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).
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.