Ive forced myself to use Bing since google introduced AMP. Do I like it better than Google? No, I don't. But! I like not having google become my single source of content more than I dislike the slight drop in quality as a result of using Bing. I like the sites I go to, to have control over their content and being able to easily link to them.
I think it's reprehensible for google to push this so relentlessly and beyond simply stealing links it makes google into the "internet."
This (AMP) could easily be a standard, in fact it's mostly just common sense (good lightweight HTML/CSS/JS). Instead of Google forcing its way on users and creators it could just lower the page rank of the offenders.
One other thing about AMP that pisses me off as a user and an engineer is it's one more place to maintain meaning one more shitty neglected experience. As a user I hate it when AMP pages are broken and I somehow can't get to the non-AMP version. I don't blame the developers because we have enough on our plate. My anger is solely directed to google for making the damn mess in the first place.
Just as a FYI, Bing is a really large supporter of the AMP project.
“We started experimenting with AMP in our Bing App last May and have noticed that AMP pages load, on average, approximately 80% faster than non-AMP pages” says Marcelo De Barros, Group Engineering Manager in charge of the AMP integration at Bing.
People talk a lot of trash about AMP, but until there's another solution that allows me to go to a news website and actually read it, I'm an AMP supporter.
Do ad blockers really solve the problems that this article criticizes AMP for? You've closed one bag of worms and opened another one. How can independent publishers live in an all adblock world? State publishers like criticized in the article might survive. You're again centralizing journalism, this time into the few organizations that can get their readers to pay a subscription.
I think that the ones that will best survive in an ad-blocking world would be hobbyist journalists and bloggers. That does not seem to be that bad to be quite frank as it would probably lead to higher quality content, less copy-paste and less clickbaits.
Me. I run http://startupnews.com.au despite making no money doing it (as the plaintive pleas for sponsorship and donations on the site show). The Perth startup community needs it, so I run it.
There's similar blogs for every small community, run by people who care about that community. Usually unfunded, and only covering stories of interest to that community.
Shills and Kool-aid-drinking zealots mostly - they are the ones usually motivated enough to do 'journalism' for free. Don't expect any professionalism, depth or any form of investigative journalismbeyond tweet-storms.
They cannot. How can wagon wheel makers live in the age of the car? Their business model is defunct.
We outsourced our opinions and fact-finding to journalists for a few hundred years. Now that time has past. Journalists themselves have destroyed their own industry by producing a poor quality product. Maybe in future journalists will re-invent themselves as purveyors of pure factual reporting, and those that care about that kind of thing will pay for it. But it is a niche market. Democracy, decency, enlightenment and society will suffer of course. But those things were never guaranteed with any kind of real safeguards.
There's more to the world than the US. The press in, for example, The Netherlands and Finland might be opinionated but they're mostly factual and high quality.
Custom filters are absolutely possible, it just depends which adblocker you choose to enable. IIRC the block list has to be compiled to a static JSON file for Safari to consume, but most of the decent adblock apps on iOS provide a companion configuration application that lets you insert custom entries then recompile the block list.
If anything I prefer this way of working - Apple alone are responsible for maintaining a high performance adblocker in Safari, the wider app ecosystem just provides the block lists, rather than rely on app developers to write performant browser plugins.
Why don't I see a significant difference then? The only thing I've noticed about AMP sites is the pain of trying to navigate them, alongside the dual top bars (reminds me of toolbars back in the day) and impaired functionality.
I'm not aware of anything AMP does differently than non-AMP with regard to tracking, except that it's declared in a way that allows it to be cached+preloaded without falsely triggering analytics.
When a user searches for an article on Google and clicks on an AMP link it never leaves google.com, even if the AMP link is an external entity.
Repro:
1. Search for some BBC news on google.com, click on an AMP link and load a BBC page
2. Notice that you're still on google.com and not on bbc.com
Duckduckgo is a lovely idea with abhorrent search results. Like, unusably bad results, at least to the extent that I'm a reasonably tech savvy user. I'm often searching for papers as a grad student, or typing things "close enough" and hoping Google figures it out for me etc. Duckduckgo cannot keep up. I love Bangs, I love the idea, but the search is nigh-useless.
That said, I use StartPage, who have a contract I believe with Google. It's Google's search results, minus the tracking. It's as much as I am willing to compromise on something as fundamental as search.
The results for localized stuff, e.g. a local store, are horrible. The results for complicated questions where the query is either not very specific or the page might not have all words, are also really bad. But if you have a good idea of what you're looking for, which is most of the time for me, it works very well.
At least it's honest about not having results whereas Google presents 5 billion, all of which are missing one of the three keywords (which it notes in a small, light grey text, which you only notice after the first three results were completely unrelated and you were wondering what went wrong).
For example, "new double c++" is the query I did most recently and in the top 3 there are 2 results that answer my question.
Making something up at random like "torrent clients" gives me as top hit the Wikipedia article "comparison of bittorrent clients", which is better than expected.
I can't seem to think of a vague query right now. "audio books" gives me sites with audio books; "psychology books" gives me articles of 'the best 50 psychology books' and such; and looking in my query history, "draw unicode" seems vague but the top hit (shapecatcher.com) is the one I was looking for.
Something localized then: "drankwinkel echt" (where Echt is a place and drankwinkel a liquor store) indeed gives terrible results. The store name, surprisingly, works though: "gal & gal echt" gives similar results to google.nl.
> At least it's honest about not having results whereas Google presents 5 billion, all of which are missing one of the three keywords (which it notes in a small, light grey text, which you only notice after the first three results were completely unrelated and you were wondering what went wrong).
Yes, that's really bad; it's what killed Altavista and could really be Google's undoing.
Still, Google is miles ahead of the competition.
Small experiment: searching for "movie old man balloons" on Google and Bing.
On Bing there is a first line of 4 videos, none of them related to the movie "Up" in any way. The second link is to Up on Imdb (good). The 3rd link is to a crazy religious fanatic site page titled "Disney PIXAR's, 'Up' - The Sugarcoating of Pedophilia!" (WTF??!? - but at least related to the movie). The 4th link is again to a youtube video with no connection to the movie.
On Google, the first 8 links are to the movie. There is a line of images, all from the movie / movie poster. There's a list of 4 questions "People also ask" that shows questions about the movie ("How many balloons would it take to lift a house?"). To be fair, the crazy Baptist site does show up on Google too (God has good SEO!), but way down below the fold.
Anyway, my point is, when answering the question, Google is certain you're looking for information about Up, and tries to give it to you.
Bing seems to have doubts and tries to guess if maybe you're looking for a funny video of a man in the subway wearing a balloon hat (??!? it's not a "movie"!!) or the hit song "99 Luftballons" from 1983 (not a "movie" either!)
Bing tries hard, but is obviously more than a little clueless.
> Small experiment: searching for "movie old man balloons" on Google and Bing.
Your experiment's results are not repeatable. When I do that here:
* Bing gives me 8 pages about Up (including that spoof site), one about Danny Deckchair, and a page about a magician who re-creates old movies with balloons.
* Google gives me 13 pages about Up (also including that spoof site), a book of best movie scenes on its page for The Third Man, and an article from The Rotarian from 1948.
Of course, some knowledge of how these things work teaches that this is a terrible methodology, given that it does not account for the fact that both Bing and Google tailor their search results to the searcher. One should at the very minimum log out of one's Google and Bing accounts, which you made no mention of doing.
Yes. But the fact that it's a parody of fundamentalist Christianity makes it a very bad result, because it's a comment on religion (or fanaticism, or Internet culture, or what have you) and not about the movie itself.
A perfect search engine would not return this on the first page of results about the movie, because it's not about the movie.
> The results for localized stuff, e.g. a local store, are horrible... But if you have a good idea of what you're looking for, which is most of the time for me, it works very well.
DDG "worse" search results are also a product of you not being profiled. Or to put it in another way, Google better search results are also a product of all your habits being gathered and analyzed.
Sadly we can't have a search engine that knows nothing about us and guesses at the same time what we are looking for. DDG can give better results, but this require being more specific when searching.
I'm not sure this is true. Google results are still amazing when used at a friends' or a public computer and not logged in, etc. (not to mention incognito mode, which you could argue still profiles you through your ip).
Other search engines feel like a noob salesperson who needs to be told 5 times in 5 different ways what you need -- and it's really simple stuff too.
Google results get "better" (depending on your definition of better) as you go in very specific ways. When I browse I clear cookies every time a tab is closed and I never log into Google just for searching. I've noticed at work I'll be googling for programing stuff and if my session gets "stale" (been doing a bunch of searches without closing the tab) I notice Google starts making assumptions about what I want. For example, if I Google a generic programming term say "string," on a stale session Google will assume the string I want is programming rather than, say, crafting or physics, and the string I want is the language I've been Googling in my last few search terms. So if I googled "string" in a fresh session I get a couple generic Wikipedia pages and some references from various programming language. If I Google "string" in a stale session Google "knows" I'm looking for the Java string so they will show me Java string results. If I wanted those same results I'd have to Google "Java string." It does make you lazy at searching though because you start thinking "Google knows what I'm talking about."
DDG could still profile you via an account and just not sell the info to advertisers. Incorporate in Germany for the strong privacy protections, et voila :)
In my experience, DuckDuckGo just requires a habit shift. You're used to Google knowing everything about you and utilizing that to provide you catered results. Be more specific on DDG and you should be fine.
Not at all. I'm not logged in to my Google account at my day job and I still got relevant search results when I arrived. DDG wouldn't after months of use at home.
How else can they profile me in a brand new job, in a brand new Windows installation, in Firefox, if I'm not logged in? The organization I work for has a lot of different job types and we're all proxied through the same external IP so they couldn't even profile my job type.
I got relevant results in my first day there. I didn't notice a drop in result quality.
Google is just that good even if I hate to admit it.
There's still a limited number of job types at your workplace. If you search for "django" odds are none of your non-technical colleagues have been searching for anything other than the Python framework at work.
It has greatly improved over the years. I remember it being unusably bad when I first tried it in 2013, but today I only have to revert to Google once in a while. That being said, there are rare occasions when it fails spectacularly, bringing up totally irrelevant results for simple searches.
It seems to expect more precise queries, while Google is geared toward "close enough" searches. I've found that DDG is often preferable when I have an exact phrase in mind. Google is sometimes too helpful, correcting errors that are not actually errors and failing to take some queries literally enough.
The main issues I have with DDG are that it doesn't seem to prioritize recent results (which can be good, but usually isn't) and it fails at local results, which is basically by design.
>Google is sometimes too helpful, correcting errors that are not actually errors and failing to take some queries literally enough.
While I am still personally a huge fan of Google's work in this are and many others, sometimes I long for the days of straight boolean search queries in search engines. I could often find exactly what I'm looking for, and get the same result each time.
Are there any other major or effective engines that allow for boolean queries beyond AND/OR?
A full set boolean queries, while useful for specifying a query, are likely far too computationally expensive at scale. The reason you don't see most major search engines abandon them is because the resources are better spent investing into heuristic algorithms that benefit a majority of the userbase.
DDG feels like it's still using Google's early algorithms, whereas Google has moved to prioritising more question or natural-language based searches recently.
You use DDG as your default engine. For most common searches it works fine, particularly nice is that if there is a wikipedia entry it will show it right there. When you have a tougher search and it doesn't work you just slap a '!g' or a '!b' on the end and turn it into a google/bing search.
