raxxorrax 2020-12-18 13:44 UTC link

I think i am too cynical to think such a committee can stand up to corporate interests. Thank you for trying though.

zupreme 2020-12-18 13:48 UTC link

Years ago I made a news aggregator site which involved dynamically digesting rss feeds and then generating an iframe display of the target story alongside related stories from other sites.

The site caught on in certain circles and pageviews skyrocketed within a few months. I was not the only person pursuing this strategy at the time.

Before a year had gone by, almost all the major news sites had updated their pages with JavaScript intended to either block iframing altogether, or to “break out” of the iframe, redirecting the viewer to their actual page. We even got a few nasty letters and emails about it with terms like “litigation” casually thrown in.

The project became untenable because of this and I shut it down.

Fast forward a few years and imagine my dismay when I see Google Amp doing essentially the same thing - but on a much larger scale....

jart 2020-12-18 13:52 UTC link

> make AMP a great web citizen

Why isn't AMP a great web citizen? As far as I can tell, it's just a web component framework. Google took a very unique approach in inventing web components. Most people who invent web frameworks just put them out there as their own arbitrary unilateral design like Django, React, etc. and if enough people sign on board it's a thing. Web components was the one time when someone who wanted a new framework, actually put the time and effort into attracting the involvement of the browser authors and web consortium and standards bodies. That's a real long road and it's incredibly hard. Google did that. It's something worth respecting, even if web components don't feel all the great to code.

Beyond being a web component framework, I have no idea who the hell these AMP people are, and why they're forming consensus committees acting like they're steering the future of the Internet. We can see how quickly that fell apart into public metadrama the moment they lost their big stick SEO, since IIRC Google recently stopped explicitly favoring AMP results.

If Google was smart, they would have invented an algorithm that can tell "your website is a slow bloated popup laden piece of crap" and we're going to officially demote your SEO because of that. If Google actually did that, rather than granting favoritism to the slow popup laden websites like NYTimes, then the mobile web would instantly transform itself overnight. And then they could say, hey, if you're not sure how to make web pages that don't suck, use AMP, which is guideline for the confused on how to achieve a mobile friendly ui that isn't downranked.

> Google’s thesis is that the mobile-web is dying and people prefer to use apps

And I'm still sitting here spending most of my time in a terminal. What is dead may never die. If the mobile web dies then Google only has its own stewardship to blame. Google once understood that its interests were tied with the success of the open web and I'm sorry but they surely didn't think that a horse which died due to their policies would come back to life if they moved its corpse out of the barnyard and into a closed barn? Since that's basically how all this comes across.

evanb 2020-12-18 14:01 UTC link

Maybe this deserves its own Ask HN (but probably not):

What automatic things do people do to get rid of amp links to see “the original”? In an ideal world I wouldn’t even load the amp. I’m especially interested in solutions for Safari on iOS and Firefox on OS X (will not ever write macOS willingly).

Along the same thread, it used to be that when I clicked an Apple News link on my laptop it’d open in a browser and redirect to the original. Now Apple has “helpfully” provided my with an OS X version of News—a browser without any of the plugins I like. How can I intercept the URL handling and send it to Firefox rather than News?

TomAnthony 2020-12-18 14:06 UTC link

It was only Monday that they announced 9 new people joining the AMP AC to replace 10 others leaving: https://blog.amp.dev/2020/12/14/amp-advisory-committee-2020-...

lemonspat 2020-12-18 14:11 UTC link

> I remain convinced that AMP is poorly implemented, hostile to the interests of both users and publishers, and a proprietary & unnecessary incursion into the open web.

Brutal, but at least we know an insider agrees that AMP is hostile to the web. If others leave, will that push Google to make better decisions? Probably not.

muglug 2020-12-18 14:12 UTC link

I'm a big fan of the open web, but I also think Google is on the right track with AMP.

Whenever I'm on an AMP website I make an effort to use the "real" version instead by following the link in the top right corner.

Nine times out of ten that non-AMP page content is harder to read – the notifications more intrusive, the content jumps around while loading.

It looks like Google are now taking a more-refined approach to prioritising pages in mobile results, but I like that AMP forced publishing companies to take a hard look at page performance, for the first time in a while.

