Mostly because Google serves the page from their own servers and starts loading it before you even click a search result. It's great for Google search and bad for everyone else.
Then I guess "everyone else" should find a way to make a usable mobile content website without AMP, because apparently that's a nearly unsolvable problem. It's hard to be anti-AMP when the user experience is that much better with AMP.
AMP is terrible for the open WWW and not necessarily any faster.
"Pinboard founder Maciej Cegłowski already recreated the Google AMP demo page without the Google AMP JavaScript and, unsurprisingly, it's faster than Google's version."
Yeah, honestly, you can do just as good as an AMP site if all you did was cut back on the javascript and use a service worker to cache static assets/pages.
I wish AMP simply wasn't a thing, and they put more effort in promoting progressive web apps (PWA's) instead. There's too much tie-in to Google on the internet already.
AMP is basically "Hey, you suck at your job. Here's a subset of HTML/CSS that not even YOU can eff up."
PWA is "Hey, you suck at your job. Here's the industry's best practices for mobile-first development."
> Yeah, honestly, you can do just as good as an AMP site if all you did was cut back on the javascript and use a service worker to cache static assets/pages.
But people didn't, and here we are. Again, as a normal user, I'm relieved to see the AMP symbol. I click on those links first, to the exclusion of others given the chance, because multiple years of trust have been broken.
I know that's the concern, but at the moment it feels like a slippery slope fallacy to me. Hypotheticals don't interest me because there's a million of them, and there's a thousand of them that can make sense if you look at the right way. Maybe the preponderance of AMP will create a shift back to the user experience, and AMP's success renders it unnecessary. Maybe maybe maybe.
Maybe I'll rue the day I wrote this, but we're going to have to see. This is a self-created problem, and now publishers of all stripes will have to work to earn back the trust they poisoned.
"Look, my tests prove that your lived experience is wrong."
Yes, it's possible to create fast mobile pages without AMP. So if that's true, why does AMP make such a big difference to so many consumers?
The bottom line is that the theoretical possibility of fast non-AMP pages is meaningless to consumers if few content providers actually act on that possibility. What matters is what happens in the real world.
Part of the problem is that most mobile browsers don't allow browser extensions to block all the JS bloat. There are other ways to fix the problem that won't destroy the open WWW.
There are theoretical ones. If you can implement a practical one, or tell me how to do it, then I'll avoid AMP. Until then, I'll keep preferring AMP links.
If you can convince marketers to stop loading up pages with nigh endless amounts of tracking, tag managers and dozens of ad units (from all different sources) then I'm sure we'd see an immediate increase in page performance. (I suspect many sites are already quite fast before they get weighed back down by marketing)
Let/encourage developers (front-end and back-end) to optimise for performance and I'm sure we'd all see fantastic gains! All without needing to feed Google even more than we already do.
I like this answer so much better than mine, I should go and delete mine! Ask any shopping site how many tracking pixels, analytics scripts, etc that they have included. They'll tell you they're all necessary.
> talks about Google's (less than neutral) motivations/actions.
Google is a company, its motivation is profit. Did you really expect otherwise? Do you really think Facebook wants to "make the world more connected"?
Where do (or would) you put your savings? Let me guess, in the assets that provide the best return/risk? Why do you expect that the companies you're investing in expecting the highest returns would act in any different way?
I certainly don't begrudge them a single dime of profit. Just using their position as "the de-factor search engine" to hype the sites using _their_ tech is a sleazy move. They spent years positioning themselves as the best search engine... and why? Because when you looked for something, you found it, usually within the first 3 or 4 results. Now, those results aren't really the most relevant, they're the ones with the home field advantage. So no, I never bought into that "don't be evil" garbage... but, I don't like them having the position and weight that they do.
I don't understand this idea that seeking profit somehow ablates them of consequences.
Just because they can make a profit doing something doesn't mean they should be allowed to continue, especially if the mechanism of profit damages public or communal infrastructure/resources/etc.
Do you really want to sit by and let them ruin the web just because they can make money doing so?
