Mozilla (and Apple) are strictly against it and thank god for Mozilla. If Google had a bigger market share this would already be something we would have been living with. I'm sure there are better sources for this, but here is the first result:
https://9to5google.com/2019/04/18/apple-mozilla-google-amp-s...
Sure, you could move it somewhere else and have it show up in the address bar the same, but the actual URL has changed and you need to somehow get the new URL into people's hands. And ultimately you've centralized a lot of websites under a smaller number of service providers which, before, would have been on their own domains.
How so?
AMP is a scourge. It's a bad idea being pushed by bad actors.
Stated another way, with a typical CDN setup the user has to trust their browser, the CDN, and the source. With signed exchanges we're back to the minimal requirement of trusting the browser and the source; the distributor isn't able to make modifications.
Google controls the AMP project and the AMP library. They can start rewriting all links in AMP containers to Google’s AMP cache and track you across the entire internet, even when you are 50 clicks away from google.com.
They cannot be allowed to become the gatekeeper for the web.
It seems to me, a lot of the security concerns come from the requirements to make pages served live and pages served from bundles indistinguishable to a user - a requirement that really only makes sense if you're Google and want to make people trust your AMP cache more.
I'd be excited about an alternative proposal for bundles that explicitly distinguishes bundle use in the URL (and also uses a unique origin for all files of the bundle).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gqGEMQveoqg
(Google Tech Talk from Van Jacobsen on CCN many years ago)
I don’t support ads but I also don’t support Google serving a version of the page that steals money from content creators. So, therein lies the problem: choice.
I can imagine a future where amp is ubiquitous and Google begins serving ads on amp content. Luckily, companies have to make money and amp is not in most people’s or company’s best interests.
If amp was opt-in only, this would be much more ethically sound.
Perhaps that's a great thing to do, but it's not something to do quietly.
https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/google-is-phasing-out-thir...
Cloudflare allow using of same domain to use AMP. In this case, content is served from Cloudflare CDN.
As I didn't know about this addon, thanks for sharing it.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/amp2html/
One should never forget that at a certain point, Google will likely invoke the looser's argument ("protect you from terrorists and pedophiles") to require proof of identity prior to granting access to any resource or service it controls.
Anything that helps them advance in that direction must be fought fiercely.
It's Google way of combatting phone apps.
If all of the world's information — especially current news and similar information — moves from the open web into apps, then Google can no longer crawl, index, or scrape that information for its own use. The rise of the mobile phone app is a threat to Google on so many levels from ad revenue to data for training its AIs.
So Google comes up with Amp to convince publishers to keep their content on the open web, where it can be collated, indexed, and otherwise used by Google for Google's services like search and those search result cards that keep people from visiting the content creators.
Google's explicit carrot in all this is the user benefit of page loading speed. Google's implicit carrot in all of this is page rank. But Google's real motivation is to have all of that information available to itself.
Can you imagine what would happen if content from even one of the big providers was no longer visible to Google? New York Times, WaPo, or even Medium? It would create a huge hole in a number of Google products and services, make its search results look even weaker than they already are, and cause people to look for search alternatives.
That's my theory, anyway.
1/ Apple and Facebook were hosting all the content.
2/ The content did not come with megabytes of JS and other unnecessary crap.
Amp is an attempt at saving the web, and Google is interested in that for the reason that you gave: they make their money from the web.
Yes; attempting to save the web in much the same way that the parasitic wasp is trying to oviposit in your thorax and take over your behavior, in order to save you from being eaten by the spider.
No thank you, sawfly.
Imagine if instead of having all news stories a quick search away you instead had to install apps from X different news sources (and inevitably grant them permission to access your location, contacts list, name of first born child etc.). It'd create lots of little silos of news with very little ability to go outside those silos.
Put another way, the web is a great platform for news. It does benefit Google, but it also benefits the billions of people who can freely access a huge range of sources.
Besides,you dont need the app on your mobile.
Also, for techie people, do you consider RSS as part of the "web" ? To me, an RSS aggregator app is superior to browsing 20 different news websites, all with different formats.
"web is just way more practical" isn't obvious. It depends about what you put in the "web" bag, and the use cases. Most apps use "web" protocols, so they are technically part of the web.