Maybe you're searching for something really niche, but I use DDG and have no problem with its results. If I can't find what I'm looking for, I can always use !g to check google, and most of the time google doesn't have the answer either!
It really is as good as google for most things, in my experience. I use it by default and when it can't find what I'm looking for, Google usually doesn't do much better.
one of the last areas I've found myself going back to google is when I'm searching for a gif... Duck Duck Go will return them, but it is usually a very small subset of the available gifs out there.
After 2 attempts it's now my default search "portal". As other said, generic results are low grade. But the bangs and the "control" are worth this loss. I can search really fast on dedicated websites !yt !gi !gmaps !wbm (waybackmachine) and I don't have to worry about what's going on most of the time.
For past few years, I go to try DuckDuckGo every once in a while (especially when someone suggests that again on HN), but it disappoints me every time with the quality of search results.
Also, if it is using Bing on inside, I'm not then sure why the results are still different than that(even at the places where there's no scope for personalization). For example type this line exactly in both bing and ddg:
difference between std list and std set
The first result DDG shows is of a difference between set and a vector - not only that, it also highlights that result in a Google Card inspired fashion (which is worse because Google does that only when they have a certain amount of confidence in the answer), while the first result Bing shows is an actual difference between list and a set. So either Bing is cheating DDG, or DDG is doing something stupid on top of its results. (Also, if you cover the above string in quotes, Bing still shows 'some' search results, while DDG doesn't).
May be after using the '!' ninja techniques it'll be same as Google, but then I have also come to love the fact that I can type in 'my next flight' or 'Show me emails from ....' or 'remind me to ... ' and other personalized things on Google so may be my priorities are different here.
Sounds like your priorities are different; and that's fine. DDG doesn't parse your emails so it doesn't have your location, flight info nor a lot of user data to build personalized results. I like it a lot, it's gotten much better but it requires adaptation when coming from Google.. or just !g
I tried Duck Duck Go exactly because of the AMP issue. Its search results are bad enough that I couldn't keep using it even though I wanted to. I'm on Bing for now.
I really don't ex: "ice cream calories" share several but not all sites and use a different order for those they share, which just suggests similar algorithms.
PS: DDG redirected image searches to bing, but not generic searches. Which honestly seems reasonable as doing image search well is incredibly hard, with minimal payoffs.
Bing just feels gross to me, just like Google. But as someone pointed out, I guess DDG uses Bing for some of its results, so I don't have much of an argument here.
My contract with a search engine is that they should provide links to other sites in a relatively painless way. In exchange for this the search engine can track me while I am on the site.
AMP breaks this relationship by refusing to let me leave the site and extends tracking to other sites. The speed difference is negligible to me and not worth this violation of privacy.
DuckDuckGo.com instead, for so many reasons. First, privacy aware. Their index is fine. They don't hide their tale and run, hiding behind captcha's and turning their users into slaves, when it comes to confronting bots: https://twitter.com/cyphunk/status/849615910545620992 (vid comparison of using google via tor vs using duckduckgo)
I am kind of shocked to see this be the top comment on this story, I remember getting shit on thoroughly everywhere for daring to point out how awful this was back when it first came out, seems like people are FINALLY willing to be a bit more skeptical of Google's actual intentions given their shady and abusive track record.
I think you've misunderstood what PWAs are? PWAs are fundementally websites which are built on a bunch of guidelines with performance and accessibility prioritized.
And if you follow those guidelines and with the right meta data, they get treated specially by certain 3rd party, like google/android letting you update them in the app store.
Just like AMP are fundamentally websites built on a bunch of guidelines with performance and accessibility prioritized which, once you sprinkle them with enough metadata, get treated specialty by third party like google.
Yeah, I don't think I misunderstood. AMP's guidelines are just more strict before the 3rd parties start treating you specially. And in both cases, the original website/app is just fine, until it starts getting treated specially.
sorry, terrible choice of words on my part (more like the world's worse freudian slip, as I was thinking "like apps in the app store). I meant that they're going to show up like any other app in the app list, settings to be tweaked/modified/deleted and so on.
> Google has no respect for [iOS Safari]. It’s a deliberate effort by Google to break the open web.
I could make the same argument that Apple cripples iOS Safari's implementations of emerging standards that aim to bring the web experience closer to a "native feel" to keep its app store revenue churning:
...but really it's a lot more likely that getting _all_ things right on _all_ platforms is the really, really hard thing about the web, for browser vendors and web developers alike.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence (or in this case, sheer overwhelming difficulty).
With respect to scrolling: We (AMP team) filed a bug with Apple about that (we didn't implement scrolling ourselves, just use a div with overflow). We asked to make the scroll inertia for that case the same as the normal scrolling.
Apple's response was (surprisingly) to make the default scrolling like the overflow scrolling. So, with the next Safari release all pages will scroll like AMP pages. Hope Gruber is happy then :)
Another bug I've noticed is that AMP breaks in-page searching with iOS Safari. If you perform an in-page search, the browser will not scroll to the found instances of the search term on an AMP page. I imagine it's related to the other scrolling issues.
Please, please fix this. It's impossible to support something that's foisted on us and breaks basic web functionality. If I were cynical, I'd say bugs like this are designed to degrade the web experience on iOS. There's a lot of bad web programming out there, but very few sites manage to break search.
I believe we have a webkit patch pending for this. Definitely on our radar!
Edit: some detail. Safari sometimes doesn't scroll find results into view when they are in overflowed space. This issue actually affects a large percentage of web pages. Fixing it was very easy, was just an oversight in WebKit.
On top of this: we currently have a team working to fix webkit bugs that are problematic for AMP. This, of course, will make webkit better for everyone.
Is that really Apple's stance? I find the scrolling to be the #1 reason why I bounce from AMP pages. I would hate for them to make this a system wide behavior.
In current iOS Safari, webpage scrolling is inconsistent from all other scrolling on the system. This was an intentional decision made long ago. In addition, overflow areas are consistent with the rest of the system, and thus inconsistent with top-level webpage scrolling. This is semi-accidental. In reviewing scroll rates, we concluded that the original reason was no longer a good tradeoff. Thus this change, which removed all the inconsistencies: https://trac.webkit.org/changeset/211197/webkit
Having all scrolling be consistent feels good once you get used to it.
That doesn't necessarily mean it was a good idea for Google's hosted AMP pages to use overflow scroll all along. The inconsistency definitely did feel weird. And the way they do scrolling prevents Safari from auto-hiding its top and bottom bars. I believe all the desired scroll effects could have been achieved without the use of overflow scroll.
Edited to add: the AMP scrolling model also breaks tapping the top of the screen to scroll to top, and this won't be fixed by scroll rate changes.
I figured that the different rates had to be intentional, but I did wonder why. Thanks for the explanation. I remember the checkerboard background on the 3G when you were scrolling too fast, if the speed was faster I mention it would've been way too easy to hit that.
It never occurred to me that Safari page is what the outlier, I just assumed that Safari pages matched the rest of the system and iframes for the thing that we're off.
Maybe this won't be as hard to get used to as I feared.
Yeah, I don't care either way. But Safari should have the SAME scroll inertia for every scroll context and ideally it is the same as used for native apps.
There are no such controls. There are just different places where one can scroll. All other browsers (as far as I know, and this includes Safari on desktop) make all of these the same, but mobile Safari chose to make them different.
Sorry, but there is some irony there. We were as surprised as anyone. I do like the new inertia much better. Allows for much faster scrolling similar to Android.
I don't think there's any irony here. You deployed something that worked horribly on iOS, you didn't offer a way to opt out, and when someone else put in a fix for your terrible UX that just happens to change everything else to the way your stuff currently works you use it to gloat and a guy who pointed out how terrible your UX was.
Honestly this whole thing (AMP and your comment) come off arrogant as hell to me.
I like the current iOS behavior because it's what I'm used to. I don't find the slower scrolling speed to be an issue at all. But if everything really is going to change then I will probably annoyed me for a while but I'll get used to it.
I'm not complaining that the scrolling behavior on AMP is too fast specifically (although that's how it feels to me), I'm complaining that it's DIFFERENT from everything else. All my muscle memory of how to scroll things is broken on AMP pages and only AMP pages. (I don't care if it's how iframes work, you deployed it anyway)
Once it feels like the rest of the system then it's not really much of an issue anymore. I'll get over my personal preference.
Well, they deployed normal HTML5, which because of how the page was defined happened to expose a weird interaction in how iOS performed some actions. They thought it was a bug in iOS and treated it as such. Getting called out as assholes for doing what they thought was the right thing (and by someone that was wrong on the facts to boot) probably rankled a bit. Calling out Gruber as both wrong and in addition so wrong that the company he thinks was maligned is actually changing to the behavior he dislikes does come off as a little snide, but given the facts I wouldn't hold it against them. I definitely wouldn't use arrogant to describe it.
They didn't explicitly set the behavior that way, but they deployed it knowing that WAS the behavior. And they didn't bother to change it or give anyone an option to turn it off or do something else making everyone on iOS suffer since they started pushing AMP.
They could've just as easily pushed you to a new page which contain the AMP content and wasn't an iframe, thus leaving all the standard feel and gestures working. Instead they choose to go along with what they were doing on android even though it was severely sub optimal on iOS.
I think choosing to do that WAS arrogant.
They made Google significantly harder to use as an iOS user because they didn't care and gave us no option to try and fix it.
I don't have an iPhone, so I can't check the actual behavior to see how broken it is. Is it just not fitting the Norms of the platform, or does it really impede usage?
I think the "correct" response in a case like this, where the platform owner has a bug and has committed to a fix in the pipeline for delivery, is highly dependent on the problem. Even then, it's possible to make the wrong choice given the information available at the time.
I prefer not to call the actions of a company and a group of people arrogant without more info than present, even if one of those people expressed a less than sympathetic opinion of the problem. I extend the same courtesy to Apple often enough, it would be hypocritical of me not to.
I don't think it was a bug, I think it was an intentional choice by Apple but I don't think it really mattered to most people untill AMP started using it.
The big problem with that that only exists on iOS is that the 'weight' of the content is much much less than normal web pages. All your muscle memory of how far and how fast to move your finger to get the page to scroll a certain amount is wrong. Instead the page scrolls MUCH faster and further. This would be bad enough except you're still technically on the Google page and as soon as you go back or close the AMP result the scroll speed is what you're used to.
The end result is it's incredibly frustrating and feels "broken".
I understand that Google's preferred solution caused a behavior that is severely sub optimal because of the way Safari currently works. My problem is I think they handled this extremely poorly and forced all iOS users to deal with it for what, over a year?
I'm glad apples fixing it but I don't like the way Google handled it... effectively saying to iOS users "too bad" since they didn't do anything to mitigate it while waiting for Apple's fixed to come through the pipeline.
> They thought it was a bug in iOS and treated it as such
The majority of end users don't know anything about divs and iframes and don't care whose bug it is. So the question remains-- since they clearly know that this bug exists, why would they ship like this?
Every time I land on an AMP page on my iPhone, the scroll gets out of control and all of a sudden I've unintentionally followed a link to some video that starts playing with sound. It's ridiculously annoying.
A hypocrite (Gruber, as evidenced in another thread) calls the AMP team hacks who do terrible work. Turns out their "terrible work" is actually Apple's bug and the AMP team points this out both to Apple and to Gruber. In your eyes, this makes it all their fault.
