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)
Related Stories
There's been a good deal of ongoing discussion about Google AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages.
Quite a few high-profile web developers have this year weighted in with criticism and some, following a Google conference dedicated to AMP, have cautioned users about diving in with both feet.
These, in my view, don't go far enough in stating the problem and I feel this needs to be said very clearly: Google's AMP is bad – bad in a potentially web-destroying way. Google AMP is bad news for how the web is built, it's bad news for publishers of credible online content, and it's bad news for consumers of that content. Google AMP is only good for one party: Google. Google, and possibly, purveyors of fake news.
[...] What it is, is a way for Google to obfuscate your website, usurp your content and remove any lingering notions of personal credibility from the web.
If that appeals to you, here's what you need to do. First, get rid of all your HTML and render your content in a subset of HTML that Google has approved along with a few tags it invented. Because what do those pesky standards boards know? Trust Google, it knows what it's doing. And if you don't, consider yourself not part of the future of search results.
Why a subset of HTML you ask? Well, mostly because web developers suck at their jobs and have loaded the web with a ton of JavaScript no one wants. Can't fault Google for wanting to change that. That part I can support. The less JavaScript the better.
So far AMP actually sounds appealing. Except that, hilariously, to create an AMP page you have to load a, wait for it, yes a JavaScript file from Google. Pinboard founder Maciej Cegłowski already recreated the Google AMP demo page without the Google AMP JavaScript and, unsurprisingly, it's faster than Google's version.
-- submitted from IRC
Google promises publishers an alternative to AMP
Google's AMP project is not uncontroversial. Users often love it because it makes mobile sites load almost instantly. Publishers often hate it because they feel like they are giving Google too much control in return for better placement on its search pages. Now Google proposes to bring some of the lessons it learned from AMP to the web as a whole. Ideally, this means that users will profit from Google's efforts and see faster non-AMP sites across the web (and not just in their search engines).
Publishers, however, will once again have to adopt a whole new set of standards for their sites, but with this, Google is also giving them a new path to be included in the increasingly important Top Stories carousel on its mobile search results pages.
"Based on what we learned from AMP, we now feel ready to take the next step and work to support more instant-loading content not based on AMP technology in areas of Google Search designed for this, like the Top Stories carousel," AMP tech lead Malte Ubl writes today. "This content will need to follow a set of future web standards and meet a set of objective performance and user experience criteria to be eligible."
Also at Search Engine Land and The Verge.
Related: Kill Google AMP Before It Kills the Web
Google Acquires Relay Media to Convert Ordinary Web Pages to AMP Pages
Google Bringing Accelerated Mobile Pages to Email
Google may be relinquishing control of its controversial Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project:
The project has been led by Malte Ubl, a senior staff engineer working on Google's Javascript infrastructure projects, who has until now held effective unilateral control over the project.
In the wake of all of this criticism, the AMP project announced today that it would reform its governance, replacing Ubl as the exclusive tech lead with a technical steering committee comprised of companies invested in the success in the project. Notably, the project's intention has an "...end goal of not having any company sit on more than a third of the seats." In addition, the project will create an advisory board and working groups to shepherd the project's work.
The project is also expected to move to a foundation in the future. These days, there are a number of places such a project could potentially reside, including the Apache Software Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation.
The AMP Contributor Summit 2018 will take place at Google in Mountain View, California on September 25 and 26, 2018.
Previously: Kill Google AMP Before It Kills the Web
Google Acquires Relay Media to Convert Ordinary Web Pages to AMP Pages
Google Bringing Accelerated Mobile Pages to Email
Google Attempting to Standardize Features of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Google AMP Can Go To Hell
Google isn't the company that we should have handed the Web over to
Back in 2009, Google introduced SPDY, a proprietary replacement for HTTP that addressed what Google saw as certain performance issues with existing HTTP/1.1. Google wasn't exactly wrong in its assessments, but SPDY was something of a unilateral act, with Google responsible for the design and functionality. SPDY was adopted by other browsers and Web servers over the next few years, and Google's protocol became widespread.
[...] The same story is repeating with HTTP/3. In 2012, Google announced a new experimental protocol, QUIC, intended again to address performance issues with existing HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2. Google deployed QUIC, and Chrome would use QUIC when communicating with Google properties. Again, QUIC became the basis for IETF's HTTP development, and HTTP/3 uses a derivative of QUIC that's modified from and incompatible with Google's initial work.
