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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
(Score: 2) by DavePolaschek on Monday March 12 2018, @11:25PM (10 children)
Turn off the one, the other ceases to function. Just like other annoyances on the web.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 13 2018, @12:02AM (9 children)
I've been living without JS as much as possible for years and in that time the number of sites that completely break without it has skyrocketed. Not even a week ago Youtube was reduced to a black screen with a white bar across the top. It used to at least show the first few rows of videos/titles which I could manually youtube-dl by copying the links. I used be amazed when JS-heavy sites loaded 10-15 scripts, today 80+ is the norm... Further, in my years-long effort to avoid JS I've convinced exactly zero people to do the same. Avoiding or boycotting tech rarely evokes the desired change. JS, new versions of Firefox/Chrome/Windows/Linux/whatever, mobile devices, government spying, all continue to march forward at an increasingly accelerated rate regardless of how much the masses disapprove of their choices or behavior; and so will AMP.
(Score: 3, Touché) by bob_super on Tuesday March 13 2018, @01:01AM (3 children)
The masses care about the social network post, the game streaming, and the porn.
The masses don't know about Javascript or any of the obscure piping that makes the bits go around.
I browse the not-neutered web on Linux with Noscript, exchanging the inconvenience for the certainty that my use case is such a tiny fraction of a percent, it's hardly worth writing nasty code against.
I have no illusions of "the masses" ever learning, let alone bothering, to fight for smaller pages and less scripts. You could run crypto-miners all day long without fear of uprising.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 13 2018, @08:32AM (2 children)
Porn sites are the exception, though. Many porn sites work without JS, some even work better without than with. Probably related to the whole idea that porn sites are especially risky, so many people will browse porn with JS disabled.
Videos are an exception, though, I'm not sure whether this is for copyright reasons (though Video Download Helper works fine), or simply web devs not knowing that the video tag works fine without Javascript. Considering the number of posts I've seen on sites like StackExchange where simple CSS questions get answered with "use JQuery", I'm guessing it's the latter.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Pino P on Tuesday March 13 2018, @04:15PM
True, Encrypted Media Extensions for digital restrictions management of web video require JavaScript. But that's not the only problem. The other problems are seeking, variable throughput of the Internet connection, and live video.
The naive method of seeking in a recorded video, relying on HTTP range requests, runs into two problems. The first is variable bit rate. Dropping the needle one-third of the way through a file won't get you one-third of the way into the runtime if the first third is encoded with a greater or lesser bitrate than the remainder. So a player has to use bisection search to figure out at which byte offset to start retrieving the video data, and this sort of back and forth can take a while over a high-latency satellite or cellular connection.
The other problem with HTTP range requests is web servers that fail to support range requests. Two decades ago, download managers used range requests to attempt to retrieve several pieces of a file at once, exploiting throttles that operated per connection. But because these used up more connection resources on download servers, several file download services deliberately disabled range requests except for those servers reserved for paying subscribers. A browser might discover that a range request has failed, and the server has fallen back to resending the entire video from the start.
Another cause of seeking is varying throughput of an Internet connection over short periods. To ensure a seamless experience for viewers, a service might want the player to choose among encodes at different bitrates. But when it switches bitrates, it has to seek to the corresponding position in the lower or higher bitrate encode.
Viewers expect to drop the needle in a live video at what's happening right now, or perhaps a minute ago ago after the video has passed through the buffers of state- or advertiser-required censorship and codecs that use B-frames. The naive solution of encoding the video separately for each viewer doesn't scale. An improvement is to encode once and start each stream at the next keyframe. But the architecture of widely used repeater services (also called content delivery networks) works on a whole file, not a stream that each server would need to demux and remux.
The common solution to these is breaking the videos into segments 3 to 10 seconds long, storing each at a separate URL, and linking them from a timed playlist. Then the CDNs can cache each segment, and the player can choose which to request based on the current playback position and recent throughput. But if the browser doesn't support common playlist formats, such as Apple HTTP Live Streaming or MPEG-DASH, a polyfill served by the website needs to handle this using the Media Source Extensions API, which requires JavaScript.