When called out on it, you double down by saying that the team is still to blame because they chose not to work around Apple's bug. You basically want Google to be part of Apple's captive audience.
No, seriously, take a step back and consider that this is what you're saying.
>A hypocrite (Gruber, as evidenced in another thread) calls the AMP team hacks who do terrible work
I must have missed this. When did Gruber call the AMP team hacks?
> Turns out their "terrible work" is actually Apple's bug and the AMP team points this out both to Apple and to Gruber.
This is flat out disingenuous, unless you're talking about something other than the originally submitted DF article. There were multiple examples of why Gruber thinks AMP sucks. Are you claiming that all of them are "Apple's bug"?
Although he didn't use the word 'hack' himself, Gruber said:
"Google has no respect for the platform. If I had my way, Mobile Safari would refuse to render AMP pages. It’s a deliberate effort by Google to break the open web."
So he sees them as intentionally sabotaging things.
Indeed, that's in alignment with what I had seen. It seems obvious at least to me that the actual character of Gruber's statements and @julianmarq's portrayal of those statements do not agree.
You don't think there's any irony in the fact that Google noticed that Safari was behaving badly sometimes, and asked Apple to fix it, and Apple said "wow thanks for pointing that out, we're going to make it much more extreme". Google asked for one thing, and because of that was given the exact opposite. That's pretty much the definition of irony.
>a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.
I wouldn't have expected Apple to speed up the scrolling on everything else if that's what's really happening, but I don't find it amusing.
As I said another comments though Safari was doing exactly what it was designed to do (for whatever reason they designed it that way). I don't think this is a bug on Apple's part. It makes sense to harmonize the scrolling behavior, but I don't believe it was unintentional.
Now I understand what someone was talking about when they said this might be ironic. I wasn't even sure what they were referring to. I can't place my finger on why this doesn't seem like irony to me. Maybe it's just not odd enough.
Snark? I think we're reading two different comments. I think it's fair to share surprise at a response like that from Apple. I would be surprised, too.
It almost feels like you're looking for reasons to be upset and finger-point. I hope that's not the case.
I took their original remark at the end as a snarky comment about Gruber. I didn't read it as being about the way Apple decided to fix things. If that was the intent it was unclear to me.
Sounds like Apple's underinvestment in mobile Safari makes it currently impossible to implement this well in web pages in iOS, and that the AMP team is working with Apple to fix their broken platform. I don't see how this isn't Apple's bug.
That they chose to ship that way instead of using an alternate implementation that didn't run into the problem ( or was less frustrating or provided an opt out ) was THEIR decision. They're not 100% blameless in this.
It wasn't a bug in Safari, that was simply the way the scrolling behavior was implemented in iframes.
It was still there choice to deploy using iframes knowing that that was the way it felt. They could've use JavaScript to load the contents into a div or simply pushed so far users to a page that had nothing but the AMP content on it.
They left it severely sub optimal and decided that was good enough… making google significantly more annoying to use on iOS than what it was before.
That was the choice they made and stuck too. No options to turn it off, no options to do it a different way; you just get stuck with it.
It isn't related to iframes directly. Iframes in mobile Safari are never scrollable. The div thing you suggest would have the same issue. If you are a web developer you likely have built a website that has this issue.
Ah. I mostly do back end work, the front and stuff I do we haven't spent any time on optimizing it for mobile, only desktop browsers. I'm not familiar with the quirks of mobile browsers. I only know the iframes scroll oddly because I've been told that was why AMP pages feel weird on iOS here on hacker news before.
If you haven't done much front-end word, let alone handled quirks of mobile browsers, consider listening to other people on this thread instead of arrogantly pontificating all around.
So because I don't know the intarcacies of mobile web development I don't get to have an opinion on the UX of a website I use every day?
So my top-of-the-head guess of something that might avoid it based on what I thought the problem was from other HN discussions wasn't right. What a sin.
That doesn't invalidate my experience or frustration as an end user.
I didn't like what I saw as their snark. When they replied they didn't apologize for it or even mention it, they just explained that the scrolling behavior was changing again.
My second comment was because I thought the original behavior of implementing AMP the way it was and forcing it on users was arrogant and has seriously annoyed the hell out of me since it originally started appearing on iOS. I've literally considered switching search engines to get away from it because it makes using Google that much harder.
Yeah, I called it terrible to their face. Because it frustrates the hell out of me. I've tried finding ways to contact google, I've tweeted at them, I've posted in previous discussions. At no point did anyone ever seem to wake knowledge the problem other than seeing people (who I assume we're not googlers) basically say it's not their fault because that's the way Apple implemented iframes.
Combined that arrogance with what I see as rudeness... and yeah. I said terrible twice. I'm frustrated as hell at this and don't like that the solution will be "it's going to stay there but Apple is going to make it a little bit better for you".
When the scrolling gets fixed? I'm still gonna be annoyed as hell at AMP pages. They break the experience, but now just a little less. Hurray.
nobody wants that. we like the way iOS scrolls and there's no reason for some pages to work different because you are imposing us an unwanted feature we can't disable and makes google impossibile to use. please remove this AMP thing. it's breaking the web - and the scroll is just the minor problem.
Maybe Gruber's comments about AMP's scrolling implementation were hypocritical (or naive, at least), but this isn't the biggest problem by far. Considering that Apple addresses what needs to be fixed in terms of how the web behaves on its browser, there's no reason for me to be unable to search for text on an AMP page or scroll back to the top on I tap the status bar on my phone.
I know, those are native platform affordances that the web doesn't need to care directly because iOS is not an open standard. But neither is AMP.
A little bit before 2017-05-21T00:52Z [1], moderator sctb updated [2] the submission's URL from the original blog post by John Gruber [3], to that of an article in The Register penned by Scott Gilbertson. Gruber's post quotes Gilbertson, and supports its main premise, but offers its own perspective.
Changing the submission URL is unfortunate, because a lot of the discussion in this thread prior to 2017-05-21T00:52Z pertains as much to Gruber's material as the Register article. Now a lot of this discussion, as you seem to have noticed, appears out of context.
I have to agree with him. AMP's different scrolling behavior in Safari makes me avoid it entirely--it's the same reason why I avoid using Chrome in iOS.
Google needs to kill AMP. Like many other teams in Google they are filled with arrogant people who believes everything Google have to become "standards" and don't give a damn about how they are being arseholes on other platforms.
Please don't "fix" the "bug" that disables the "scroll to the top of the page when the user accidentally taps the top of the screen" behavior. I loathe this behavior, have never summoned it intentionally, and can't imagine why anyone would ever want it.
I'm not sure I've ever needed to do that in all my life. But about three times a day I accidentally lose my place on a long webpage and there's no Undo.
In theory* I don't mind the idea of having a more standardised subset web page that has a consistent internal structure and that renders quickly.
However, having Google load this structured content and host it on its own platform is a terrible idea. Content should remain on the publisher's site. Putting too much content in one place is dangerous for competition.
* In practice there are implementation problems too, e.g. those mentioned in the linked article.
No, it does not happen, nor will it ever because that's fundamentally not how AMP caching works. A site doesn't pick an amp cache like they pick a hosting provider, with some sites cached on cloudflare-amp while others are hosted on google-amp. All amp content is on all amp caches. Google search is one AMP client, and it uses google's AMP cache. If, for example, bing wanted to serve AMP pages, they would need to choose an AMP cache to serve them from, and cloudflare's offering would be an option. One of the problems that AMP is trying to solve is individual websites hosting on insufficient architecture. If each site was allowed to choose what AMP cache it was served from, that would defeat the purpose. It's up to the client to choose the cache it uses, to ensure a consistent speed.
That's pretty much the point I was making. The wording from Google to publishers doesn't make this clear.
It is the implementation they chose, and it does have speed benefits. But, an edge cache that allows the end user more control, their own domain, an no hijacking header is possible, and would provide a notable speed benefit. If there were a choice between the two, publishers would likely pick the latter.
Publishers had a choice, and they overwhelmingly chose to host their sites on infrastructure that was too slow. That's why the AMP project exists, to take choices like that away from publishers, because they consistently make the wrong choices when you give them one.
Seems to me the right approach would be for sites to embrace the HTML5 semantic tags (<nav>, <article> and so forth), and browsers to offer a way to view just that semantically-marked-up content - without scripts, with restricted CSS, and maybe with some kind of filtering out of third-party content. Something like Firefox's "reader view", but including more bits of the page.
So the browser would still be downloading the exact same HTML document (straight from the publisher's server, how you want it) - just then ignoring all the clutter. Compare to AMP, which AFAICT necessitates serving a whole separate version of the page with only the blessed markup... it reminds me of the bad old days, having a separate mobile site instead of a single responsive design for all devices. All seems rather antithetical to that grand ideal of separating structure and presentation.
An idea I've been floating for a while is to have two HTML profiles in the future. Call it HTML6 document and HTML6 app.
HTML6 document is a restricted subset, similar to what you suggest. I would still allow complete design flexibility, and I might even allow a subset of JS, but only for presentation purposes. Definitely not turing complete, and no ajax etc.. Probably I wouldn't allow cross-origin resources with credentials. So you could include an image or stylesheet, but the browser would not send along cookies. What I'm aiming for is a replacement for PDF, something you could read on an ebook, etc.. Just a plain document.
On the other hand, I'd have HTML6 app to be able to use the complete web platform.
Isn't that pretty much what AMP is? IIRC, you don't need a separate version of the page with only AMP on it - Google's cache just extracts only the AMP parts of your page when caching. Or has this changed since I saw it? (And if so, why - that would probably also be an argument against your solution :) )
Right. Here's the problem and confusion with Google AMP: it's actually two seperate products.
1. There's the HTML/CSS/JS library/subset that's a good framework for building pages that load quickly
2. There's the 'CDN' that integrates with Google Search to preload and 'iFrame' the site in. Google 'has' to host/'iFrame' the content in their own google.com/amp pages because that's the only way to preload a page to make it display instantly.
Oh sure. Though I'm not actually trying to criticise the idea of a subset, if anything I'd support it. I'm just pointing to potentially useful precedent. It's not a new idea.
They can offer to do a CDN like CloudFlare, but make it optional.
I want to ensure that not a single bit of my data ever runs through Google's infrastructure, while still getting all the same benefits as if it did.
If Google treats sites different just for using an AMP Cache, then I'll have to send another complaint to the EU Antitrust committee.
My pages actually increased their loadtime tenfold when I tried them with AMP — they're tested on a HUAWEI IDEOS X3 on 64kbps GPRS. AMP increases load time to over a minute. (On a modern phone, with a modern connection, my pages are obviously also faster — I'm also testing with a Nexus 5X on 100Mbps 4G)
I can't just massively increase load time for pages just for a better ranking in search results, this shouldn't even be a choice.
> Google using their search monopoly to create a distribution monopoly is also extremely worrying.
Google is using any means possible to keep the web (html, js, css) relevant in the age of native apps (that includes Facebook app running on Android). If the web stays relevant, the same goes for Google search.
In contrast, I think google is making every effort possible to direct people away from the web and into the Google ecosystem. Searching for maps? Google. Searching for flights? Google. Searching for information? Google. The list goes on, and the technical means for delivery is essentially irrelevant.
To be fair, at least in wikipedia's case, that's potentially a good thing. Wikipedia isn't ad-supported, so having their data hosted elsewhere isn't actually a problem (as long as credit is given and so donations continue), because it becomes less expensive for them to host.