It's not just HTTP that Google has repeatedly worked to replace. Google AMP ("Accelerated Mobile Pages") is a cut-down HTML combined with Google-supplied JavaScript designed to make mobile Web content load faster. This year, Google said that it would try to build AMP with Web standards and introduced a new governance model that gave the project much wider industry oversight.
A person claiming to be a former Microsoft Edge developer has written about a tactic Google supposedly used to harm the competing browser's performance:
A person claiming to be a former Edge developer has today described one such action. For no obvious reason, Google changed YouTube to add a hidden, empty HTML element that overlaid each video. This element disabled Edge's fastest, most efficient hardware accelerated video decoding. It hurt Edge's battery-life performance and took it below Chrome's. The change didn't improve Chrome's performance and didn't appear to serve any real purpose; it just hurt Edge, allowing Google to claim that Chrome's battery life was actually superior to Edge's. Microsoft asked Google if the company could remove the element, to no avail.
The latest version of Edge addresses the YouTube issue and reinstated Edge's performance. But when the company talks of having to do extra work to ensure EdgeHTML is compatible with the Web, this is the kind of thing that Microsoft has been forced to do.
See also: Ex Edge developer blames Google tricks in part for move to Chromium
Related: HTTP/2 on its Way In, SPDY on its Way Out
Google Touts QUIC Protocol
Google Attempting to Standardize Features of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Google AMP Can Go To Hell
The Next Version of HTTP Won't be Using TCP
HTTP/3 Explained: A Work in Progress
Microsoft Reportedly Building a Chromium-Based Web Browser to Replace Edge, and "Windows Lite" OS
Mozilla CEO Warns Microsoft's Switch to Chromium Will Give More Control of the Web to Google
Google makes emails more dynamic with AMP for Email
Google today officially launched AMP for Email, its effort to turn emails from static documents into dynamic, web page-like experiences. AMP for Email is coming to Gmail, but other major email providers like Yahoo Mail (which shares its parent company with TechCrunch), Outlook and Mail.ru will also support AMP emails.
[...] With AMP for Email, those messages become interactive. That means you'll be able to RSVP to an event right from the message, fill out a questionnaire, browse through a store's inventory or respond to a comment — all without leaving your web-based email client.
Some of the companies that already support this new format are Booking.com, Despegar, Doodle, Ecwid, Freshworks, Nexxt, OYO Rooms, Pinterest, and redBus. If you regularly get emails from these companies, then chances are you'll receive an interactive email from them in the coming weeks.
[...] [Not] everybody is going to like this (including our own Devin Coldewey).
Also at The Verge, 9to5Google, and Engadget:
As you might imagine, Google is determined to keep this secure. It reviews senders before they're allowed to send AMP-based email, and relatively few will support it out of the gate (including Twilio Sendgrid, Litmus and SparkPost).
Previously: Google Bringing Accelerated Mobile Pages to Email
Related: Kill Google AMP Before It Kills the Web
Google Attempting to Standardize Features of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Google AMP Can Go To Hell
Google Moving to Relinquish Control Over Accelerated Mobile Pages
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @10:42AM (14 children)
Almost every site I visit is getting slower and less functional, many to the point of being broken. Comments on one site only show up sporadically, on another they now require js to read and they dont show up right, email notices from another are being delayed by hours or days making me miss out...
Then there is this recent foray of twitter/fb/etc into censorship... I think those sites are dying and trying to drag the rest down with them somehow.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @10:45AM (2 children)
And reddit's decline goes without mention.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @02:18PM (1 child)
Does that make your post redundant? I mean, really, if something goes without mentioning, then what was the point...?
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @08:58PM
Not necessarily. It may have gone without mention, until mentioned by the GP AC. His observation was that it had gone without mention, however, subsequent to his post, we can now say it has been mentioned. Therefore, not redundant for the implied reason. Although, it's likely redundant by the probability that a previous post, or possibly the unread article had previously made mention pointing out Reddit's decline.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Saturday September 08 2018, @01:29PM (7 children)
I wouldn't even mind the JS if it weren't so badly abused. Almost every site these days MUST have text/graphics bouncing and bobbing around like something from Microsoft Bob. With in-page popovers asking me if I want to take a survey, close that and something pops out from the left asking if I want to sign up for stuff, content is script generated so it is impossible to print and even if it did all the mobile "washed out" colors come out too light to read, all of the links are JS links so I can't bookmark or open in a new tab or window, and if a single script fails to run then there is no content AT ALL.