At least on iOS, this is an easily solvable problem on most web sites even without AMP: tap the "Safari Reader" button in the toolbar to get a text-only version of the web site. I assume that something like that is a thing on Android and elsewhere.
I understand the usability case for AMP, but let's face it -- making a mobile-friendly web site really isn't that difficult, as long as you're not insisting on jamming things up with untold megabytes of JS woo. Google's argument to publishers is essentially "jam up your desktop sites with whatever JS woo you want, and let us unjam the mobile site for you." And, you know, fine, but to take advantage of it, you're essentially tailoring your web site to let Google reformat your content in a similar fashion to Safari Reader -- and, unlike Reader, Google is doing it by rehosting your content. They get the clicks, and you get whatever analytics and revenue they deign to share with you. And worse, that opens up the strong potential for Google's search results to penalize those of us who would rather maintain control over our own content.
> At least on iOS, this is an easily solvable problem on most web sites even without AMP: tap the "Safari Reader" button in the toolbar to get a text-only version of the web site. I assume that something like that is a thing on Android and elsewhere.
I'm not sure it's technically true; the text on the page needs to be loaded, but that doesn't mean every other HTTP request associated with the page has to have completed before Safari makes the Reader button available. While this is entirely anecdotal, I can definitely see that button appearing before pages are fully loaded.
Option one doesn't require downloading all the images backgrounds and and videos and other stuff until it's been determined that that should actually be displayed by reader mode.
"Better" is a very subject term. "Loads faster" is fair. Google has made things load faster by forcing apps to be stripped down (nearly useless for anything outside landing page or news sites) and heavily caching them. Given the same constraints for any app, we could load and perform with similar characteristics. Furthermore, Google prioritizing AMP search results just because they use the technology, means Google should no longer be trusted as the "best" search results.
> Then I guess "everyone else" should find a way to make a usable mobile content website without AMP, because apparently that's a nearly unsolvable problem.
It's a hard problem.
Having everyone use Google as a proxy and content server, trusting them to deliver ads and so on, is one way to improve quality of service, but it's a way that's hostile to publishers and infringes on the privacy of users, so the industry absolutely hungry for a solution here.
A major issue is that Google acts as a gatekeeper for competing products, so we're unlikely to see any effect unless high profile publishers take a stand, or we individuals lobby our government to intercede.
> It's hard to be anti-AMP when the user experience is that much better with AMP.
I know. Ben Franklin warned us in a way about convenience, so his words seem quite appropriate here; I value my quality of life and my privacy, and I see it as such a slippery slope, so I don't implement AMP on my properties.
My organic Google traffic has admittedly suffered since the AMP logo program started, but focusing on making my sponsored search buy stickier has proven a lot more valuable to me fiscally, while allowing me to preserve my morality.
> It's great for Google search and bad for everyone else.
Well, other places (including Bing) do the same thing with AMP caches, so even if it were only good or then cache operators, that wouldn't just be Google.
But, the speed is good, and whatever problems the client has on iOS, it's been great on Android, so as a user I mostly see it as a positive.
And it's got built in support for advertising and analytics and the cache operators end up handling much of the traffic, so it seems like a win for publishers, too.
So, I'm not sure who the “everyone else” that AMP is supposed to be bad for is.
(Initially I intended to respond to a couple points in your comment, but my comment turned into somewhat of a small rant.)
It seems to me that AMP is so divisive on HN that whenever it comes up both sides continue to draw their battle lines and regurgitate the same arguments. Every AMP discussion I see on here is less of a conversation between sides and more of each side talking at each other. It seems to me there are 3 separate debates that end up getting all mixed together:
1. The user experience of AMP
2. The technical details of AMP
3. The concern about google abusing its market dominance in an anticompetitive way (or not, depending which side you fall on)
I'd like to add a bit of my own personal experience with AMP, focusing entirely on the first point of user experience. I'll admit that I have had a more negative experience with AMP.