Definitely trying, but overreaching. The public is starting to cut out Google/the middleman and it's really just forcing shoppers into Amazon's ecosystem, those searching for flights to Skyscanner etc.
> Putting too much content in one place is dangerous for competition.
Only in this weird world of third-party-served-js-ads.
In an ideal world, I wouldn't care about where my content is served from. I just care 1) that many people see it, and if it is commercial 2) that I get money for it. I could just add some ads as inline to my article, served in the same way as my article's illustrations are. Not sure google allows that, though. Wouldn't surprize me if not.
The original content is still on the website, Google hosts a cache server, rehosting the website's content around the world closer to the users for faster access, for free.
In theory, it's a win-win-win situation. Publisher gets free hosting (with analytics and ad money still coming to them obviously), users get a faster experience and Google is happier if the users browser more content.
In reality, AMP is obviously not perfect but they have been addressing common issues and improving. I may not be fully sold on it yet, but I don't understand the massive blind hatred.
Saying "people can just optimize their website" doesn't mean shit. They've had years and no one has been. Sites have been getting slower every year despite browsers getting faster. No one gave a single shit until AMP came around...
The main problems I have are that it breaks two really important web features: sharing links and trust. Users seeing google.com URLs means they trust them more, which has helped propaganda sites and phishers.
The other thing is that for me, AMP has not been faster many times. I know they're working on it but having to download and run 100KB of external JavaScript before rendering frequently meant that it was slower than the real page. It helps the stragglers but e.g. WaPo or NYT load just as fast and that should be enough.
I'm aware of that but it's new – it took a year to add, giving many time to develop a negative association with the icon – and it's still clumsy compared to the standard web experience.
With real web pages, the native sharing UI just works as it does everywhere else.
With AMP, you have to know to tap a different unfamiliar icon and then know that the unstyled URL displayed is actually a link you can interact with. That means that sharing goes from one tap to 2-3 and that's after people learn that Google gives substandard results doing what they're familiar with and so you need to remember to do something else only for pages which you found on Google.
That's also not an alternative — Google can't be allowed to treat pages different in their results just for using Google's AMP Cache.
An AMP page served without cache has to be treated the same, or this becomed exactly the freedom issue that this entire discussion is about.
My pages are actually optimized a lot, and they actually get about 10x slower with AMP than without.
I don't want to have to choose between fast loading and good SEO, I want both. And Google only offering good SEO to those who let Google track all user interactions with their page is also not ideal (I specifically do not use any ads, analytics, or tracking, not even storing IPs in the server logs).
I doubt that CDN is really that important. Maybe if your site serves content overseas then there is a difference but what about a website in a relatively small country that is visited mostly by locals? The CDN doesn't make big difference here.
If your server supports HTTP/2 and has a connection with a good bandwith then static resources can be loaded really fast without any CDN because all the resources can be loaded in parallel without waiting in a queue.
The real motivation for publishers to implement AMP is that they hope to get better position in search results.
It is interesting that AMP is about the only edge cache that doesn't let you use your own domain. Cloudflare is fairly good evidence that it's workable at scale. Of course, that would eliminate the hijacking header and Google control over the URL.
Do you think Google wants to hijack the URL and add extra chrome? They don't. They want the absolute fastest performance which requires prerendering which requires hijacking the URL. (This seems like a bad tradeoff to everyone on HN.)
That extra chrome didn't even include a way to see the original URL until after much squealing. It did, however, include left/right swipe to other people's content. The MVP that rolled out fairly clearly shows who benefits.
An edge cache of an optimized page is plenty fast without preload. Images, in fact, can be preloaded cross domain if that is really needed.
You know it's a mess when the New York Times has to inject a "sorry this video doesn't work on AMP pages, visit our site" message on stories.
I mean that when you click a search result in Google you should go to the publisher's site, not to Google's cache of the content. It may have changed since, but that's how it was implemented originally by Google:
"…but there’s a big catch: if readers decide to share a link to an AMP page they’ve clicked on through a Google search, the link points to Google.com (for example, google.com/amp/yoursite.com/yourpage/amp), not to your site. A Google spokesperson confirms that there isn’t a way to both have your AMP-optimized appear in Google’s prioritized search listings without having that content hosted on Google’s AMP Cache servers."
1. You can (and must) host AMP content on servers of your own choosing.
2. Google's crawlers ingest your AMP content, validate it, and re-host it in Google's AMP Cache. Bing and other folks run similar crawlers and caches.
3. Google search results will only link to AMP content on Google's own cache.
So yes, you can host your content on your own servers. And you can give people direct URLs to that content. But Google users will only ever see links to the copy of your content that Google hosts; your servers never see that traffic.
There is no way to opt-out and still be considered a valid AMP page.
If by "anyone" you mean "my tech savvy friends at google" then yes. I've seen many friends end up on a google-hosted AMP version of a webpage, unable to complete whatever ticket purchase etc they needed because whatever autoAMPifyer the origin site uses produced half broken pages. These users have no idea what AMP is or why the page doesn't work (or that they could have reached the origin site directly if they click around on several unlabeled half-invisible icons in the fake-address-bar on top). In fact, they don't even realize they aren't browsing the origin site. They just give up.
Conceptually this isn't all that different from having a website that works in browser A but not B due to insufficient testing. Why did they not fix it?
Because how many website operators continuously google their own web site on mobile devices to click through to experience their google-hosted AMP editions? I would wager it's a fairly small % of the number of websites running an auto-AMP-ifying wordpress plugin, for example.
I've seen plenty of badly designed mobile websites over the years and these sites seems to have turned out okay - most mobile browsers keep the option of "Request Desktop site" very accessible for a good reason.
The worse case I've seen is a site in which every page crashed Mobile Safari without fail regardless of which version you ask for. It was eventually fixed but I never figured out why. If the sites are just running some script without checking then the admins have failed their line of duty.
Well, I suggest you start giving AMP content that isn't in Google's cache the same preferred treatment in search results that you give cached content.
I'm just going to file another complaint to the EU Antitrust committee otherwise, as this is a simple and clear violation. (Although I doubt my own complaint would be very relevant — all large publishers already have filed such complaints, and Google will be fined for it).
My pages actually increased their loadtime tenfold when I tried them with AMP — they're tested on a HUAWEI IDEOS X3 on 64kbps GPRS. AMP increases load time to over a minute. (On a modern phone, with a modern connection, my pages are obviously also faster — I'm also testing with a Nexus 5X on 100Mbps 4G)
I have the choice between a massively worse user experience, or worse search ranking. And that's a choice that's just not acceptable to me.
The linked article says: "Yes, AMP pages load fast, but you don’t need AMP for fast-loading web pages." Well yes, but people don't build fast webpages without AMP. They could've done all the time, yet webpages got more sluggish over the years.
You're right, I was imprecise in my brevity. Speed is definitely a signal in ranking. I'm mainly grousing at classes of results -- like the "Top Stories" carousel -- that are only available to AMP pages, and rather difficult to organically rank above. The AMP results also get more vertical real estate, flashy thumbnails, publisher logo images, etc.
For example, searching for "Python" returns five pages of results where only two aren't about the programming language. But at the top of the page, bested only by python.org itself, is a huge carousel of 11 AMP stories about snakes in the everglades. These stories also appear in the normal search results, but not until the bottom of page 7.
So somehow the #68 result, "Python hunters eliminate more than 100 snakes from Everglades," got boosted to #2, because rankings #2 through #13 (if you count the AMP carousel) are not available to merely fast and relevant content.
Ah, yeah. Truth be told I realised after hitting 'send' that you may have meant that.
This being the case, I think even if building fast webpages may not allow one to circumvent AMP in the instant, it is still a strong way of removing much of the grounds for its existence.
I could be wrong, but from what I've seen, it's not possible to create a non-AMP page that loads faster than AMP, on account of Google's JS hot-loading and caching. AMP always loads faster for me.
The complaint about AMP's strange UX paradigms is valid: it works very hard to pretend like every AMP article is a standalone website, but it actually behaves like a viewport-wrapping iframe, where Google Search is on the outside and the article is on the inside [1]. But it's not a personal affront to iOS; it's more of an artifact of Google's confusing market strategy and conflicting requirements for AMP's deployment: pretend like AMP pages are real browser-resident tabs, while actually driving traffic around within the confines of Google Search (vs. outside) when possible. As much as I don't care for their strategy, I respect needing to balance conflicting requirements. They should scrap the dishonest UX and be up-front about what they are, as I write [1].
But Josh descends to hyperbole. I've been both critical and supportive of AMP on here [2], but it's important to not lose sight of the big picture. AMP isn't an effort by Google to kill the open web; it's a technology whose existence was forced by Facebook Instant Articles' meteoric rise, a competitor from a company that doesn't even operate on the level of the open web, but runs a family of products where the data flow is one-way: inbound.
Instant Articles made publishing harder on the web, giving preferential treatment to articles posted within Facebook's walled garden (cf. AMP giving preferential treatment to content that adheres to the AMP spec, the same way they give preferential treatment to content served with TLS). With Instant Articles fizzling a bit [3], AMP's importance as a strategic play is lessened, and we can enjoy its benefits without feeling like we're pawns in a game between two massive content aggregation portals.
Besides, Apple News is the same idea as AMP; I'd be curious how Josh feels about that.
Apple News is really just RSS. I think Gruber's Daring Fireball stuff in Apple News just comes from his RSS feed. It's all hosted on your servers, so it's basically just a specialized browser.
AMP pages don't intrinsically live on google.com. Rather, when you use Google Search on mobile, some results may have AMP equivalents, they're often prioritized on or closer to the top [1] or otherwise highlighted (like in a carousel). As of writing, these results are marked with the lightningbolt-in-circle logo and the text 'AMP' somewhere in the result's most immediate box [2].
Clicking on one of these AMP results in Google Search will lead to a Google-hosted page with the base URL of "google.com/amp/", which loads an iframe (or equivalent) of the AMP article content. This whole thing takes up the entire viewport, save for a small grey horizontal bar up top, which collapses (hides) with JS if you scroll down far enough, but is otherwise pinned to the top, staying adjacent to the browser chrome.
This AMP navbar, as of time of writing, has the original publisher's domain name in the middle (which isn't a link, just informational text); then on the right side is a link ("chain-link") icon which will produce a small overlay containing the article's original (non-AMP, non-google.com/amp/ link), and a vertical triple-dot button with a link to 'More info'. This 'More info' link takes you to a Google Search Help article [3] (along with a really, really long visit_id as a tracking parameter), which talks about AMP and the Google AMP Cache, says that "The Viewer is a hybrid environment where Google and the third-party webmaster may each collect data about you", links to a few FAQs and the Google privacy policy, and the like. In the past, the navbar was different [4], and its deficiencies where a frequent source of criticism.
In short, Google Search on Mobile serves AMP results out of Google's own AMP Cache in a not-completely-obvious in-place wrapping viewer that tracks your visits, but it's now possible to get original URL [4]. Meanwhile, Cloudflare, currently the only other operator of an AMP cache, offers auto-AMP links [5] for customer domains, and offers an SDK to customize the wrapper-viewer [6] that will surround the articles surfaced for that domain.
Apple News is a client application that combines a feed-reader with articles delivered from Apple News' servers; these latter types of articles are always hosted by Apple [7], and in the beginning the only way to publish to it was to use Apple's APIs to post to Apple News directly [8][9]. Now there's integrations that will consume content out of your CMS and post it to Apple News on your behalf, which makes it easier to use, but doesn't change the fact that the the content is published into Apple's ecosystem.