Bring back HTML 3 and send "modern" web designers back to kindergarten.
Quite frankly this entire AMP things sounds like Microsoft HyperHelp all over again. Pushed down everybody's throats, not needed, and impossible to get rid of.
(Score: 3, Funny) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday September 08 2018, @01:52PM (4 children)
Hmm... are you sure you mean Microsoft Bob [wikipedia.org]? My recollection is that was pretty sedate. A little dog walking around, and a dialog box popping up periodically (those most of them required you to click on something to get a pop-up). I think you might mean Clippy [wikipedia.org], who did have a penchant for bouncing and bobbing around in the corner of your screen... and saying things like "It looks like you're trying to write a suicide note! Would you like help?"
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday September 08 2018, @03:24PM (1 child)
In my infinite boredom I considered cloning that UI for an Android app (program launcher, etc). I have better things to do, but I did seriously consider it. I'm not stupid enough to get a copyright violation from stealing the original artwork and sound clips, but if I do too much myself people will just think I invented it all myself like that TempleOS project written by an internet-semi-famous dude.
I remember LOLing at the time of MS Bob over the typical "old guy failing in attempt to be cool" where they had a "slacker cat" as one of the avatars in Bob. That's the kind of thing where do I try to modernize and make my own "slacker cat" theme which only people around 50 with good memories will get although it would be deliciously retro, or should I modernize with modern theme, like I could have a over the top stereotypical SJW avatar for people to laugh at "I see you're trying to start the gmail app, but first you need to check your white male privilege". I gotta be careful saying stuff like that, that'll probably get embedded into SystemD or windows11 for realsies.
I used NovaLauncher for many years on my Android phone, it was superior to the provided android launcher; I just thought it would be a fun challenge to write my own "bob-alike launcher" for my phone. May yet do it someday for the LOLs.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @08:14PM
If Poettering has to take some extra time to check his privelege before every commit, would that be a bad thing?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Saturday September 08 2018, @03:27PM
I was, in fact, thinking of some other more animated children's software, but no one would have recognized the names. It's really says something about modern web design when they have made it many magnitudes worse than good old Microsoft Bob.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @10:16PM
I can see why someone would want to write a suicide note after getting frustrated with having this silly paperclip bobbing around their screen.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @07:34PM
Please send them back to kingergarden! Maybe the will learn about use of color to make color to make panels readable! Super looking guy blue on white is 100% non-readable
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @03:21PM
Some of these concerns could be addressed in the browser were to impose a "speed limit" on javascript, especially something user controllable, to slow down these infinite unblocked loops that spin incessently, if it gets really abusive, really slow them down a lot or halt them. This could prevent the javascript from eating up CPU and punish these bad scripts.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday September 08 2018, @03:17PM (2 children)
This is just ONE of the reasons i support THIS site.
Quickest load in the west.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday September 08 2018, @03:26PM (1 child)
I'd expect we'd get more "Fr1st po5t!!!" BS but maybe I'm just filtering it out really well or its not cool anymore?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Gaaark on Saturday September 08 2018, @07:56PM
Or the average age level is higher here?
*shrugs*
Seems like our first posts are either really intelligent/insightful or trolls which get modded down fast.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 5, Informative) by zeigerpuppy on Saturday September 08 2018, @11:20AM (4 children)
Google is a fucking menace.
They break standards whenever it suits them and then shoehorn other standards into place where it helps them in acquiring more market share..
DKIM in email is another example, there's little extra security benefit to it but for medium size email providers it just creates more work. And of course, Google puts perfectly valid emails from other servers into spam just to discourage true federation.
They have done the same thing many times over (for example with xmpp and chat).
At some.stage these practices need to be called out, they are abusing their dominant market position and squashing smaller providers that care about their users' privacy by making us jump through ever more hoops that are arbitrary and.of benefit to no.one but the all powerful G.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @12:04PM (2 children)
Monopolies act as monopolies do. No one would need anti-monopoly laws if they didn't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @02:39PM (1 child)
But look at what they are doing without any "intervention". They are basically ruining the internet for people, who will flee to some alternative form of entertainment/info as soon as one pops up. Unless the government props them up (probably already happening via buying data from them), they shouldnt last too long.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Gaaark on Saturday September 08 2018, @03:20PM
"But look at what they are doing without any "intervention". They are basically ruining the internet for people who will flee to some alternative form of entertainment/info as soon as one pops up."