AMP project by itself is open-source and it explicitly states 'Other companies may build their own AMP cache as well'.[1] There are only 2 AMP Cache providers - Google, Bing. Further, 'As a publisher, you don't choose an AMP Cache, it's actually the platform that links to your content that chooses the AMP Cache (if any) to use.'[2]
Say, if Cloudflare provides a AMPCache and if the site publisher can choose their own Cache provider this can be resolved effectively as AMP by design itself is easy for a laymen to create high performance websites; of course there is no excuse for hiding URLs.
[1]https://amp.dev/support/faq/overview/
[2]https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/learn/amp...
I Agree. IMO, Google has been using 'open-source' for weaponized marketing, same way Apple has been using 'Privacy'. But, either of them could be much worse without those.
This is the point.
People easily confuse "open source" with "free software" and "community driven".
A lot of corporate-driven open source greenwashed the dark patterns of closed source: centralized development, user lock-in, walled gardens, poor backward compatibility, forced software and hardware upgrades.
It's a really bad look on Google's part to be pushing this.
And it appears to be a problem.
Another problem is, there's effectively no distinction between regulator and regulatee.
Yes, AMP is an anti-competitive move by Google
At the same time AMP is "faster" because it gets rid of all the nagware and JS crap that the original page has.
So yeah, I don't like what Google is doing but I don't like what NYT is doing neither
It’s been one of the primary things that’s driven me away from google and into DDG. I don’t really care about privacy enough to leave google, but I end up leaving more and more of their services because their competition is just less annoying.
Google gives preference to AMP content whether the source page is lightning fast or not. I get the frustration with crappy web pages, but a big part of the reason web pages are getting increasingly crappy is because Google and Facebook (and to a much lessor extent Amazon in a weird way) have a stranglehold on the web advertising market and publishers are getting smaller and smaller slices of advertising revenue. AMP increases Google's lock on the market. Since AMP pages can only really be monetized by the publisher, this puts even more power in Google's hands.
AMP is faster only for poorly-optimized JS-heavy pages but the design is fundamentally flawed to require all of its own large amount of JavaScript to run before anything displays, whereas most of the traditional bloat doesn’t block rendering. That means any optimized page - Washington Post, NYT, etc. – loads noticeably faster even before you factor in how often you need to wait for AMP to load, realize that some part of the content is missing, and then wait for the real page to load anyway.
That design forces it to be less reliable, too: before I stopped using Google on mobile to avoid AMP, I would see on a near-daily basis failed page loads due to the AMP JS failing in some way and when it wasn’t failing it was still notably slow (5+ seconds or worse on LTE). Since all of that JavaScript is forced into the critical path, anything less than unrealistically high cache rates means the experience is worse than a normal web page.
WPT examples:
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/200704_GR_62165b7f695e300...
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/200704_5F_f5c36a7c41cf4c2...
So you can see why there must be some kind of internal struggle at Google. They understand the value of a faster web but they also cannot go after the main cause of the slow web. And this is how technology such as AMP gets invented and makes things worse.
> To be blunt, this is a really dangerous pattern: Google serves NYTimes’ controlled content on a Google domain.
No, "Google serves NYTimes' controlled content" is an oxymoron. Google controls the content that is served, and that's all your browser is verifying. Google could very well make the NYTimes content on there display something else and your browser wouldn't show a warning. NYTimes could do nothing about that.
I disagree that this pattern is dangerous. While Google taking over serving the world's content is hardly a thing to celebrate, at least we're seeing that it's doing so here.
From the non-technical people I've talked to, the answer is no, they don't know what a URL is, and that was happening before AMP came around.
This change would restore the idea that the URL indicates the provenance of the content,
I don't like AMP nor much of how Google has behaved with it (http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2020/05/05/the-shape-of-the-mach... largely matches my thoughts), but let's stick to what's actually happening with SXG.
No, Signed HTTP exchanges are something that Google dreamed up so people don't have to see their hegemony over the modern web (or as the article you linked calls it, a shakedown). It's not a browser standard so far, because of Apple and Mozilla's resistance.