HTML is already fast. It's the stuff that's added to the page that slows it down, and we already have plenty of standards, techniques and solutions to make sites faster.
AMP is just an alternate HTML framework that prevents certain things, that's all. Not sure why everyone is so eager to opt-in to a less flexible system instead of fixing their existing web presence. All it does is increase the amount of time and resources needed to now maintain effectively 2 different versions of the same site while also losing control over rendering, URL location and privacy.
Also the main reason for slow sites is all the ads - ads which are are usually served by DoubleClick, the biggest ad server on the planet and owned by Google.
I am on your side -- just chiming in to share my observations.
To 99% of the businesses I worked with, software development is a singular expense. It's treated like buying a tractor for the farm. Hell, even farming equipment is more generously funded by the buyers for possible future expenses (compared to most software development) -- maintenance, repairs, parts that periodically need replacement, fuel.
For one reason or another, most businesses treat software development like buying a socket wrench from the local store and never even thinking of spending another penny on the developed product in the future. They expect it to run perfectly forever.
That only makes AMP worse. Many publishers are already squeezed with dev resources, the last thing they need is yet another standard to support instead of putting that time towards the original HTML that is universally available to all users and devices.
Absolutely. You know, in a perverse way of seeing at it, I kind of feel good that Google forces AMP; they are like "Hah, you all stupid motherduckers couldn't get your own crap together for 15 years, guess it's time for you to be ruled, if you can't make use of your freedom". If you look at it that way, it makes sense.
Still, maybe it's time the web development in general gets its crap together indeed. One can dream, right?
Yes. Most often, it's a business management and priority issue than anything technical. It's far easier for developers to point to AMP limitations and just say "its just not supported" rather than try to argue against adding more cruft to the page and get overruled anyway.
Very true. The farmer is also aware it's not a maintenance-free machine, unlike businessmen who think software never needs another penny of investment.
Because when Google says, "We can make your page faster" management listens. But when a company's own engineers say it, management says, "Google knows better."
I know it might not be their shtick, but I wish the post focused more on the "publication independence" part of the criticism. Giving Google control over prioritizing a subset of the web, and letting them optimize for it, just gives them a better way to filter content. They seriously have enough power over the web as it is.
The other criticisms about how it performs on iOS seem truly secondary, they could easily fix them but we're still left with the far bigger issue.
Additionally, criticisms about iOS having a closed ecosystem seem irrelevant to this. An App Store is one thing, but starting down the path of effectively adding "high speed lanes" to the supposedly free web is scary.
Gruber's first link ( that's not part of the quoted block or a link to the article he's quoting from ) going to a previous piece of his about the publication independence problems of going along with AMP.
Well said. It seems impossible for me to believe that the trajectory Google is on doesn't end in catastrophic, dystopian disaster for us, the consumers. That should have been the focus, rather than scrolling behaviour.
The only reason AMP is even viable is because the current alternatives are even worse.
Publishers have to date shown a remarkable inability to grasp the idea that user experience matters. Just about every major online publication is painful to browse on a mobile device, even ones that have embraced responsive design, because of things like slow-loading ads, excessive use of JavaScript, and enormous modal prompts for things like subscription offers and newsletter signups. Every year the situation gets worse. And no publisher appears to be willing to buck the trend; presumably they believe that, as long as everybody else's site is just as bad, doing so would just be leaving money on the table. So the economic incentive for change is not there.
AMP is a terrible idea for a lot of reasons, any one of which would in a sane market make it an instant non-starter. But the state of online publishing demonstrates that it is anything but a sane market; it's a market trapped in a death spiral, and in that situation any idea that seems to offer a way out is going to get some traction. So it is with AMP.
The only way to make AMP (or something like it) irrelevant would be for the publishers to get their houses in order on their own, without the need for external pressure. But their leadership doesn't have the kind of farsightedness such a move would require, and that leaves room for someone like Google to come in and do their jobs for them.
AMP is Google's latest attempt to build a walled garden. It's more dangerous to the web than Facebook's WG because of Google's near-monopoly on search. AMP does indeed need to die in a very hot fire.
And in the long term, it's high time somebody built a less creepy, better functioning search engine.
I am aware Bing also supports AMP, but reducing Google's dominance in search data is key on preventing them from determining web design going forward.
DDG uses multiple sources, including Bing and Yandex. They also have their own efforts like their knowledge graph-type data features, which are open source and can be contributed to.
Bing user here. I switched a few years ago when I finally got sick enough of Google's many creepy abuses of power.
It's just as good. As others have noted, Google's search is only good when you're signed in. Because they use all that data to personalize the results.
Honestly? I've come to loathe the abysmal performance of the modern web so much that I'm ready to accept AMP. Half the reason I come to hacker News is that the site runs fast. And half the reason I comment before reading the article is because it doesn't.
I often comment without reading the articles because on an older device it's impossible. 90% of links will just crash the browser in 10 seconds. I can watch an hour long youtube video just fine, but trying to load a newspaper article will make it keel over and die.
Disabling javascript does fix a lot of it, but then I can't vote on HN, and I like doing that.
AMP needs to either be drastically rethought or killed. Nothing more annoying for me on my iPhone than clicking a link and it's AMP - as it means missing features, broken scrolling, masked URL and worst of all, in page search is totally broken on the iPhone! So annoying that there is no way to disable it - if Google persist in pushing it then it might push me to try alternatives!
It seems to me that only iOS users are complaining -- as an Android user I am blown away by how readable AMP pages are.
I can just get to the page, read it, and then leave. There's no futzing around with:
* long scrolling down "the fold" filled with clickbait in-site links or other unrelated nonsense
* interstitial and overlay ads
* crappy non-mobile interfaces
* "Shared" buttons stickied to the bottom or top of the viewframe
There's still ads around the page (in-content ads between paragraphs and "you may like" or "recommended" ads at the bottom of the page) and navigational elements to browse outside of the AMP page. It's the mobile content consumption experience as it should be.
A way to disable it while seeing Google results is to start from DuckDuckGo but add "g!". This goes through a different Google interface that always returns normal links.
Indeed they do! Thanks for the pointer. Looking a bit deeper, it looks like that's a special case for g! rather than something that works across all DuckDuckGo bangs.
I use ddg myself and as much as I like it, it's still quite a bit away from Google in quality of search results. Usually it's good enough, but I still get result pages where ddg has nothing I want and appending !g gives me what I want in #1
I switched my phone to DDG a few months ago because I was sick of crappy AMP pages. I find the results to be decent for quick searches but not helpful for really researching something–which I'm okay with since I don't usually do heavy research on my phone and I can add a !g if I'm not getting what I need.
Have been using DuckDuckGo as primary search engine for more than a year. It's OK for many cases but the search results aren't yet there in terms of quality or relevance in many cases. Even searching for AMP shows the AMP spec page after some almost useless dictionary sites, in the search results.
I feel like I may be in the minority here. I don't like the philosophy behind AMP, but with the internet at my mildy rural house, AMP articles can be sometimes the only way to access the news without waiting 30+ seconds for a single article.
AMP was born dead no need to kill it. As the webmaster of many websites, the last time I heard customers complain about rankings in SRPs was ten years ago. Their main concern nowadays is likes, follows and shares. I keep telling them: put some effort on your website, own your audience, you do not own your FB page much less the fans and likes there. They don't listen. Trapped in the hype.
In this light, how do I sell to them the idea that investing in AMP content (same trap different server) will help with rankings/performance where they do not care?
Sadly enough, the Internet is happening inside social networks, Amazon and mobile apps. AMP is late to the party, no?
What kills me about AMP's UX is that not only is it a dark pattern, it's not even a new dark pattern.
Back, say, 10-12 years ago it used to be really common for sites to jigger their outgoing links, such that the target site would appear in an iframe underneath a toolbar from the original site. This was widely reviled, and mostly died out, and the fact that Google is reviving it really bothers me.
How is this a dark pattern? Sites opt into it, users get a streamlined interface for content consumption, everybody wins.
The only losers in this are those seeking to "curate" the user experience (UX) on their sites, and personally I lump them in with malicious ad peddlers -- to hell with them.
Sites opt-in under heavy pressure that they'll lost placement if they don't. Users lose the ability to get the normal site rather than the AMP version when browsing on mobile devices.
The only way that would be accurate is if Google targeted content creators randomly for rent seeking, but the fact of the matter is Google has a vested interest in making sure their search results are compellingly useful to users.
Personally I'm using Google search more because AMP makes things faster for me. It's a win-win for me.
I do not understand the dislike this community harbors for AMP. I personally really enjoy the system; whenever I'm searching for any type of article on my phone (Android), I prefer AMP pages, because they load faster and are far more responsive than some of their more bloated counterparts.
It's not just about responsiveness. About half of the AMP pages I open on Safari on iOS literally do not scroll at all, instead scrolling the top bar with the fake URL on it, so as a user AMP is literally breaking the web.
I think the frustration here is seeing the decay of the open web and the rise of AOL-esque walled gardens in which your Facebooks and your Googles own the access methods, and every other third party is subordinate to them.
These guys at Google are abusing the web in order to prevent you from navigating away from google hosted content (I'm a technical user and it still took me way too long to find that menu in the corner), in much the same way that Facebook apps make it hard to escape their respective walled gardens.
I'd like it if people made non crappy websites instead of amp sites that have slightly different behavior than normal websites. Amp adds nothing of value compared to just writing a non bloated site
The fact that you say android explains everything to me. I'm sure Google made sure it was a decent experience on their operating system. But it's clear they didn't give two seconds thought to iOS, and haven't bothered to improve it since it was released.
It really does make google search feel broken. Many of the top results no longer "work right".
Ignoring all the other issues of who is in control and whether it's a walled garden and all that other stuff… On iOS it's a terrible user experience. That ALONE would make me hate it.
Well now you know how most of those web pages felt on Android before - web devs tested on mobile Safari and left pages broken and utterly stuttery on Android web browser.
Why do you expect Google provide a good experience in iOS? Heck I can't even connect to my Apple calendar in Android. Does Apple care? Is there a apple mail app for Android? AMP is fine in all browsers except Safari. AMP is great for browsing with 100£ cheap phone when I was in Thailand.
This community hates AMP the cache, AMP the centrally controlled place for all news which Google can easily manipulate or censor if a totalitarian government should ask them to, the AMP that gives pages an advantage in search results only if they let all their content go through Google.
No one's complaining about AMP the web framework — which is the part responsible for the performance and responsiveness.
As for amp, I read that it needs to use iframes (and Javascript). Yikes. We can easily write a program to strip out iframe targets as well as links to Javascript.
amphtml does look great in a text-only browser that does not load iframes automatically.
It's really annoying trying to copy and paste URLs from Google results. It also seems largely unnecessary, can't they detect clicks using javascript? I have noticed they have started doing this with links sent through Google Hangouts messages as well. I do remember a time when they weren't doing this and it was very refreshing because everyone else was.
Google, Facebook, and Apple all have walled gardens for reading the news on mobile.
The web as we know it was killed when you couldn't link to a news site because it'd serve ad interstitials (Forbes) or full screen pop-over ads (basically everyone).