_gtly 2020-12-18 14:18 UTC link

The attorneys general case led by Texas [1] asserts that Google created AMP so that Google could stop "header bidding" (which subjects them to competition):

> To respond to the threat of header bidding, Google created Accelerated Mobile Pages (“AMP”), a framework for developing mobile web pages, and made AMP essentially incompatible with JavaScript and header bidding.

1.https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...

markkat 2020-12-18 14:21 UTC link

This committee is window-dressing. AMP is about Google revenue alone, remaking the web as a consumer portal, not an open platform for information exchange and creativity.

The premise that the web ought to compete with native app experience is flawed to begin with. Executing that goal through a corporate gateway is perverse.

ocdtrekkie 2020-12-18 14:22 UTC link

Considering one of the lawsuits specifically cites AMP as part of the project to wall in the web, it's now public information that there is no real effort on Google's part to be a good steward of web technologies here.

I've followed your participation from time to time, and appreciate the lengths you've gone to keep an eye on them and push them in the right direction, but it's pretty clear what their goals were from the start.

jan_Inkepa 2020-12-18 14:36 UTC link

I mentioned this before, but the only problem I have with AMP is that one can't self-host - you have to link to amp js files on the official servers (you'd think a starting point for fast hosting of webpages would be hosting everything on the same server, but it seems no...). I haven't seen anyone try to justify this; for whatever reason it's not on anyone else's radar that I've seen. For me it's a total deal-breaker.

If you want a standard you can specify a standard, if you want a framework you can specify a framework. But requiring it to give you client-side permission to run scripts is something that requires more justification that I've seen anyone give.

(I haven't checked the official amp website in a year or so, maybe things have changed since then).

tomaszs 2020-12-18 16:18 UTC link

With Google Chrome as the most popular browser and Google that earns a lots from Google App Store all we can expect, and what I actually see, is that open web development is blocked. Open web is almost perfectly capable to serve apps on the same quality that native ones. But without a strong competition to Google Chrome we might never experience the full benefit

joshxyz 2020-12-18 16:36 UTC link

That fucking AMP even makes it hard to find the original link of the site it is wrapping. I just hate and abhor its existence.

supernovae 2020-12-18 16:42 UTC link

I can only assume AMP is dead if Google Analytics 4 doesn't even support it. Not only do they not support it, but you get a run-a-around by anyone and everyone who is simply ass kissing google and insulting you for asking valid questions.

I'm removing AMP from my websites now... it is terrible.

piyush_soni 2020-12-18 17:35 UTC link

I know HN hates AMP (overall), and I understand it from an ideological perspective (they trying to be the 'gatekeeper of the web' and all), but I think it's because the audience here includes many content 'creators', not consumers alone. Purely as a user, I love the fact that when I click on an AMP'ed page, it loads almost instantly on my mobile, as opposed to a few seconds that I have to wait before they load completely. How it could have been done in a way that didn't hurt publishers is not a consumer's concern. For an end-user who doesn't know much about tech, they 'made the web better'.

dheera 2020-12-18 19:25 UTC link

> Google’s thesis is that the mobile-web is dying and people prefer to use apps

At least this user doesn't prefer apps, it's just that websites downright refuse to make their mobile pages useful, and keep throwing popups for you to get the app, and Chrome on mobile doesn't support extensions to block said popups. Most mobile websites also suck at supporting common navigation modes like swiping between tabs. They entirely could, but they refuse to spend resources developing it.

deft 2020-12-18 20:07 UTC link

The damage is done. AMP has been criticized since its inception, the author is no hero for realizing it after making it this way for years.

ffritz 2020-12-18 20:15 UTC link

Besides the obvious, I have an additional problem with AMP that I never see getting mentioned: It completely fucks up redirects on mobile Safari. It requires two or three swipe back gestures to actually return to Google.

musicale 2020-12-18 23:34 UTC link

> AI remain convinced that AMP is poorly implemented, hostile to the interests of both users and publishers, and a proprietary & unnecessary incursion into the open web.

That kind of says it all, doesn't it?

nrvn 2020-12-19 06:10 UTC link

Amp is a hackity hack of the modern web, a poster child of some people who try to justify their mere existence in bright google conference rooms and email chains.