But look at what Microsoft is doing without any "intervention". They are basically ruining computers for people who will flee to some alternative form of entertainment/info as soon as one pops up.... that is if they can get out from under the 'WINDOWS IS LIFE!' way of thinking.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @09:44PM
Google is a sexist and racist [nbcnews.com] organization. Google: Do
NoEvil!(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @01:39PM (16 children)
Google been down ranking shitty websites for years and promoted sites using their crap. Sometimes it meant good things like killing Flash and moving to https over http. Sometimes it meant bad things like making everything mobile friendly ajax.
On the grander scheme of things, AMP forces sites to load fast. You can say how it's underhanded and monopolistic and all that... But in the end when the site doesn't load fast, people don't look at the ads and might even close the tab so it's completely within Google's right as an advertising company to require certain standards.
Don't forget how we got into this situation in the first place: Publishers were filling up their pages with crap javascript measured in the MBs and literally causing chrome to crash on low-ram smartphones just to load a couple of paragraphs of news. This is the shit AMP hopes to solve. And don't bullshit us about how the world would so much better if we just let web designers run things like they want again.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday September 08 2018, @02:17PM (4 children)
If all Google cared about was "loading fast," they could prioritize sites that load fast. Instead, they've chosen to create their own proprietary system and force people to use it to get prioritization on their site. As one of the side effects, it does also create links that "load fast," but why should a site be forced to conform to a bunch of arbitrary proprietary standards?
Yeah, obviously Google is really an advertising company. I kinda wish if they want to force other sites to conform to standards, though, they should be forced to display prominently that that is their motivation. Imagine if the Google homepage consisted of a huge banner that took up 50% of the page saying, "By the way, we're not really primarily a search engine. We're an advertising company that wants to collect as much personal data about you as possible. Oh, and we like to force sites we link to do things the 'Google way,' so you might not see some really good content here because those sites don't like being manhandled by us. If you want to search here, do so at your own risk..."
Just a fantasy, but if the world were fair, that would serve Google right for the way it strongarms other sites to conform to its standards.
Oh yeah, that's a real problem. I agree.
No, that's the Google propaganda. It's really just a service to benefit Google -- to direct people to Google servers and Google content and give Google more control. That's the primary aim of the project. The public propaganda is about fixing a web problem so it won't look so draconian and evil.
Again, I agree. But if Google just wanted to prioritize stuff that loaded fast or whatever, there would be other metrics it could use. If it wanted to stop lots of excess Javascript, it could start by disabling its OWN Javascript crap, and it could prioritize that goal in filtering results. Again, AMP is really a power-grab by Google, which happens to come with some other possible benefits.
In my fantasy world again, any site should be required to pop up a dialog before loading if it had bad elements -- "This site wants to load 53 random pieces of programming code from random untrusted third-party sites that could potentially do really bad crap to your computer and will require you to load 10 times as much data as if you just downloaded the basic content of the site. Oh, and it will also install 27 third-party trackers on your computer that will follow you wherever you go. Are you really, really sure you want to load this site???"
And then the dialog box should have two options to click: (1) "Yes, I'm really sure I want to load this site" and (2) "Please deliver an electric shock to the web developer."
You want to solve bad web design? That might be the only way to really do it... :)
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @05:12PM (2 children)
Oh? Do tell, what technical solution are you proposing to let both publishers and advertisers keep making money that doesn't involve server side telemetries owned and operated by an invested third party like google? There will always be third party ad servers and the only way to keep users from disabling javascript or avoid the content altogether is by keeping the code to a minimum. And the best way to do that was to XHR scripts to google's own ad serving cloud.
We already had uMatrix and uBlock around for years. Did publishers stop adding more javascript or did it cause the exact opposite and made them implement their own DRM schemes that blocked people who weren't enabling javascript? Google slowing down connection by 8s is nothing. They could have blocked the content. They could have blacklisted your IP for a few minutes thus blocking you and everyone on your network from google searches (they do that if you fail their captcha tests too many times)...