There are legitimate ways for NYTimes to allow Google to serve content on behalf of them, like so many other CDNs around the world (it usually involves the CDN generating the certificate for your site as well). Why should people create new standards for HTTPS and URLs simply for Google's benefit?
I don't deny that there's a way to make "nytimes.com" work where everything is served by "google.com". What I'm questioning is why we need a completely new web standard for doing so that affects the URL, something that has been standard for decades.
Trying to copy the domain of a url without the protocol just infuriates me.
Really, I couldn't care less about stuff getting pruned from the URL bar, as long as there's an easy and permanent way to show everything.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/28/21272543/google-search-re...
So much of the distrust here is that google wants to be everything: to host their content and publisher content and user content; to broker ads and recommend links; to run their software on your computer and phone, to store your data on their servers. They serve too many masters.
So it is kind of frustrating to see someone offering to fix a problem they helped create in the first place through neglect or carelessness.
I just made https://sites.google.com/view/whalefacts, took me literally ten seconds, confirmed it was accessible from multiple IPs and multiple browsers.
Google wants to be a content host and an ad broker and a search engine. Each of these is reasonable in isolation. Yet you can search on google, and Google will serve you an ad linking to a google.com site, and that site scams you out of money. This isn't theoretical, I know because my family was hit.
Screenshot if it gets taken down: https://i.imgur.com/T6hVHr5.png
If NYTimes and every other news organisation refused to participate then yes, Google would be in trouble. But they can rely on good old divide and conquer: these news organisations all compete with each other. All it would take is for one to starting producing AMP content again and they’d vacuum up all the search traffic, and all the other sites would follow them immediately.
But right now we are not living in that ideal world and because all other publications are doing that they have to follow if they don't want to risk losing visibility against the competition.
So of course they don't "have to" but they also kinda do.
It's a tempting Ponzi scheme.
In addition to this, I previously stumbled upon a few situations where I visited an AMP site to read an article and I noted down the site name in my mind. A few days later I tried to visit that site and when I put the site name in the address bar in hopes of getting helped by autocomplete, guess what?! It was nowhere to be found.
How to fight back against Google AMP https://markosaric.com/google-amp/
And the original thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21712733
Even if it didn't have all of the problems associated with it I just don't get the point. I don't need Google to repackage a website with less useability. It's frequently not even faster.
It's also much faster to render, which makes a huge difference on the crappy Android phones that are everywhere. Hell, I'm using a $200 Android phone right now because my iPhone broke and browsing the web is painful on it. And with the terrible hauwei $40 phones that have taken over Africa, most of the web is unusable.
I don't like Google's control of Amp, but it exists because of the original sin of html and js. Everything about html is terrible: bloated, pointlessly verbose, etc.
I have a dream that we all just start using Gopher and dump the www, but it's never going to happen. Maybe even browser vendors could get to together and design a super light weight markup based on S-exps or something, but that's probably not going to happen either. Amp is the best we got and it solves a real problem. And it solves the problem well.
I appreciate that not everyone has fast data, but not having data speed to read a basic web page is really becoming the exception, not the norm. Data transmission is getting cheaper and faster and available in more remote places every year.
I wouldn't have a huge problem with AMP if I could opt out. Unfortunately I can't. So despite my blazing fast unlimited plan on a flagship device, I'm getting served crippled pages with degraded performance. It's like I own a Ferrari kitted out with all the extras and Google is saying "here have you tried out this cool bicycle? It has special pedals so you can't go too fast and we reconfigured the handlebars so you don't accidentally do something like steering! It even has a bell. Ting-ting, ting-ting! How cool is that?"
In all seriousness, it is neat if it makes the web more useable for low-connectivity users, but maybe then limit AMP to those places (which are shrinking every year) and don't serve needlessly crippled pages when I'm standing in downtown Amsterdam or Hong Kong at the center of the internet, connected to blazing fast Wifi.
Huh? Yes. Hugely. I'm on my fast home internet using a new iPhone I bought two months ago, and loading a NYTimes article just took 8 seconds. God only knows if it's bounded by network or CPU or both, if the problem is frameworks or ads or what. And it isn't even "stuck" on anything -- I watch the blue loading bar in Safari move pretty smoothly across the top.
I did a search for a NYT article on Google, clicked it, and it appeared instantaneously.