A little background about me: I work in embedded systems, so although I am probably more technical than most users, I have very little knowledge of things at the browser level. I know virtually nothing of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I feel like that puts me squarely in the "user" category rather than the "people having technical discussions about AMP" category. I do quite a bit of browsing on my phone, an iPhone 5s that is always kept current with the iOS updates.
The things I love about AMP:
- Like you said "the speed is good." AMP really has sped up the page load and rendering experience. Whatever technical details are used to accomplish this (caching, prefetch, etc?), it truly is noticeable to me how quickly AMP pages load.
- I have experienced website bloat issues for years, both on mobile and desktop. Whether it is images or text jumping around as a page loads or pop ups, banner images, and bloated ads that make the web page hard to use. Even though I have always heard discussions about how this should be fixed, AMP is actually achieving it.
The things I dislike:
The things I strongly dislike about AMP can be addressed through the other part of your comment
> whatever problems the client has on iOS, it's been great on Android
As an iOS user, the AMP experience has been horrible for me. It's not that AMP is 'bad' or 'unusable' on iOS, it's that AMP imposes its own UI rules that are jarring on iOS. Having regularly used other google apps on iOS (gmail, maps, calendar) it feels like AMP is another part of google's "material design is the one true way" mentality.
On an iPhone the system and third party apps are generally very consistent in the placement of menus, back buttons, share buttons, etc as well as what they look like and how they function. Likewise, the gestures and navigation follow some general patterns: pages scroll up and down; swiping right and left are forward and back motions. Headers and footers tend to auto hide when scrolling up and down. And so on.
In google apps on an iPhone you get the Android/Material Design version of things. Buttons have different shapes. The menu in google apps is the hamburger icon instead of a button that says 'menu' or 'options.' Likewise there is no 'done' or 'back' button, only an 'x' button. Pages don't scroll in google apps, and the vertical flow is nonexistent. Instead pages are flipped through by swiping left and right, just like the android app drawer. For a great example of this compare google calendar app on iOS to the native iPhone calendar app.
On a web page those things don't matter. The browser's header (URL bar) and footer (navigation bar) autohide when scrolling. Give a good swipe left to go back a page in your browsing history. A good swipe right to go forward in your history. Even Firefox on iOS implements these same patterns. AMP manages to break those. It somehow prevents autohiding, so now I perpetually have safari's URL bar and navigation bar wasting space on my screen. AMP provides its own menu header bar as well. But it is wonky and auto hides or unhides at seemingly the slightest tap, jumping around and wasting more screen space. Likewise, once I am on an AMP page safari's swipe left and right gestures are broken. Swiping left doesn't being me back a page (back to the google search results); it brings me to new AMP page. Swiping right doesn't bring me forward a page in my browser history; it brings me to a new AMP page. My forward and backwards navigation gestures have been hijacked, thus trapping me in AMP-land until I explicitly tap safari's back button or the 'x' button on AMP's header bar. On top of that, the swipe gestures are incredibly sensitive on AMP compared to normal safari and iOS usage. Often I find myself scrolling down an AMP page not-quite-perfectly-vertically and accidentally jumping to a new article because I am so unused to the AMP-specific swipe sensitivity.
At least they finally added the ability to get the native article URL, which was infuriating when AMP first came on the scene and was a big complaint of mine in the past. And now Apple is implementing their fix for the share button with the URLs as well.
At the end of the day though, why can't I disable AMP? Why is there no way for me to click through to the native web page from the google search results? My experience as an iOS user with AMP pages has been overwhelmingly negative, but consistently from google and the AMP team I see some form of "well users overwhelmingly love it and it makes pages load faster." That's great. I don't love it though. I hate it. Please let me disable it, and please stop forcing AMP down my throat, breaking my browser's behavior in the process. Please stop imposing Material Design aesthetics within AMP. I am not browsing the web on through a google platform. Please stop trying to 'fix' that for me.
If I had a way to disable AMP I wouldn't feel so strongly negative about it. But instead I am left with the notion from google "AMP is good. See, users love it. You're wrong if you don't as well. Thus there's no need to disable it, ever."