Not being a fan of porn, I don't know how long a typical porn video is. But if it's under a minute, the compressed video is likely to fit entirely within RAM, allowing the browser to use trivial seeking methods that rely on the whole muxed stream being available.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday March 13 2018, @04:29PM
> many people will browse porn with JS disabled.
"AH, you mean incognito mode, right? I always clear my history and cookies too, just in case" - typical user
Little reminder for the SN dweller: It is likely that over 90% of people browsing the web Do Not Know what that Javascript thingy is. Maybe half have noticed the name exists.
You could easily sell the casual user a new flonium condensator to rehash their Qbit.
Computers are an appliance, especially in phone form factor. Most people have no clue.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by cocaine overdose on Tuesday March 13 2018, @03:50AM (3 children)
One of things I've found successful, was reactionary and precise pushback that doesn't remove the quality of life one has been accustomed to. Think uBlock : Ads, not NoScript et al. In one of my own codebases, we were able to modify the SpiderMonkey JS engine to emulate Chrome's V8 (among other privacy patches that make your browser completely indistinguishable from a Windows 10 Chrome, even on Linux) for the very bare necessities, and then pass fake info for everything else. Less than 1% of the browser population uses/ does not have JavaScript enabled (don't look at industry data from fingerprinting companies, this one statistic is misinterpreted/lied about). Our assumption was that NoScript severely lessens the user's experience, while offering intangible benefits. So we worked the opposite. The insecure cruft was removed in favor of simple pseudo-data outputters. What's left is already fast and stops most egregious abuses of JS, but we still added little user-enhancements here and there to make it more "real" (like rate-limiting and scaling CPU usage, so coinminers don't lock out a core). Then slap a simple installer script onto it, and you have people giving a shit now. In the SaaS world, this is called "friction," i.e how fucking hard do you make it to achieve your intended goal?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday March 13 2018, @05:09PM (2 children)
Would it also be considered "precise pushback" to block scripts that the end user isn't allowed to understand and improve [gnu.org]?
(Score: 2) by cocaine overdose on Tuesday March 13 2018, @07:16PM (1 child)
You're not gonna get people to disavow JS using a logical argument. They're going to have to get consecutively more and more sick of it, until everyone drops it for the newest flavor of [insert hyped up tech here].
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday March 14 2018, @03:16PM
"Non-free" is hard. "Not machine-readably labeled as free" is easy. Block everything by default and allow only those scripts whose developers have specified their license [gnu.org]. I'd be interested to see which would be the first adtech company to answer the LibreJS challenge.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 13 2018, @12:43PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Tuesday March 13 2018, @12:01AM (2 children)
None of this would be needed if it wasn't for undisciplined/uneducated/underpaid/uncaring web developers and management believing that multi-meg pages are acceptable in order to render a line of text.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 13 2018, @12:05AM
Are you done with that story yet? It is just a 3 pointer. You said it would be done yesterday.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 13 2018, @12:45AM
> undisciplined/uneducated/underpaid/uncaring web developers
Thankfully, I don't employ any of those people. My small company site is hand coded in html and any of the 40+ pages come up in less than a second. It's not fancy, just an "e-brochure" discussing the company history & capabilities, no e-commerce.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by goodie on Tuesday March 13 2018, @01:04AM
Fuck this. I'll tell you what the issue is: CPU-hoggin, memory-eating adverts and crap that prevent pages from loading properly and result in never-ending page loads (as in, the page is never done loading). If AMP aims at helping load the actual contents and not the ads, then you don't need AMP altogether. The content is not the issue. The issue is the fact that loading a random page requires calls to thousands of other services that are here to track you and sell you stuff.
Fuck this, I'll take gif banners back I think and will gladly punch that monkey :p
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Appalbarry on Tuesday March 13 2018, @02:28AM (12 children)
I haven't really taken the time to fully understand the fine points of the whole AMP thing, but have to say that it make me very, very uncomfortable. It seems like a bad idea to have the entire Internet filtered through Google.
I've been gently looking around for quite a while, thinking about how to replicate the good things about Google (passwords, history etc across multiple devices; web mail that you can use anywhere; spam filtering that is still the best; integration of mail, calendars, contacts etc (though it seems that Google craps out on those things of late)) but without being drawn into the whole Googleverse.