So unless you have a viable alternative solution, go karma whore elsewhere.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Pino P on Monday September 10 2018, @02:40AM (1 child)
Ads that aren't third party. Web publishers acting like print publishers, with a self service UI for an advertiser to upload "creative" (JPEG or PNG images to display) in standard IAB ad unit sizes and buy ad space in particular sections, so that a campaign goes live as soon as the publisher's standards and practices department approves the creative. This is what Daring Fireball [daringfireball.net] and Read the Docs [readthedocs.io] do. But I don't see it catching on more widely because ad impressions based on tracking a viewer's interests across sites reportedly have three times the payout (PDF) [politico.com] of impressions that are not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 10 2018, @05:59PM
So to get first party ads to payoff, we need >66% ad-blocker adoption rates...
Reports peg ad blocker usage from 22-40% so there's a ways to get before it breaks even still. (Self reported...)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @08:15PM
as a developer, i have found that few people wish to pay for a site that works that doesnt social media ad display bouncing whatever
and the younger business owners don't recall a time when it was another way, so they want the site to look like it is 'native' and that means windows 10 appearance with social media tie ins and ads that are based on what you looked at on some other website.
something like this site appears to be broken to those people. and there is no fixing them; they know what they want and they'll pay someone else to get it if i won't.
i'd flip burgers but robots are coming for that job
(Score: 4, Informative) by HiThere on Saturday September 08 2018, @05:28PM (9 children)
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.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @06:05PM (6 children)
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)
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)
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
Or use you to take out Github: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/04/ddos-attacks-that-crippled-github-linked-to-great-firewall-of-china/ [arstechnica.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @10:05AM (2 children)
ISPs inserting ads on pages
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @08:21PM (1 child)
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
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)
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.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday September 10 2018, @05:38PM
And it is also aimed at killing off static websites that simply present information and have ABSOLUTELY no need for https.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday September 10 2018, @01:41PM
So in order to fix bloated Javascript slowing down websites, they arbitrarily force anyone who doesn't allow Javascript to wait 8 seconds before the page will start to display. How is that better, exactly?
(Score: 4, Informative) by requerdanos on Saturday September 08 2018, @02:29PM (8 children)
I am glad that "Web consultant Barry Adams" gets his say, but his opinions don't seem very weighty.
Adams is apparently unaware that the vast majority of free software/free culture projects that are open source come 100% from a single developer, with 0% from anywhere else, and that the freedom (usually conveyed by a license) is what makes something free, not Barry-Adams-Approved diversity, which counts for precisely nothing, just as it should. 10% contributions from outside the core project is a *huge* amount compared to almost all other projects, whether free or proprietary.
If he doesn't like it, he could start his own project (maybe "Barry Adams Diversity Contribution Reducing Allocated Pages") and just not contribute anything to his own project until random strangers have contributed enough to make his own contributions below some arbitrary percentage of the whole. That would, by his strange definition, make his project "open source." (Or he could just learn the open source definition [opensource.org]. I don't see anything there about enforced contribution diversity.)
This guy is saying that the fact that "Most of the project contributions come from the people who started and maintain the project" is a bad sign. That's just not a responsible position, and it removes credibility from that point on because you already know he isn't participating in the real, actual world at this point but some mental misunderstandingland.
If publishers had a choice, instead of usable mobile pages, they would be publishing multi-bazigabyte monstrosities that would properly fit neither the screen space nor memory capacity nor processing power of mobile devices. Google is heavily rewarding a (sucky but workable) system for making mobile-friendly pages.
Adams is also saying ominously that this, too, is a "bad thing". The guy's either got some axe to grind against Google, or he doesn't understand what he's saying.
Look, I don't especially like AMP, and I am not crazy about Google. But "Google contributes to their own open source projects" and "Google wants publishers to make mobile-friendly sites" are not the reasons why I or anyone should dislike either one (quite the opposite). The fact that those reasons are true doesn't serve as proof that they are also bad things.
(Score: 5, Informative) by PiMuNu on Saturday September 08 2018, @02:47PM (6 children)
Did you read the article? I think you rather missed the point.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by requerdanos on Saturday September 08 2018, @03:53PM (3 children)
I read the article. In addition to the article's introduction (substantially published above as TFS which I pointed out serious flaws with), Adams shows screen shots of a bunch of notifications that say "This will not affect your search ranking. This is a notification that your AMP page and the regular page differ in that (whatever)."
Then he says something along the lines of "You know what! I bet someday real soon Google is going to say, yes, informational notifications suddenly DO affect your search ranking! IT'S A CONSPIRACY! FIGHT BACK!"