I think the real problem is journalists rely on advertising income to do their job. That model requires them to rely on Apple/Facebook/Google for their livelihood, and to focus on sensationalist headlines and quantity over quality (to get ad impressions). One of the most shocking things for me was seeing Buzzfeed have some of the better written pieces in the last year -- all of those stupid "10 best/worst/funniest" type lists provided the ad revenue to do actual journalism that other publications didn't have the budget to do. But it's not clear to me how to break this dependency; for example, UBI might come with strings preventing the publication of pieces critical of the government.
I'm honestly just too scared that Google would gain an even larger foothold in the web to consider implementing AMP on any sites, but the UX argument is valid as well
I actually really like AMP but not for articles but for products in webshops. The media on the internet is such a mess nowadays anyway that having AMP pages makes no difference whatsoever for the content, sharing and talking. How is google optimized content any different than having to print magazines so that they fit through your mailbox? It is just a alternative method of delivery. The truth is that for the everyday user the only interesting part is the content. Not the ads, not the comments, especially not the page layout and hopefully not the links to other "You never believe what X things about Y" articles across 10 X different page loads. AMP for web articles may die as publishers try to remain more independent or relevant in other forums (snapchat, instagram stories, facebook live etc.) but the idea of fast and simple mobile pages should remain.
For webshops where product discovery is really important and having a fast google search result could (I dont have data to back this up) really drive users to use your webshop instead of the competitors. AMP style pages force developers to focus on what is actually important on the page.
> How is google optimized content any different than having to print magazines so that they fit through your mailbox?
That's pretty much the point. The web was supposed to free us from those kinds of practical constraints - why let Google keep them alive for grubby commercial reasons?
Freedom would be to choose whether format you like. Web is anything but that as every developer and user has to rely on set of rules and software to be able to communicate and access it. In practice most of us have zero power on the system itself. Someone else (businesses and organizations funded by businesses, developers working in such organizations) have the power to control how the web works. At the moment google yields much of the such power as does facebook, amazon, twitter, apple and others. Truthfully I see the whole internet today as a business enterprise that as a side effect allows everyone to share their everything. Internet as we know it will never be free and thats probably part of the reason why there has been a movement to "fix the internet" (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs-creat...)
Practical constraints and solutions stem from real world problems. AMP is an attemp to fix broken thing. Yes, internet was created for very different use and with different motivations than what it stands for today. I truly understand the concern of having a big tech behemot take control over the content for monetary gain but I dont really see the problem as a technical one. Whether you use Bing, Google or even DuckDuckGo you rely on someone else to find you stuff and thus give them the control to feed you information they think you want.
The bigger issue is the legistlation and how basic economy works, especially in the states where companies probably yield the most power over the government than in any other place in the world.
Looks like Google have recently added a means of getting out of the AMP "jail" and arriving at the original source site by clicking a little link icon in that irritating header that constantly pops over content while scrolling.
This is very welcome. My biggest gripe with AMP was that there was no way out of it.
Too little for me. I still can't easily copy that URL, and there's no way to opt out of it. Instead of fixing their complete break to the way with the web works, they put in a little tiny patch and clean it's just as good.
You can now (although that's still different from any other site). I'm pretty sure that was only added a few months ago and when it was first released you couldn't easily copy the URL.
"it breaks the decade-old system-wide iOS behavior of being able to tap the status bar to scroll to the top of any scrollable view"
Wait. I don't know of this feature. For example I attempted to tap my addresss bar on iOS but it just goes to change the address. How do I use this feature?
So AMP benefits google because faster page loads = more DFP views (and also more $ for publishers); AMP benefits consumers because JS is not murdering their memory and dataplans. It seems like web developers are the ones that hate it.
Have you been to Daring Fireball? It's one of the fastest loading pages on the whole Internet because it's not crapped up with lots of stuff. Gruber's site is proof you don't need AMP to have fast loads.
I honestly don't know this: how exactly are AMP pages monetized? Weren't there articles recently that publishers who went with AMP or Facebook's version saw steep declines in revenue?
AMP has an ad component.[1] It seems to have gotten a lot of ad network participation now, but it was pretty limited (i.e. effectively no money via AMP views) last year when I was working for a major content publisher. It's undoubtable that the company lost a lot of ad revenue in exchange for protecting its position in Google search results.
I can't imagine that AMP would load much faster that the current Daring Fireball design. If it's faster, I would probably guess that it's just the different routes between the AMP cache on Google and Daring Fireball's host. But, DF isn't using AMP.
I seem to recall that publishers who used the Facebook version saw a decline in revenue, so I think you're right about that point. I don't know about AMP, though.
I think google, which you can google ;), published a study showing that users are more likely to stay on a webpage if it loads under some threshold time. And if this is the case, users are more likely read the content and see the ads on said webpage. Hence, more $$$ for publishers.
I want Apple News and Instant Article to join in AMP so that media developers could reduce the cost of news distribution following the single standard. I even want crawling services, Feedly or Pocket, to serve AMP with advertisements so that I could support writers, journalists and media companies; besides, I have no idea if web feed, RSS or Atom, could consume AMP.
Google, which would gain the most benefit from AMP, deserves criticism for potential abuse of their power. Online media, which serve pages with poor performance, deserve criticism for its reluctance to improve their poor UX. AMP, however, hardly deserves criticism, through a perspective of user experience and news distribution.
AMP may look intimidating to the open web philosophy, be tepid approach from a technological point of view. But we need more experiment as it stands: everyone can become a media with the Web, old media is still playing a valuable role in society, online media lack prospects for the future to be profitable enough to invest in journalism. Fighting for the open web is good, but fighting for it without caring about anyone but technological principle is no good.
> Except that, hilariously, to create an AMP page you have to load a, wait for it, yes a JavaScript file from Google.
What does the Javascript file do? Is there an open-source equivalent? If it transmits data to Google, could you instead collect the data server-side and send anonymized data with a cron job once-a-day to Google's endpoint to reduce the slowdown and privacy issues?
It looks like AMP bans all Javascript except for the one Google-provided Javascript file, which provides common UI components:
"While it does allow styling the document using custom CSS, it does not allow author written JavaScript beyond what is provided through the custom elements to reach its performance goals."
Unless Google's library includes everything, even a simple 'Delete' button requires Javascript if you want to use the right HTTP verb. I'd worry about using anything that leads me into a corner like that.
I feel like the majority of the benefits of Google AMP could be realized with an nginx & Apache plugin combined with Google's CDN.
If it was implemented in this manner, you could keep your existing URL structure and not be forced onto Google's domain. I'm sure many more developers would be okay with AMP if this was the case.
I don't like AMP for no other reason than I don't believe there are any genuinely decentralized initiatives anymore.
"Oh, we open source it, you know", seems the common answer.
If an initiative is rolled out from the innards of one of the tech giants, and there are a bunch of other tech giants contributing to the initiative because it is open source, and most of the contributors and maintainers just accidentally happen to be also be employees of the tech giants, then stop and wonder about it for a while. And then reject it. That is, don't participate in the initiative.
Here is why: at the moment, the cost of open sourcing is minuscule for the giants but the benefits are enormous, and surprisingly often leads the entire tech sector down the path of greater oligopoly (Android being an excellent example). Another way to put it is, given none of the tech giants directly compete with each other in their respective core profit centers, open source is becoming a nice little platform (intentional or unintentional) for extending oligopolies.
There is no realistic chance that the open source code can be used by a competitor against the one who proposes the initiative (if you know of a counter-example, I would be happy to hear about it). But, there is every realistic chance that an initiative like AMP could extend a heavy toll on a genuine but small competitor in terms of code compliance (e.g. DuckDuckGo) and put them out of business.
But then, don't we all benefit from the nice byproducts of their technical innovations? In sum total, once you see the reduction in privacy, competition and decentralization of the web, probably not.
I suspect whoever made that executive decision at Google to use "AMP" was too young to remember Frontpage and so many years fighting with MSIE. How soon we forget. AMP is bad news. Keep your hands off my design. It's not your Internet, Google. PS: I'm on Linux, not an Apple fanboy :-D
On our site, we just load AMP as a base experience, and load our other stuff on top of it if it's not served in the AMP browser.
So we get the initial render speed of AMP, along with the SEO advantages, and can still implement features not supported by AMP for the majority of our users.
It's called HTML, and it's been around for a number of years.
If you don't put 12 megs of JavaScript on it and five auto playing video ads… you'd be surprised how fast web pages can be.
This isn't a problem that "needs" solving. It's not like it's impossible or even difficult to make a fast loading pages with the existing technologies. The people who didn't care before or just outsourcing it to someone else who doesn't care about them and everyone's losing in the process.
You're missing the point. Once you've clicked on the link, it's too late. Putting an icon on the link that says "this isn't one of those bloated pages" seems useful, particularly for people on slow connections.
In theory, someone else could create another standard and write browser extensions to put an icon on links that meet that standard.
The HTML standard doesn't help with this, not by itself, anyway.
> The people who didn't care before or just outsourcing it to someone else who doesn't care about them and everyone's losing in the process.
There's probably another factor involved: The people who actually build the sites rarely have final say on their content. They usually report to a VP of marketing who is non-technical and who doesn't care about load time but does want as much bling and ad revenue as possible.
I care about page weight and have mine render quickly without AMP and without being in Google's clutches. In particular I try to have the page sensibly renderable with the first 10kB or so of content down the wire.
And I try not to have anything critical depend on JavaScript.
I'm not sure when there is going to end up but because google amp is hosted on google servers you can actually read such articles on GoGo plane flights with out paying for Internet. It was kinda nice although I'm not sure how long until this will be fixed.
News websites dug their own graves. AMP is a solution to a simple problem: the inability for websites to reach acceptable perf levels. For users, AMP is a blessing. It even improves the ad situation a bit (no more perf impact).
When does that bloody pagerank patent expire anyway? Maybe we can see slightly better quality on other major search engines if they used the same algorithm Google "invented"
Google news has a bug on iOS safari for me that makes it just load the header - it's actually cut back a lot on my idle news consumption - please don't fix!
Do you remember the time when slow webpages with megabytes of ads in popups/iframes were killing the web? When almost every webpage was trying to get you install their half-baked mobile apps?
AMP webpages are fast and responsive. Publishers that don't use AMP now have to make their webpages fast. Competition is good for the user and the web.
It's not the standard, it's what google does to amp sites: re-hosts them on their own site so your site is now (essentially) google.com/yoursite.com.
AMP as a standard is great: limit javascript to a known set of behaviors, ensure images/etc all have defined sizes so content doesn't jump around... but google's using the benefits of this standard as a trojan horse to route even more web traffic to their servers, enabling them to get better and better analytics and insights to your browsing behavior. (Now all the things users do on your site are visible to google too, even after they've "left" the search results).
The whole thing sets off alarm bells and indicates an overall strategy that's aimed towards moving the web into a google walled garden. There's all sorts of dystopian futures we could imagine here: promote search results that are AMP, while users appreciate the speed benefits, and become less likely to click any non-AMP links, and suddenly every web publisher has to get on the train or lose viewership... so that they can monitor yet more of what we do online, widening their competitive moat, etc.
It's scary stuff and there needs to be a CLEAR separation of the benefits of AMP as a standard, from what google's doing with it.
Offer better experiences on their websites and apps, the technology is available but publishers choose to shovel crap in with food and call it beef tenderloin. Now Google is offering something better.
What did you expect Google to do when Apple News Format and Facebook Instant Articles are creeping up? Both offer impressive experiences and this isn't even nearly as impossibly mind-boggling.
