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posted by martyb on Saturday September 08 2018, @12:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the handbasket-is-optional dept.

Web consultant Barry Adams has written a blog post about the problem with Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and how to fight against it being shoehorned into the WWW.

Let’s talk about Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP for short. AMP is a Google pet project that purports to be “an open-source initiative aiming to make the web better for all”. While there is a lot of emphasis on the official AMP site about its open source nature, the fact is that over 90% of contributions to this project come from Google employees, and it was initiated by Google. So let’s be real: AMP is a Google project.

Google is also the reason AMP sees any kind of adoption at all. Basically, Google has forced websites – specifically news publishers – to create AMP versions of their articles. For publishers, AMP is not optional; without AMP, a publisher’s articles will be extremely unlikely to appear in the Top Stories carousel on mobile search in Google.

And due to the popularity of mobile search compared to desktop search, visibility in Google’s mobile search results is a must for publishers that want to survive in this era of diminishing revenue and fierce online competition for eyeballs.

If publishers had a choice, they’d ignore AMP entirely. It already takes a lot of resources to keep a news site running smoothly and performing well. AMP adds the extra burden of creating separate AMP versions of articles, and keeping these articles compliant with the ever-evolving standard.

So AMP is being kept alive artificially. AMP survives not because of its merits as a project, but because Google forces websites to either adopt AMP or forego large amounts of potential traffic.

And Google is not satisfied with that. No, Google wants more from AMP. A lot more.

AMP is also purported to throw in an 8-second delay to punish those that do not toe the line.

Earlier on SN:
Google Attempting to Standardize Features of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) (2018)
Kill Google AMP Before It Kills the Web (2017)


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by HiThere on Saturday September 08 2018, @05:28PM (9 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday September 08 2018, @05:28PM (#732252) Journal

    Moving to https over http isn't all good. It's good if you're trying to do secure transactions (and trust your middlemen), but it's a pain in the ass if you just want a plain static html page. Worse if you're building a site of static html pages. It basically makes small sites a lot harder to self-host.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @06:05PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @06:05PM (#732262)

    Which is a pretty minor thing considering that the alertnative is to open your visitors to various MitM attacks.

    • (Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @08:16PM (5 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @08:16PM (#732297)

      What is the danger of a MitM attack on a static site?

      • (Score: 5, Informative) by pipedwho on Saturday September 08 2018, @09:17PM (4 children)

        by pipedwho (2032) on Saturday September 08 2018, @09:17PM (#732319)

        A middleman could easily modify the page and insert some extra 'static' content. Eg. a false link out to a bogus phishing page, a trojan JS spambot/coin miner, or even just a simple advertisement for a product/service/political entity.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @06:01AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @06:01AM (#732404)
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @10:05AM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @10:05AM (#732433)

          ISPs inserting ads on pages

          • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @08:21PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @08:21PM (#732564)

            My favorite is when my ISP used to change ads on the pages with their own. Drove me nuts for months. So I finally reported it on https://support.google.com/adsense/contact/unauthorized_code [google.com] and put it in the comments that I could provide HARs or WARCs. They emailed me less than an hour later asking for a HAR of a particular page from my network; the ads stopped working 10 minutes later; and the injected code disappeared a day later.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 10 2018, @07:15AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 10 2018, @07:15AM (#732682)

              That is copyright infringement. ISP's don't have the rights to modify the 'creative' layout of a web page. You could have damaged your ISP a lot more than just getting their adsense account temp-banned.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by toddestan on Monday September 10 2018, @02:52AM (1 child)

    by toddestan (4982) on Monday September 10 2018, @02:52AM (#732640)

    While I do overall agree that https over http is a good thing, it is starting to be a bit concerning the way it's being pushed by Google. The way things are going I expect that at some point Google will push out a version of Chrome that will no longer work with plain old http. The other major browsers would likely follow suit. At that point in order to have a webpage that anyone can actually visit you'll have to get a certificate which you can only get from a handful of vendors. That certificate also has a potential to be revoked at any point, which would effectively shut your website down.

    I may be a bit paranoid, but it the push to https does smell a bit like a way to lock down the internet and to put the control of what can and cannot be published on the internet into the hands of a small number of entities. Or perhaps encourage you publish your content on someone else's website (Facebook, etc.) which might what they are really pushing for.