem.
[+] [-] bashinator|4 years ago|reply
There are some options for activating reader view even before loading a web site[0]. I imagine it would be a pretty light lift from there, to create an extension that keeps a domain list which automatically prepends the reader view URL prefix.
The magic prefix is
[0] https://www.howtogeek.com/268116/is-there-a-way-to-force-ena...[+] [-] tomComb|4 years ago|reply
When Google was forced to cut a deal with News Corp last month (the Australian debacle) that would bring News content from the open web into their News app, AMP became much less important to them anyway.
All in all, yes, another loss for the open web, but I think the picture is more complicated then the "AMP is evil" meme.
[+] [-] bo1024|4 years ago|reply
You get to choose what browser and plugins you use. That goes a long way.
[+] [-] stephenr|4 years ago|reply
Really? Scroll jacking is good effort?
Re-inventing a bunch of tags, just because, is a good effort?
It had a good claimed goal: make heavy sites load faster, particularly on low bandwidth/high latency connections.
The approach taken was, like everything Google does, heavy handed, tone deaf, and instantly defended by fanboys waiting for another chance to suck on the google teat.
[+] [-] afavour|4 years ago|reply
Overall it just feels like hack upon hidden hack with a sliver of standardisation on top.
[+] [-] stephenr|4 years ago|reply
1. Introduce $badThing with claims about page load performance.
2. tell sites they need to use $badThing to get into the “carousel”
3. Scale back the requirement of #2 just soon enough that you can argue against any claims of market manipulation via your monopoly.
4. (Continue to) Profit, because 80% of the sites that implemented it aren’t going to just rip it out now that it’s there.
[+] [-] bsaul|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] instagraham|4 years ago|reply
Websites deserve their own traffic, not Google's.
[+] [-] chalst|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 310260|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SquareWheel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AgentME|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmikaeld|4 years ago|reply
The article just "hopes" it will die, it doesn't point to any specific source that it will.
Quite the opposite, it says "Google will continue to support AMP" on the Google Page Experience update.
[+] [-] FriedrichN|4 years ago|reply
> I’ve had the pleasure of working with more than twenty thousand publishers in the five years since AMP’s launch, and I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a single reason that a publisher uses AMP other than to obtain this priority placement.
If there's no reason to use AMP other than to waste money, it's very likely it will be used less and less. And then it's just a matter of time before Google pulls the plug.
[+] [-] GuB-42|4 years ago|reply
In fact, I suspect it will only affect the small minority of sites that work better without AMP, the ones everyone who dislike AMP talk about. But for most mainstream news sites, I find AMP better than the typically bloated non-AMP version. And I bet Google will have the same opinion when ranking sites.
This is excellent news, but unfortunately, I don't think it will change the situation much. I wish it would, but most websites owners simply don't care about performance.
[+] [-] Crash0v3rid3|4 years ago|reply
If only web developers would follow this advice...
[+] [-] Sohcahtoa82|4 years ago|reply
The criticisms of AMP regarding how evil Google has been with it are all valid.
But to the average user that doesn't care (Remember, HN users are anything but average!), AMP is an absolute godsend. Normally when I view a news article on mobile, it's plagued with the scroll jumping around as things load, obnoxious controls, frequent freezing, and just overall a terrible experience.
AMP for the most part fixed all that. Pages load in only a second or two, and once they've loaded, they're smooth to scroll though and STAY smooth.
I don't do web development (Professionally anyways, I've got a couple small <3K LOC pet projects), so I don't understand why the current world is such total garbage. I just went to a few news sites, and the front pages sent me anywhere from 3.5 to 6 MB of JavaScript, and that's even with my ad blocker disabled. And then some of them started sending me even more once I started scrolling.
There's no reason for all this bloat. It does not take 3.5 MB of JavaScript to load content asynchronously and create some menus. And that's minified JavaScript.
So yeah...AMP is here to stay, and the users are grateful.
[+] [-] spicybright|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huskyr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JeanMarcS|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uncomputation|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zaphirplane|4 years ago|reply
So long as google strongly influences page views it lives
[+] [-] gsnedders|4 years ago|reply
At least with Chrome, one related performance advantage will remain, given AMP pages will remain preloaded from Google results pages, whereas non-AMP pages won't be.
Why is this related? On mobile, Google preloads AMP pages in the carousel that are in the Google cache, which will obviously give them a page-load time advantage. Why not do that for more sites? Avoiding third-parties (i.e., third-party v. the Google results page) from being able to detect when they appear in search results and getting data (like IP) from the user regardless of whether or not they click on the result.
Is this insurmountable? Can you outperform it? Sure, but it's inevitably going to be harder as a result.
[+] [-] lexicality|4 years ago|reply
Kind of depressing when you think of all the money and engineering hours that went into trying to make websites work with AMP that could have been spent on just making their existing code less shitty...
[+] [-] tootie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] halotrope|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chalst|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bjt2n3904|4 years ago|reply
"Did you hear about AMP? Yeah we switched to it last week. I heard Google would start weighting pages that didn't use it down. Wait, you haven't made the switch yet? Well... I don't know, we'll see what happens..."
If I smell FUD as a marketing technique, I'm out. The odds that you're trying to sell me something I don't need are astronomical -- and in four years, management will be driving me to the next big fad under FOMO.
[+] [-] dmitriid|4 years ago|reply
Most likely (one, or some, or any of these reasons):
- there's a potential court battle regarding AMP, and Google wants to get ahead
- publishers are leaving the platform
- there are new advertising opportunities that bring as much money to Google, or more, than AMP (or are better than potentially losing money on courts and to publishers leaving)
[+] [-] svat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdenton|4 years ago|reply
Can anyone please explain what "passing core web vitals" means? It links to very lengthy articles full of SEO jargon that I don't understand.
[+] [-] sergiosgc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|4 years ago|reply
Ever heard of Web Bundles?
https://web.dev/web-bundles/
https://github.com/WICG/webpackage