AMP is an open standard that any publisher and any search engine can implement and if all search engines get on board then users win so much -- pages load faster, they require much less network bandwidth, they're easier to read. Nobody, absolutely nobody, will have sympathy for publishers after all the bullshit we're being forced to experience both now and historically.
If your argument is "other walled gardens are doing it too", it sounds like we have the same understanding of the problem. You just seem to think it's ok and I don't.
My argument is Google took an alternative road here, like they did with SPDY and HTTP/2 development -- they developed an open standard and threw their weight behind it. I don't see how AMP is a walled garden since any and all other search engines are free to implement the standard as well. Content aggregators like HN can cache and serve up AMP pages as well.
The only controversial thing here is this: publishers' content is being cached and re-hosted on a platform outside of their control. This is a non-issue because publishers are opting into this system.
> AMP HTML is a subset of HTML for authoring content pages such as news articles in a way that guarantees certain baseline performance characteristics.
Basically you have your website serve up your content within a subset of HTML so that your pages have to load faster. JavaScript is permitted but with limited functionality (again, the intent is your website loads quickly).
Also, Google will host your webpage on their servers after crawling your website. When a user clicks on an AMP link from Google's search results, the content will be served up from Google's servers and thus the page will load much faster.
"publication independence"? Really? The man who is famous among other things for supporting the most closed ecosystem there is around: iOS, where a single company decides what apps are worth publishing and wish ones doesn't. Or does newspaper publication independence is really that more important than software publication independence. The irony is so clear that it's weird that he didn't even mention it.
That genie is out of the box, when you decided that you didn't mind a company gatekeeping which software you can install on "your" devices you opened that can of worms, the one where any company can gatekeep anything they want as long as it is "convenient" for most people.
>"publication independence"? Really? The man who is famous among other things for supporting the most closed ecosystem there is around: iOS, where a single company decides what apps are worth publishing and wish ones doesn't.
First of all, that's an ad hominem. If publication independence is important, then it remains important whether Gruber is hypocritical about it or not.
Second, one might want apps to be curated (for the better experience), but stand for independence from control and censorship when it comes to journalism and personal commentary.
And indeed, one can think that "newspaper publication independence" is really far more important than software publication independence. The main difference being of course that Apple controlling apps is a huge inconvenience to those being rejected, but not so much to the users (especially with 1.5 million other apps to chose from). Whereas someone controlling the news is bad for the readers.
>That genie is out of the box, when you decided that you didn't mind a company gatekeeping which software you can install on "your" devices you opened that can of worms, the one where any company can gatekeep anything they want as long as it is "convenient" for most people.
Actually there's nothing (no law of physics or history for example) to force someone being ok with the one (company control of its walled app store) to be ok with other (company controlling content publication). You can be angry and/or stop and/or speak against any combination of the two.
Having your central argument against his case focused on his personal contradiction, is:
"That genie is out of the box, when you decided that you
didn't mind a company gatekeeping which software you can
install on "your" devices you opened that can of worms, the
one where any company can gatekeep anything they want as
long as it is "convenient" for most people."
Wikipedia agrees it's an ad hominen, but NOT fallacious (if true):
"However, in some cases, ad hominem attacks can be non-fallacious; i.e., if the attack on the character of the person is directly tackling the argument itself. For example, if the truth of the argument relies on the truthfulness of the person making the argument—rather than known facts—then pointing out that the person has previously lied is not a fallacious argument."
Lied and contradicted oneself are a close-enough match - but outright contradictions are rare; complex opinions and judgments common.
That central argument you're talking about doesn't look like it was aimed at Grubber's case. I don't see any disagreement with Gruber's post. I believe it's an attack against Gruber himself, that says the hypocritical bastard got it coming, and even shares some responsibility for advocating the brand that single handedly popularised that kind of lock down.
Ad hominem attacks are considered logical fallacies only when they're used instead of a dismantling someone's arguments. If they're not making a sound argument at all, yet they continue to make it, there's no way to argue the argument, the problem is a character defect - so attacking the character of the person is logical in that case and accepted in debate.
Not all people are good. And not all smart people argue logically.
I don't think he is arguing against independence for publication. He is instead arguing against the app store restrictions on account that they are equivalent. It is not illogical to point out an hypocrasy if the point is that his own arguments should be more broadly applied. The tone was unnecessarily ad hominem but not the overall argument.
Yeah, my comment was a bit more emotional than required and ended up sounding like an ad hominem, but the overall point was that people (not just the author of the piece) vote with their wallet, and they voted that gatekeeping is OK; mostly they have been showing that "convenient"=OK regardless of how many privacy issues it rises or how much free speech could be affected.
Still, I understand the point of those who consider news publishing independence to be more important than software publishing independence. But I think they may be missing the bit of irony (regardless of AMP) that Google is still the search engine they use to find those news, Google may as well delete a full domain from their search results and make a site disappear into oblivion. But at least Google-search has been forced -in some cases- to keep some level of neutrality there. Apple is just freely deleting and adding whatever they want to iOS/App-store, with some of their apps having access to APIs no other app can (e.g. Safari), which is as monopolistic as software gets.
Ad hominem arguments are chiefly problematic in pure logical discourse. In normal human rhetoric, the reputation of the person making the argument often factors in to whether listeners view the argument as truthful. It's not a problem to point out things that reduce the impact of reputation on rhetoric.
Essentially, any time a public figure says something, there's an implicit, "I have been truthful before, I am being truthful now," leading the statement. If someone's opinions are self-inconsistent, it's important to know that one can discount that implied statement.
> First of all, that's an ad hominem. If publication independence is important, then it remains important whether Gruber is hypocritical about it or not.
I agree! It's a poison in the well lazy people use to discredit something they don't like without thinking about it.
However, in this particular instance it raises questions of whether or not Gruber is arguing in good faith. It lends credence to accusations that editorial independence might not be his overriding concern.
Well, it is Gruber we are talking about. He believes in openness when it suits Apple - AMP outputs standard HTML5 which Safari renders - it does its own scrolling but he doesn't quite like it. Google doesn't 'respect' that closed platform. On that 'crime' Gruber has this to say - "If I had my way, Mobile Safari would refuse to render AMP pages."
You might have valid reasons not to use AMP but Gruber's are merely that he ends up sharing google.com URLs on twitter, it's Google, and it does its own scrolling on iOS.
AMP does NOT outperform HTML5 unless the HTML5 page is horribly designed and ridiculously bloated. But that can be fixed without Google's help.
I'm not sure why your dismissive of the scrolling thing. Having something breaks the feel of the web browser is a really bad idea.
Additionally he's completely right that it breaks other platform conventions that users expect to use. You can't use the share button, you can't tap at the top of the article to jump back to the top.
I can tell you as someone who uses mobile Safari, AMP is incredibly infuriating. It's gotten to the point where I actively avoid AMP search results.
Google has single-handedly broken the way it's search results feel for a number of top sites on iOS, and doesn't seem to care. Further, there is NO OPTION to turn it off.
I would LOVE to have a way to tell mobile Safari not to render the AMP version of the page. Then I could use Google easily again.
> AMP does NOT outperform HTML5 unless the HTML5 page is horribly designed and ridiculously bloated. But that can be fixed without Google's help.
And yet, noone cared enough to fix it until now. It's really really hard to sympathize with publishers when they brought this upon themselves by turning their pages into giant autoplaying video infested places.
If that's all Google truly cared about they could've simply put a heavy penalty on Pages that rendered slow or presented garbage.
Instead they invented their own thing which caused you to stay on Google sites using Google services to read other peoples content… and said they did it to speed things up.
It feels like that was either justification after the fact or that was with the original engineer had in mind but was not the point of the project once it got approved.
All those horrible infested pages? That's why I run an ad blockers, use RSS, and stopped reading a lot of sites. As every publisher got more and more aggressive other people were going to start doing it too. Eventually, I think it would've had an effect.
This feels a lot more like when Birders (or was it B&N?) outsourced their web sales to Amazon. Remember how well that went? Outsourcing a key part of your experience to another company it's a bad idea, especially if they like being in control of everything.
> If that's all Google truly cared about they could've simply put a heavy penalty on Pages that rendered slow or presented garbage.
There already is a penalty for slow-loading pages, but you make a good point that the penalty could be increased to the point where publishers would be forced to adapt accordingly. However, outside of the news ecosystem, that would end up penalizing a much larger base of content creators who don't have the means and infrastructure to handle this.
To say that "well users who have good content should also get their shit together" rings a bit hollow, especially on HN, where technical/deep/interesting articles get upvoted to the front page only to crash from the traffic. If authors of those articles/sites can't do it, then it's a problem for most folks.
I understand. But I don't know what else I'd want google to do other than turning up the penalty a lot. If there are pages that have to load slow for some reason then hopefully they're good enough to overcome that penalty. Or maybe they could choose to apply it only to news sites?
The problem is that Google took this in such and embrace-and-extend direction that seems to benefit them and give them a lot more power than they had before. And I already think Google is way too powerful.
Their solution annoys me and creeps me out more than the problem did. By a large factor. I don't like them being so deeply involved at this kind of level. If they are going to do something, I can't think of something I would like for them to do other than just tuning the penalty.
If you increase the penalty you also increase the artifacts from measuring the speed. Should it measure first byte, content above the screen size (and which size then), or fully loaded site. What about lazy load which neither method represent when a site is usable, but rather at what point javascript takes over the responsibility to load the site.
A small penalty devalues gaming the way google measure the speed.
This penalty also can have negative consequences on image quality on websites.
I had to worsen JPEG image quality to get good score for a website in Google's PageSpeed tools [1] because our management believes it affects search rankings.
That tool is awful. I would never follow Google's recommendations on my own site. The compressed versions of images it suggests one should use have visible artifacts.
> However, outside of the news ecosystem, that would end up penalizing a much larger base of content creators who don't have the means and infrastructure to handle this.
AMP does the same thing. Many sites don't have resources to convert their content to AMP pages and they will get worse positions in search results.
But by favoring websites that support AMP, isn't Google already "penalizing a much larger base of content creators who don't have the means and infrastructure to handle this"?
Exactly... Saying that it's "technically possible to fix all performance issues" is like saying that it's "technically possible to write your script in C instead of Python".
Sure it is, but no one has been doing it and if it wasn't for AMP, it would've stayed a slow hell for users, if not getting even worse. If you've got a better suggestion to motivate all these news sites to spend thousands rewriting their website from scratch and optimizing it, go for it. But right now, this is the best we've got.
It's not perfect, but it has actually been making huge strides in solving common issues over the past year.
You say it's been solving problems, but for me it's only been causing them. It's made it significantly harder to use Google search on iOS. Also the slow pages? Reader mode on safari has worked fantastically on them for years. Slow pages wasn't even a problem for me because of reader mode. Not only were they faster they were also easier to read because they didn't have crazy styling applied to them.
I kind of wonder if this whole thing is an accidental android/iOS litmus test. People who use android don't seem to have problems with it because the experience sounds good there.
That's NOT my experience using Mobile Safari. I have a literally considered switching my search engine over it. I've dug through all the Google account settings looking for a way to turn it off. If someone put some sort of content blocker in the App Store that would disable AMP? I buy it in a heartbeat.
> It's made it significantly harder to use Google search on iOS.