In other words, after a rather inauspicious beginning, the article got factually and logically worse, not better.
My point from warning signs in the introduction was: Expect the article to get factually and logically worse, not better. Specifically, I said of his position, "That's just not a responsible position, and it removes credibility from that point on because you already know he isn't participating in the real, actual world at this point but some mental misunderstandingland." Reading further, you learn that he isn't participating in the real, actual world, and is making it up as he goes along. He offers screenshots as proof.
Here's the thing. "I say that a message that says one thing REALLY! MEANS! ANOTHER!" followed by "SEE? I can prove that the message I am ranting about EXISTS!" is just noise, not evidence. Maybe he's right--under the laws of random chance, there is at least an infinitesimal chance of that. He certainly doesn't present any indication that the chance will be higher than that.
No one who reads TFS here and then reads my comment above will be disappointed in the fact-free junk factor of the rest of TFA. That doesn't "miss" the point--it *is* the point.
If you are a paranoiac who is convinced that Google is conducting vast conspiracy--you might well be, and they might well be--then you will enjoy the article because it will reinforce your biases in an evidence-free, fact-free way proven to be enjoyed by paranoiacs worldwide.
If you suspect that Google is conducting a vast conspiracy and you're looking for evidence of that fact--you'll be disappointed.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Saturday September 08 2018, @09:04PM (2 children)
The content of the article, by my reading, was "if you adopt AMP, you are setting yourself up for an Embrace and Extend fail". It is a reasonable point. When adopting any 3rd party dependency, one must be very cautious to understand the risks implicit in that decision, and the costs involved in backing out of that dependency.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday September 08 2018, @10:51PM (1 child)
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.
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* 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.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Sunday September 09 2018, @10:00AM
Fair enough - I read the (related) theregister article so it probably coloured my perspective. Sorry about that.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Saturday September 08 2018, @07:13PM (1 child)
FTFA :-
The GP post picked up on this point and I agree with him on it. Open source code is simply stuff that people other than those who wrote the code can read, and modify if they wish, and re-publish the modified version. It does not necessarily mean a project which has been originated by a small company or amateurs, nor one in which the work is spread around a large base, no matter how much that would give you a warmer feeling about it.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday September 10 2018, @01:58PM
But you have to look beyond the code and standards that they've actually released. AMP isn't just how you write an AMP website, it's also a set of standards for infrastructure to deliver that content. I can't find any open implementation of that infrastructure component though -- seems like the choices are either Google or Cloudflare.
It's the old EEE strategy. Google is already doing it with Android, and they're starting to do it to AMP as well, although they're probably waiting for increased marketshare to provide sufficient lock-in for the extinguish step. First they release AMP as an open system, then they get everyone using their own caching servers since it's their tech and their servers are free. Now their servers are starting to implement special proprietary features that they aren't part of competing servers -- if you check the pages about Google's AMP cache, you'll see sections which state "This is only applicable to the Google AMP cache". They've started to Extend and are preparing for Extinguish.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @12:58AM
Who the hell doesn't have an axe to grind against Google at this point? That company is horrendous.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @02:38PM (1 child)
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/07/google_kills_www/ [theregister.co.uk]
https://www.wired.com/story/google-wants-to-kill-the-url/ [wired.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @10:08AM
that can be damn annoying
I was at work, loaded a site in chrome, and it showed nothing. Blank page. So, I hunted around, reloaded, checked the (truncated) url. Seriously, wtf?
Several minutes later I realised that the url was missing the s in https
assholes.
I don't use Chrome as a primary browser anymore. Palemoon is far better.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Saturday September 08 2018, @03:01PM
Seems like a pretty clear cut case of abusing their search monopoly position in an anti-competitive way. We have laws for this. I'm curious to see if any real legal action is taken.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday September 08 2018, @03:09PM (1 child)
Call a spade a spade, its clickbait political propaganda.
Not our editor or comments or story; I'm talking about the paid political operatives and national governments spreading propaganda masquerading as "news".