It seems like inside google(and outside of it as well) people tend to have forgotten that web performance is all about intelligent work with web standards. And throughout years people-who-care-about-perf introduced and advocated various techniques and changes to engines, standards and languages used across web development to improve end user experience. Prefetching, preloading, multiplexing, minifying, lazy loading, PWA, CDN, et al.

Instead of teaching how to build web properly google puts its enormous resources to what serves as a search result preview for end users, and the only beneficiary of the AMP is google itself.

Care about your users, their experience and performance of your website? Ditch https://amp.dev/

Discover https://web.dev/

chrismorgan 2020-12-18 13:51 UTC link

Mind you, the problems with iframe embedding are technical and security-related, and it’s quite possible that news sites broke iframing at that time not because of you or any one else specifically, but because that was about the time people started making noise about clickjacking attacks, and so they protected themselves against that form of technical abuse by blocking such embedding. AMP doesn’t suffer from that technical problem, instead saying “please implement your page in such a way that it’s safe to embed and can’t possibly cause trouble for either of us if we happen to host it instead of you”.

toxik 2020-12-18 14:15 UTC link

The solution is not to let Google be the gatekeepers of the internet.

There are so many other things you could do that fixes your problem WITHOUT handing over the internet to a single company.

rahkiin 2020-12-18 14:16 UTC link

> will not ever write macOS willingly

And yet you did.

News app -> preferences -> Open web links in News might help

lvass 2020-12-18 14:22 UTC link

I'd ask the opposite instead, what is it that leads people to AMP over "the original"? I have never been directed to an AMP page except in case someone shares AMP urls. And I use a lot of browsers and search engines, just not chrome or google.

hnarn 2020-12-18 14:23 UTC link

What AMP could have been, which in my mind would have been a lot better, is some type of open standard that Google offers free hosting for, but does not require Google to use.

The m.foo.com usage has been around for ages in Internet time, it could do with some standardization and tooling to ensure it gives the quickest page loads possible.

emodendroket 2020-12-18 14:25 UTC link

Why is that premise flawed? That's precisely what happens on mobile platforms. At least on desktops we recognize the absurdity of installing an app for every Web page we want to use

ocdtrekkie 2020-12-18 14:27 UTC link

I never felt like anyone outside Google had any power to fix AMP, but Terrence is one of the good guys, he got involved on our behalf to see if anything could be done.

IgorPartola 2020-12-18 14:27 UTC link

Thank goodness. AMP is the reason I don’t use Google on mobile. It just sucks. They could have done a million things that could have improved the quality of the mobile web and they chose one that actively makes using it unbearable.

afavour 2020-12-18 14:29 UTC link

> I like that AMP forced publishing companies to take a hard look at page performance, for the first time in a while.

True and false. It forced companies to pay attention to page performance... and then create an entirely separate version of every page they have, using up valuable developer time that could have been spent making the original pages faster.

Google should (and now/soon are?) assess the performance of the page and rank it accordingly, not force everyone to make two versions of their site. But this is where the sneaky part of AMP comes in: they wanted that side-swiping carousel that meant you never engaged deeply with any one site and instead stayed on google.com (and kept those google.com ad cookies, natch). There was no way to force people into that without AMP.

chrisseaton 2020-12-18 14:30 UTC link

I can't understand - where do they find all these people from outside Google willing to sit on a committee for a Google product? Why are people volunteering for this? It sounds like there's two committees?! Why so much bureaucracy and why do people want to take part in it?

notjustanymike 2020-12-18 14:30 UTC link

Years ago I worked as a frontend dev for Newsweek & The Daily Beast and saw the other side of this. It boiled down to money, brand, advertising and engagement.

Wrapping the content in an iframe allowed the host to monetize our content by decorating it with ads. This would dillute the CTR on our ads, resulting in less money. Big sites enter into contracts with major brands for full page advertisements, which could include contractual requirements that theirs is the only ad on the page. Serving and decorating a site would create headaches for us to explain why their ads weren't alone.

The iframe also reduced engagement as reader would only read the embedded article and move on. An actual visitor of the site had a far higher likelihood to navigate to other pages. Higher engagement resulted in more money and some brand loyalty. This also dramatically hurt sharing as the browser URL wasn't ours, but the hosts (which I also hate about AMP).

