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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: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday September 08 2018, @10:51PM (1 child)

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Saturday September 08 2018, @10:51PM (#732328) Journal

    "if you adopt AMP, you are setting yourself up for an Embrace and Extend fail". It is a reasonable point.

    I quite agree. AMP is also practically self-extinguishing when you consider features like the required javascript blob and punitive artificial delays implemented via css if you try to get around its use.

    TFA focused, however, on a fact-free rant about imagined slights. There's no need for this, as the real slights are bad enough.

    As for sites that I manage, zero of them use AMP and all but one or two* are mobile-friendly by mobile-first design stylesheets that look great on mobile and even better on desktop/laptop.

    --------------------------
    * one is a site someone else designed and I rescued from its archive.org backup and put back online for them, but they don't want to pay to do anything but just that. No mobile. Another is a site I designed several years ago that gets cute and "detects" traces of a mobile browser and uses a different (uglier) static table layout when it guesses that you are on mobile. All going forward use CSS that shows up well regardless of device and screen size. None going forward are likely to use AMP.

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  • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Sunday September 09 2018, @10:00AM

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Sunday September 09 2018, @10:00AM (#732430)

    Fair enough - I read the (related) theregister article so it probably coloured my perspective. Sorry about that.