The local legacy newspaper propaganda outlet is pushing:
Headline of a corporate press release about a new industrial (not consumer level) product, theoretically more jobs, well, in China, anyway, but the shell of the company is still on shore... for now... A local judge tongue lashing the prosecutors office WRT laziness, its not his fault (the judge) that trials are late. A local real estate developer puff piece. Two suburban high schools had a football game, total enrollment at both is about 3K and around a tenth of that showed up at the game (this ain't Texas, LOL). One black guy was killed and two black guys wounded in the usual overnight shootings in the black neighborhoods, I think they just rerun the story and roll 1D4 for new numbers each day. Some bizarre inside baseball "scandal" about some local oversight committee not oversighting a department at all. A corporate owned pro sport team where the average viewer age is retired boomer is having some kind of uninteresting personnel problem (literally, "inside baseball"). Scrolly scrolly scrolly, WTF haven't seen this many links on a web page since 1994 ... scrolly scrolly scrolly ... Five propaganda articles all fairly content free suffering from intense severe Trump Derangement Syndrome, your standard 1984-style two minutes hate, OK thats almost normal now, but five in this issue? Win a weekend getaway for two, to a city with a murder rate five times our cities rate, uh no thanks. A local private uni with about 2K students is having challenges. Two politicians are shit talking about various opinions, in a total shocker we declare the lefty to be honest and the RINO to be a liar. A 1970s pop star is coming to a small venue in a couple months. Things to watch for and predict about a college football game this weekend for two schools that are hundreds of miles away (who gives a F?). A school district 300 miles away made a trivial policy change that doesn't really matter; will our local districts copy them and why? X reasons why this season is great. A puff piece on recent fashion trends for Rosh Hashanah menus (I kid you not, too weird to make this shit up)
The common thread with all the stories is they're either formulaic and meaningless, or hyper predictable propaganda, or only hold interest for maybe a couple thousand folks at most out of the millions in this greater metro area. Its sort of like a random twitter feed, but more boring and less useful.
Lets say google kills this industry; have we lost anything?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @10:08PM
Lets say google kills this industry; have we lost anything?
They want to make it easy to sell you things. On your phone. It took a bit of doing but I think I finally got the notifications under control. Have to sit down and do the same to my wifes phone. That is fairly new. Basically they want to make it easy to scrape then be small when they bounce you off their servers.
As for what is real news. You are spot on. I would add, we asking these exact same questions in 1980 when CNN first popped up. Apparently a bunch of pundits screaming at each other over something none of us can control in 20 different ways.
It gets even worse when you dig into *how* these places are getting the news. AP/Reuters/CNNNetwork/FoxNetwork. These news services are basically how all of these guys get the garbage they serve us.
Once I learned companies and countries submitted news pieces in whole to stations to read aloud I realized our news was less than honest. It was very manufactured. Not necessarily for our own good.
(Score: 1) by NateMich on Saturday September 08 2018, @03:09PM (5 children)
He actually suggests I should buy an iPhone because he sucks at web development?
Sure dude, I'll make your fucking problems into my fucking problems.
No thanks.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday September 08 2018, @03:45PM (1 child)
That would straw dog the guy as a stereotypical left winger; I looked his twitter feed over; actual observations are not so clear.
The dude blogs exclusively about SEO, and the "other" famous article of his, is, in some ways, more interesting than the linked one.
https://www.polemicdigital.com/google-news-bias-in-google-algorithm/ [polemicdigital.com]
An attempt at summarizing that article is 46% of clickbait providers clickbait traffic comes from the Google "top stories" carousel and only 2% from news.google.com and other places. The article summarized that google themselves admit the carousel is corrupt as hell and is essentially curated propaganda, so arguing over whats "right and wrong" is almost orthogonal to the entire business model.
Googles position seems to be something like "we'll advertise the hell out of select propaganda of yours for free IF and only IF you'll cooperate by producing propaganda we like and various technical reqs" and the usual characters being given wealth on a silver platter whine about it being too much work for them.
Maybe a good analogy of the whole argument is who should do how much work for who, with respect to supermarkets checkout lanes having copies of "weekly world news" physical clickbait for sale.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday September 08 2018, @03:50PM
Oh just thought of a better analogy. The whole fight is like a gangster movie where they're talking about the morality and ethics inside the business of selling heroin to kids or sex trafficking. People are kind of interested in the internal operations of organized crime very "Sopranos"-like. But its not like any level of morality and ethics in the complicated process of paying laundered protection money somehow makes the overall corrupt industry less corrupt. What are the moral and ethical issues of a whore withholding some amount of tips from her pimp, in the context of the greater sex trafficking industry as a whole, and does it really matter outside their personal transaction? Or what does it mean to be the most ethical pimp on the block?