Your site messed with a lot of the ways their business generated revenue, in an industry that was already struggling to adapt to "the internet".

coldpie 2020-12-18 14:34 UTC link

There's a Firefox add-on for that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/

varispeed 2020-12-18 14:45 UTC link

This is also to push out other advertisers out of the market. Given the glaringly obvious conflict of interest, Google should have never been allowed to create such "standard". I hope this will lead to forced break up of this company.

Chris2048 2020-12-18 14:54 UTC link

> remaking the web as a consumer portal, not an open platform for information exchange and creativity

True, but that assumes without google, that's what we have. In fact, many of the content providers themselves don't want free exchange, every website trying to be it's own walled garden.

If google can force the hand of those trying to lock their content in their own formats, there maybe benefit to the clout of google.

oefrha 2020-12-18 14:56 UTC link

> Google Amp doing essentially the same thing

Iframe is a security trainwreck. You could clickjack Google's login widget iframe to steal account details as late as 2018, maybe even later.[1]

Whatever legitimate gripes you may have with AMP, it's not the same as iframes at all.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17044518

Veen 2020-12-18 15:02 UTC link

> If Google was smart, they would have invented an algorithm that can tell "your website is a slow bloated popup laden piece of crap" and we're going to officially demote your SEO because of that.

Google does exactly that, which is one reason so many publishers were tempted to adopt AMP.

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/07/search-ads...

However, sometimes a slow site is still the best site for a particular query. There are multiple factors to consider when ranking pages.

> If Google actually did that, rather than granting favoritism to the slow popup laden websites

Again, Google already penalizes sites for popups and interstitials.

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2016/08/helping-us...

> And then they could say, hey, if you're not sure how to make web pages that don't suck, use AMP, which is guideline for the confused on how to achieve a mobile friendly ui that isn't downranked.

That was the reason Google ostensibly introducted AMP in the first place. Unfortunately, it also breaks a lot of standard web interactions and forces publishers to cache content on Google infrastructure.

Looking at your comparison of AMP with React, it's safe to say you are a little bit confused about what it is.

paxys 2020-12-18 15:07 UTC link

> Fast forward a few years and imagine my dismay when I see Google Amp doing essentially the same thing - but on a much larger scale....

Amp isn't even close to the same thing as iFrames. And the difference is they did it with the publishers' consent. Why is it okay to put their content on your own site?

BrianOnHN 2020-12-18 15:11 UTC link

Self-hosting is a thing, at least as far as the amp-geo component is concerned:

> Publishers and caches that re-host AMP JavaScript files...

https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-geo/#self-hosti...

watwut 2020-12-18 15:20 UTC link

They all simultaneously found out AMP is not good for web when there started to be legal problems with AMP.

spicybright 2020-12-18 15:21 UTC link

You mis-spelled "realistic".

maxfurman 2020-12-18 15:22 UTC link

I think the justification is something along the lines of "Google's cache is faster than yours" - but I also agree that it's a bridge too far. I should be able to add a <meta> tag in my header that says "this is an AMP page" and assuming I've implemented AMP correctly that should be enough.

potench 2020-12-18 15:30 UTC link

You can use Prebid Server to provide ad competition on AMP. So I would imagine that it’s less about competition and more about removing the very negative web performance impact of JS header bidding.

metabagel 2020-12-18 16:00 UTC link

I find the opposite to be the case. AMP websites often don’t scroll down in my mobile browser (Firefox), so I have to click on the link to the original article in order to be able to read it.

jrochkind1 2020-12-18 16:18 UTC link

> If others leave, will that push Google to make better decisions?

Certainly not. If decision-makers believe it is in their interests, and they can get away with it, they will keep doing it. So you can try to convince decision makers that it is not in their interests, or you can try to show them that they can't get away with it. Quitting an advisory board does neither.

Note that the OP didn't really say they thought or intended it would. They said they were glad they tried to impact AMP positively, they don't think they succeeded, and they are choosing to spend time on other things such as an educational program. Of course by making a public announcement perhaps they hope to affect something, but probably more encourage others in the struggle; after seeing how they couldn't have much impact on the advisory committee, I am sure they know they won't have much impact simply by resigning from it, at least not impact on Google directly.