Works well enough on Android Chrome. Irony is, AMP, Android, Chrome and Google Search are all Alphabet (Google) products. I am personally all for platform portability, but certainly it's been Apple who have been pushing for One Closed Ecosystem since the introduction of iPhone, and Apple users have been very happy about it and playing down the vendor lock-in issue - some even as far as claiming it desirable that The One Benevolent Vendor control everything (note that real Chrome is not available on App Store simply because Apple has decided that iOS users should only use the Safari rendering engine!)
Now that there's a shard in the walled garden, another player seemingly using the very same tactics as Apple, it's frustrating to see the same users complain about how much it sucks to be disenfranchised from modern computing because they use a different vendor - only this time Apple is the "other" vendor.
Should Google succeed to marginalize iOS (assuming this is intentional and not just a bug in Safari), I bet many of these folks will soon be writing about how great it's that Google controls everything, how Material embodies the latest hip in UX and how the new Pixel has become so integral to their daily life.
> Now that there's a shard in the walled garden, another player seemingly using the very same tactics as Apple, it's frustrating to see the same users complain about how much it sucks to be disenfranchised from modern computing because they use a different vendor - only this time Apple is the "other" vendor.
I don't think they're actually are a lot of Apple fan is claiming that the one benevolent company should control everything as you posited earlier your post.
I'll also tell you this: I was an Apple user long ago. I would back to the platform in the early 2000's, years before the iPhone came out. I distinctly remember what it was like to be on the minority platform that no one bothered to support. In many ways, OS X is still like that today.
I don't think you'll get a bunch of people switching over to the "winning" side and claiming google is better just because it's "winning".
I see a lot of problems with what they're doing, outside of simple issues of my personal taste.
Also, you can complain about whatever you don't like about Apple, but they NEVER tried to break the web. If anything they did a huge service by making a browser that was not IE6 extremely important and drastically hastening the demise of flash.
Google can do whatever it wants on android, my problem is that they can use the web to force people into the rest of their ecosystem that's removing the one big open thing that made it possible to use Apple computers back in the "bad old days" of having a little software. By the mid to thousands people use the Internet enough that switching to a Mac wasn't a big deal because so much of what you wanted to do involve the web browser. If google "fixes" that, they now have a very heavy hand over all of computing .
> I don't think they're actually are a lot of Apple fan is claiming that the one benevolent company should control everything as you posited earlier your post.
Not of course directly, as that would sound obviously fanatical, but the walled garden is almost universally cited as the "best thing" about iOS compared to more open platforms like Android.
This recent article in MacWorld invokes it at least five times, saying it makes iPhone more secure, more private, more user-friendly, more uniform, more polished etc:
Those are all magnificent adjectives, and unquestionably makes the Apple user's life great. (And surely then, if Google wants to make life great for Android users, they are perfectly entailed to it as well.)
But from 3rd party developer's perspective, I can assure the more open platform is better. Google is enhancing the experience for stock Android users, but if you don't like it you can write and publish a competing search engine or browser. On iOS, you don't have a chance to replace the browser, and I bet had Apple actually developed a search engine of their own, like Microsoft with Bing, you'd never been even able to use Google on an iPhone..
> But from 3rd party developer's perspective, I can assure the more open platform is better.
I'm not sure that follows.
But anyway, if being more open is a good thing then Google purposefully trying to shove everyone into their various products and ecosystems seems precisely the opposite of "open" to me.
I was never really a big fan of chrome but when you Google released it and the web started getting a lot better that was fine with me, it was even nice. Same thing with many of the other things they've done.
Now it seems to me like they often try and corral or cajole users into using other parts of their ecosystem by making other people stuff broken in unnecessary ways when you try and use one of their "open" products. It's starting to look very 90s Microsoft to me with a different spin on it. And that worries me. And they're big enough/powerful enough that they can get pretty far and do a lot of damage before it becomes extremely obvious to a lot of people.
> I don't think they're actually are a lot of Apple fan is claiming that the one benevolent company should control everything as you posited earlier your post.
True, of course. But I think many like the fact that Apple is not an advertising company, that Apple has a transparent business model, that Apple (for now) defends its users' privacy.
"Horribly designed and ridiculously bloated" describes the majority of popular websites. If companies won't fix their shit, somebody else will come along and do it for them.
Or Google do things the right way, ad could start punishing them instead. Google pushes those to the top of results, and then sweeps in to fix the "problem" that they created
I have to admit, I've been on iOS for years and only ever use Safari for browsing, and NEVER had I heard about this tap the top bar to scroll to the top behavior.
It's one of the standard iOS gestures and works nearly everywhere.
iOS is FULL of handy little things like that, but I'm not sure many of them are ever explained. You just have to stumble across it or read about it somewhere like reviews of the new versions of iOS.
Did you know in mail (and many other places) you can swipe table rows left or right for quick actions? Marco Arment recently changed Overcast to make features more visible because it seems many people, including power users, weren't even aware that gesture existed.
Now that I have an iPhone 7 re force-touch stuff can be very handy. But I forget it exists for weeks on end because I went so many years without it and it's totally hidden.
> Marco Arment recently changed Overcast to make features more visible because it seems many people, including power users, weren't even aware that gesture existed.
So that's what that was all about. I noticed the changes because for me they reduced the usability of Overcast massively. The features I used the most were resuming the current podcast, playing a different podcast, and setting a sleep timer. All of these things now take double the taps they did before, with much smaller controls that are hard to hit in the car. You tap a podcast and some miscellaneous options jump out. Ugh, when I tap a podcast I want it to open and start playing! The sleep timer durations move around, so it takes 7 presses and some squinting to set a 25-minute timer. By this time my retinas are seared because the UI for that is white even in night mode.
I know full well about swiping in tables and I'd love the old behaviour to be an option. The author could probably make some good coin by making it available as an IAP.
That's one of the new force press gestures that came around in the 6S. It really is useful, but I'm having trouble getting over almost 10 years of muscle memory that no such gesture existed.
It's not something developers have to implement so only if you are rolling your own UIScrollView/UITableView components would you have to worry about it.
Also it's been there since iOS 1.0 so quite a while now.
> AMP does NOT outperform HTML5 unless the HTML5 page is horribly designed and ridiculously bloated. But that can be fixed without Google's help.
My personal experience demonstrates that the latter statement is not the case. People are indeed not making performant HTML5 without Google's help. It might be physically possible, but it's not actually happening.
Oh. I guess I just read it that way because I'm used to people saying that AMP is much faster than HTML five (and given a horribly bloated page it is).
"...it does its own scrolling but he doesn't quite like it."
Nothing should be doing its own scrolling. Everything should let the native scroll do its thing. Computers work for me and should work the way I expect. I expect the default native scroll.
With respect to scrolling: We (AMP team) filed a bug with Apple about that (we didn't implement scrolling ourselves, just use a div with overflow). We asked to make the scroll inertia for that case the same as the normal scrolling.
Apple's response was (surprisingly) to make the default scrolling like the overflow scrolling. So, with the next Safari release all pages will scroll like AMP pages. Hope Gruber is happy then :)
I actually had never noticed that it was possible to scroll with AMP because it's different from the way it normally should work. So, yes I think the scrolling issue is a real issue.
So, whenever I've seen AMP, I've just clicked on the link to get the hell out of it.
Software is ubiquitous now, and that tend to make it more important than basically everything else. It is also a means of expression (not the only one of course, but still). Finally, how software is build can alter how you read the news (start with profanity filters, then block Tienanmen or something).
The key difference is that there are alternatives to iOS, which isn't even a majority share of the market.
Google, by contrast, has a far larger share of the search engine market than Apple has of the mobile device market. That means it's more of a concern by default.
Except iOS is a captive market. Once you have owners of i-devices, switching requries capital investment and time moving to an alternate platform. You can exploit them heavily before they start leaving.
If we are talking about search, you can stop using google by typing bing.com or duckduckgo.com in your url bar any time you want, and every major browser supports changing the default search engine, even Chrome.
Apple has certain things that they can push any time, such as the lists that safari looks at to find out if websites are dangerous or some of the security stuff they have.
However they ship it, they'd still be in an arms race against google to keep AMP pages hidden from Safari users. That doesn't seem like a productive use of anyone's time.
It's not a rebuttal - he's not trying to say Scott is wrong. He's pointing out Scott is a hypocrite. An insult is not an instance of the ad hominem fallacy.
It's a shame you hijacked this thread with a critique of Gruber. There's no good argument that AMP is anything but a bad thing for publishers, and that has nothing to do with Gruber's support for Apple's approach to iOS.
I wish there was a big red “I know what I'm doing” button on iOS that allowed the user to download and install a binary from a simple web page.
But technically, you can download the source and/or write your own code, compile and install on your iOS device without jailbreaking or going through the AppStore. It's a hassle, sure, but doable.
The appstore-only policy is probably what has kept iOS from having any noteworthy large outbreak of malware. Unfortunately, the Darwin kernel as well as the various iOS frameworks have huge glaring security vulnerabilities patched in every minor update. A free-for-all unvetted code-exec option would open the floodgates for deceptive downloads and compromised iOS devices.
Of course, it also makes good business sense for both Apple and third party developers as it keeps piracy to a minimum (though I'm sure a subset of 3rd party developers might find skipping the 30% Apple cut valuable)
The xcode backdoor thing could have been much worse if iOS allowed sideloading for regular users. With the centralized appstore, most users having installed backdoored builds would be auto-updated to clean builds, current backdoored builds would be removed from sale, and new backdoored builds are likely to be blocked during uploads to itunesconnect/app review.
Also, don't forget the whole xcode backdoor fiasco happened because people were installing side-loaded xcode distributions instead of getting it from the mac store. So even where sideloading is and should remain allowed - on the mac - people will click big red "I know what I'm doing" buttons without knowing what they're doing. And that's for people who really should know what they're doing - developers!
I understand the impulse, but so many security issues happen to people because they're tricked into running things… I can't help but think that this would cause a dramatic rise in the number of security issues on iOS.
Remember what happened just over a week ago to the NHS and all sorts of other computers?
Security is becoming EXTREMELY important, although it was already pretty important.
Apples very strict (occasionally draconian) app model on iOS is one of the reasons it has so few problems with the software destroying the system or viruses or other such things. There's a reason Microsoft is eyeing it jealously for Windows. That kind of heavy sandboxing makes exploit much much more difficult.
That's actually no longer true, you need to join the free dev program, but can publish to your own device without paying $100/year. The $100 is only needed for the App Store now.
Correct, but your self compiled app will only work for 7 days on your own device. And than you have to recompile and reinstall. Unless you pay the $100
What's going to be interesting is if browsers can at some point render a APM version of a page natively. What I mean is render the original page on the source website as APM content. That will stop the monopoly and hijacking (or rather the rationalization of it) of target websites in Google results.
i agree that AMP is troubling for a variety of reasons - none of which, however, change the fact that the author of this article is unquestionably a Weenie.
I think it's reprehensible for google to push this so relentlessly and beyond simply stealing links it makes google into the "internet."
This (AMP) could easily be a standard, in fact it's mostly just common sense (good lightweight HTML/CSS/JS). Instead of Google forcing its way on users and creators it could just lower the page rank of the offenders.
One other thing about AMP that pisses me off as a user and an engineer is it's one more place to maintain meaning one more shitty neglected experience. As a user I hate it when AMP pages are broken and I somehow can't get to the non-AMP version. I don't blame the developers because we have enough on our plate. My anger is solely directed to google for making the damn mess in the first place.