That's an insane difference. I know everyone hates AMP here, but when I've got my user hat on rather than my developer hat... it's unbelievably more performant.
But even if I can load both pages at roughly the same time AMP experience is just so much better, they always load at the very least at the same speed as the original website, there's no weird scrolling implemented, there's no annoying popups, etc.
I always choose AMP pages when possible, compared to the "native" ones - because I know for a fact that I'll get fast loading, and other stuff mentioned above.
As a user, before learning computer knowledge, I am so thankful and amazed by those AMP pages, because they are really fast! And I barely look at this URL thing to care for security which is huge deal to those conspiracy queens, because as non-tech user I don't know a heck about URL, all I care is how fast a page is presented to me.
So, no, the problem is only you, yes, you can just use a dramatic title just because you are so bored with your life to cause a scene, you are only embracing yourself and bring some noise to this already chaotic world, please, go find yourself something to do instead of trying so hard to be internet famous. Thank you.
That itself sounds awesome and something we should promote. The other part of AMP is of course that it's served through Google's servers. While their global edge caches probably bring the speed up I think that's less important.
I other words: AMP as a framework to force users to build light-weight pages without bloat is a good thing. Google's control is a bad thing.
I think many of the comments here make it a borderline topic where there's either all or nothing. I want to see a more nuanced discussion on what the possible alternatives and solutions are instead of just "Google bad, AMP bad".
One interpretation is that Google is changing the URL bar from "where" to "who", which may be the more relevant information for most users. Signed exchanges are an interesting way to achieve that.
I guess times have changed.
They could argue that Google is using The New York Times's branding and domain name to make it look like this content is controlled and provided by The New York Times, when in fact it isn't, and that an average person (“idiot in a hurry”) could be deceived.
If The New York Times willingly gives Google permission (or The New York Times willingly abets Google's monopoly position), then I guess Google can do whatever they like.
To be clear, I don't think Google or any other large company is evil. It's just the way things turn on, how the incentives are structured.
I feel like in the first few years it was not yet an advertising giant. Wikipedia says they had small text ads in 2000, but seems to imply that the advertising didn't get really huge for them until after IPO. Correct me if I am wrong, I was not following super closely in those years. But that would provide a few years of "not being evil".
Meh, they preserved 2/3rds of it.
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/amp2html
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/privacy-redir...
Google should can do this stuff if they like...on their own network in their own ecosystem.
Insane that they got rich from hyperlinks and now want to fiddle with the so others can't.
Hearing people mention low quality search results was what kept me off, but I’ve actually only needed to do a google search about once a week, far less than I was expecting.
I know Google wants browsers to lie to the user about the website they're visiting. But the article screenshot is a case where that's not happening, it's displaying the real URL.
Well at least under Google AMP, the pages loaded on time.
Your comment is pure flamebait without any insight.
Oh, exactly that: Google/AMP with the web, systemd with Linux.
The point though isn't about the technology or the tactics. It's about the seemingly-benign apologia from third parties that bit-by-bit chips away at the objectors' arguments. It's part of how X wins their long game and takes control of Y.
I don't even think the original comment to which I replied does this, but it reminded me of a pattern. The way in which AMP/web and systemd/Linux are playing out are similar enough to be worth thinking about.
(I almost certainly lack any kind of meaningful insight and – according to quite a few others here – an ability to write. It's disappointing to be accused of pure flamebait though.)
Yeah, because Google is cheating.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/11/03/...
You are supposed to trust Google.
And when your browser says 'Google' - you know it is all good.
I live Out In The Styx, in a Shithole country, at the end of an allegedly 2MB/s piece of wet string masquerading as an internet connection that seldom lives up to its adverted performance. AMP has never once made any significant difference to my web experience.
My point is that it's so easy to just see the drawbacks and none of the benefits when you're sitting on a good connection. All threads on HN becomes completely one-sided where everyone is just backslapping each other's complaints.
Well, this is one kind of modern skepticism I particularly like: Does gravity kill if one jumps off a cliff? Is a sphere round? Is it really bad if we give up our freedom? Who are we to think for ourselves?
When questions like this are asked, the damage is already done. And it seems like it's already beyond repair.
Image AMP? No URL for You! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322730
