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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)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Sunday September 09 2018, @09:15PM (5 children)
Google is politely asking news sites to cater to their fake standard else be listed lower? this is abuse of monopoly as the sites depend on hits and hits depend on google.
Anyway I like the 8 second delay, I guess it went like this:
Engineer 1: "finished!"
Engineer 2: "well that was fast! there was much to speed up I guess?"
Engineer 1: "they did not ask me to speed up anything, they wanted the js amp pages to be faster than the non-js regular ones. FastER is relative. I slowed down the regular ones et voila'"
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(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday September 10 2018, @03:00AM (4 children)
Without a delay, how else would you prevent document elements from being seen moving around in a distracting manner before all subresources are loaded? See "Flash of unstyled content" on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday September 10 2018, @11:52AM (3 children)
You do it on page load completion, not after a preset timeout.
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(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 10 2018, @06:06PM
But then it would appear to load faster when you block all the external scripts / ads !
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:43PM (1 child)
So the "load" event would fire 30 seconds later once a connection to retrieve a subresource has timed out. How is that an improvement?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday September 13 2018, @06:59PM
It's an improvement because you have 22 seconds more to consider switching to a website with less sh!t.
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