MrStonedOne 2020-12-18 17:14 UTC link

That wouldn't be issue if google let people turn it off.

They do not, and they will not.

I don't like amp. I don't like that unrelated amp results get promoted over the actual content i was looking for (that can't be amped because it's dynamic content) in search results, I don't like that have to use to inferior search engines on mobile to get rid of it, and I don't like how watered down amp sites are.

MrStonedOne 2020-12-18 17:36 UTC link

AMP does not fit all types of content, so prioritizing it over non-AMP pages penalizes websites that don't make static content or forces them to make all searches a landing page in AMP to the actual page, making shit even more of a mess on the web. AMP Forces publishers to put their content on googles servers giving google more data about users (that it doesn't share with the publisher) and its the equivalent of a yellow pages phone book provider making the text of all companies smaller unless the company gives yellow pages exclusive access to their front door security camera. Don't defend it.

When yelp started replacing the phone number of restaurants with their yelp delivery service partner's phone number to intercept the sales and use their own provider, everybody on hackernews rightly called it out as shit, but when google does the same shit its "not everybody's cup of tea".

No, you can't divorce AMP from how Google uses AMP. Google made AMP and Google shaped the core foundations of AMP that lets them do this. You can't just hand wave that away.

MrStonedOne 2020-12-18 17:40 UTC link

As a user, I fucking hate searching on mobile google now. I was trying to find some information on something, can't remember what, and all I got on the first 3 pages were amp links to news sites talking about the thing, but nothing to do with the info I was looking for.

I ended up opening duckduckgo and it was on the first page.

Did google just forget that static article content does not exclusively make up the internet?

I'm gonna re-post the rant I posted last time this came up:

> As a mobile user, I hate it.

> I hate that every fucking google search result on mobile web has its stupid little icon

> I hate that there is no way for me to disable it as a user

> I hate that it has muddied the waters in what the url bar means

> I hate that it has trained users to not question fake url bars.

> I hate that cloudflare so thoroughly jumped on its dick

> I hate that we invented a way to fake the address in the url bar just for this stupid fucking feature.

> I hate that we now have a system where somebody can share a page url with a friend, and that friend can view it on the same device model using the same browser with the same settings, and will get a different page because one was viewing an amp page but shared it's real url.

> I hate that every fucking amp page is lower featured in some way, and almost never works in desktop mode.

> And most of all, I hate that it leads to everybody offloading shit onto google's servers.

> AMP is not fast because it's served from google's CDN. AMP is fast because it's incompatible with 99% of the bullshit client cpu heavy tracking and ad libraries, so they don't get included inside AMP pages.

sbarre 2020-12-18 17:41 UTC link

Here's a different way to think about what you're saying:

They are reducing margins and removing control from those content creators.

So that content you love so much? Over time there will be less and less of it, as less and less publishers can stay afloat in a world of rent-seeking and monopolistic Internet gatekeepers.

Enjoy it while you can...

gxs 2020-12-18 17:48 UTC link

I don't know, from that perspective my biggest gripe is that it breaks a lot of functionality.

It breaks zoom on a lot of pages, and the pages don't load with whatever settings you have saved on the site (nothing fancy, maybe a night mode or something).

It also removes the url, which is really annoying.

It's full of little things like that, I'd be interested in knowing if when consumers encounter things like that they'd even know to blame google.

wrsh07 2020-12-18 18:04 UTC link

I wholly disagree as primarily a consumer. Page speeds? Good.

Everything else about it? Awful.

How do I share the page I'm on without sharing the amp link. It's an extra 2 clicks and heavily obfuscated.

When browsing history, if I'm expecting to see something from news org but instead see amp garbage?

Human readability (for URLs but also in other contexts, like json) is a feature.

Amp throws away most features of web browsing in exchange for page speed. It's a devil's bargain, and it's not even a necessary transaction. You can get fast web pages without sacrificing everything else.

That last point is literally the drum that hn has been banging since amp came out. If Google wants to reward pages for being fast, then do that. Don't reward them for being amp.

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