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday September 08 2018, @11:51PM (2 children)
Well, technically, he only says to ditch your Android phone. You could use a flip phone, or use landlines only, and comply with his suggestion.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday September 10 2018, @02:51AM (1 child)
Say someone wants to use a service that mediates arranging transportation between points, or at times, that are not served by a particular city's public transit. A user of an iPhone or Android phone would use Uber or Lyft. What would a user of a flip phone or land line use instead?
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday September 10 2018, @01:12PM
Need a ride? Dial 555-TAXI
(Score: 5, Insightful) by shortscreen on Saturday September 08 2018, @08:15PM (3 children)
Goog is trying (rather successfully) to turn the www into their own walled garden. See how many sites will function without recaptcha horseshit, without google fonts, without trying to contact google analytics or google tag manager or any of that garbage, in a browser that isn't google chrome or a rebadged google chrome or a clone of google chrome. Maybe there are more googsites than there are websites at this point.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @08:20PM (1 child)
the recpatcha is the worst
i do not want to train their computers to better spy on me via optical recognition. and i dont know why so many people are ok with training the super computer FOR FREE. At least be a bitch and sell out. but no. its mandatory to participate if I want to even create an account to review my COBRA insurance benefits for the job i left.
customer service did not even understand what my issue was. it doesn't load? it won't open? have I tried viewing it in Chrome?
but they could get me a payment table in a .csv format and so I send monthly checks and don't log in to their 'benefits' site. the captcha is required to complete to confirm i am not a robot and also save a few cookies to identify uniquely the computer i am connecting from.
yeah like I need to secure my COBRA amounts due info from other people. and then secure it again if I log in from my laptop instead of my desktop.
so yeah lots of companies are just plain fucked because they accept the google way just as there was one microsoft way. Now there's a two way street, each leading to a dead end. using an apple product still puts you on that road ahead.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday September 10 2018, @02:55AM
Would you prefer that an attacker on the network path between the machine sending your COBRA amounts due info and your machine be able to falsify your COBRA amounts due info in transit? Xfinity by Comcast has been caught repeatedly modifying documents in transit that are delivered over HTTP. See, for example, "Comcast to Customer Who Noticed It Secretly Injecting Code: Maybe It’s Your Fault?" by Sidney Fussell [gizmodo.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @05:55AM
Our tech masters seem to love to try owning the internet. It's been some 20 years since Micro$oft tried to do the same with Internet Explorer and non-standard web markup. And they were pretty fucking close to nailing it, much like google now is. Firefox was what saved our bacon back then, let's see who if any can help us this time.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @12:16AM (1 child)
While Google does do some bad things, it behooves us to look at the bigger picture. The California network neutrality bill hasn't be signed into law yet as far as I've heard. But shortly after the legislature submitted it to the governor, there was a sudden shit ton of astroturfing about the monopoly power Google. Which is coming straight out of the telecoms war rooms via their respective propaganda minions.
Do you really not see what is going on? All of this astroturfing about Google exists to give cover for the CA governor to veto the CA NN bill, and/or to astroturf on behalf of federal vs. state litigation. The discussion about Googles intrusiveness needs to be had. But that is discussion for programmers. Not consumers, and not newsies. Putting the cart before the horse undermines the the bigger problem.
The real walled gardens exist at OSI layer 3, where overlay networks and CDN's are being used to to constrain trade and invade everybodies lives. Everything Google does above OSI layer 4, is irrelevant to any argument about walled gardens. Whatever attempts Google may make that don't leverage their CDN network, can be breached with software. And software is cheap. So even IF they are doing things that can be reasonably described as monopolistic, they are still doing it at the carrier level. IOW, stop trying to fix the second problem. You are fucking things up for the guys trying to fix the first problem.
Of all the bad things Google does, what this guy is bitching about doesn't even scratch the surface. And as much as I'd like to enumerate them, this isn't the time for that. The time for that, is ten minutes after NN is resolved once and for all, nationally.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @02:48AM
But that is discussion for programmers. Not consumers, and not newsies
I disagree. There are 3 sides to this discussion. The ISP the providers and the customers. Well the customers are being left to rot. While the ISPs want to double charge us. The data providers are plunging head over into stripping us of the very rights they proclaim only apply to them. BOTH sides need their shenanigans show in a bright light. Because one group sure as hell is not getting a say. We the people.
(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'"
Account abandoned.
(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.
Account abandoned.
(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.
Account abandoned.