Shouting TURN OFF JAVASCRIPT! BLOCK EVERY AD EVERYWHERE! isn't really an answer. Like 98% of the population I will put usability and feature fullness ahead of near religious blocking of every element that I don't like. Ten years ago I might of jumped on that bandwagon, but I just want to get work done these days, and crippling two-thirds of the 'net doesn't really help me in that goal.
By the same token, I also ignore helpful people who tell me that I can increase battery life by turning off WIFI, GPS, data, notifications, and dimming the screen to 5% brightness. I didn't buy a smartphone just to turn off all of the things that make it "smart."
Someone somewhere will surely build a search engine or similar tool that doesn't fuck around with everything that you touch - point me at it and I'll use it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 13 2018, @02:32AM (4 children)
https://nextcloud.com/ [nextcloud.com]
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Tuesday March 13 2018, @06:10AM (2 children)
Have actually looked at that, as well as Mailpile
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Tuesday March 13 2018, @12:02PM (1 child)
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 13 2018, @01:55PM
You can get a keepass running on that nextcloud to address the passwords
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 13 2018, @10:58AM
I recently deployed nextcloud for a group of friends and they have found it very useful. Not only that, while I didn't intend to use it myself, I have found myself doing so.
Not heavy usage by any means, but definitely handy (and of course, being able to deploy your own server is great!).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 13 2018, @03:33AM
Fuck Beta and
Fuck AMP?
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Tuesday March 13 2018, @06:21AM (4 children)
Ferdy Christant wrote a blog post about many problems with AMP [ferdychristant.com]. There are four main ones plus the puzzling fact that the standard itself does not actually help speed things up:
However, AMP itself does not speed anything up, the pre-loading is what does it. It looks to me like a brazen maneuver to get Google in position to be cache for most of the world's web sites under the guise of speeding things up.
Fixing the web pages would solve that and reduce bandwidth overall. So the way around the problems AMP claims to solve is to keep pages lighweight [soylentnews.org] and avoid bloat. Bloat refers to any scripts at all but especially third-party scripts and third-party CSS.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Tuesday March 13 2018, @08:41AM (3 children)
Not mentioned in the article, but I believe that this preloading only works because they're hosted by Google and so the same-origin policy works. It wouldn't work with any other AMP cache and it wouldn't work for any other search engine. This seems like it's an antitrust lawsuit waiting to happen.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday March 13 2018, @05:13PM (1 child)
Would it be enough to boost sites' ranking if they 1. are lightweight and 2. opt into cross-origin requests (CORS) for origins under the major web search engines' domains?
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Tuesday March 13 2018, @07:42PM
Would it be enough to boost sites' ranking if they 1. are lightweight and 2. opt into cross-origin requests (CORS) for origins under the major web search engines' domains?
I would guess so. That's kind of what I had in mind but am far from both Google and what they work on. However, sites are generally quite eager to optimize their pages towards search engine rankings.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Tuesday March 13 2018, @07:40PM
This seems like it's an antitrust lawsuit waiting to happen.
Yes. In a parallel universe they'd get warned off just for even considering it, but it's most unlikely under the incumbent regime. Even since Bush II kicked out a federal judge [nytimes.com] to curry favor with Bill Gates and prevent breakup of M$ [politico.com], anti-trust rules in the US have been ignored. The effect spreads even to other regions outside the US. However, just in the US, you could see Larry Ellison testing the waters for Oracle with purchases and making more strategic purchases later. Here are four, the first (Innodb) heralded the eventual purchase of MySQL.
Then look at his additional acquisitions [networkworld.com] in the layers in the stack above that. Nothing in any of those purchases triggered even a warning. The Peoplesoft acquisition [ftc.gov] started in 2003 already. That leaves Oracle with little to no serious database competition, if the usual behavior continues that would combine with the holdings to be anticompetitive. IANAL
There was also more lately from M$ and from Apple that should have triggered some response too.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by isj on Tuesday March 13 2018, @01:28PM
It may not be useful to you yet, but there is https://www.findx.com [findx.com] We're currently focusing on crawling Danish sites so that is where the results are good. If you need French results then https://www.qwant.com/ [qwant.com] is OK (their non-French results seem to come from Bing).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 13 2018, @05:39AM
You got a handful of too-big-to-fail fuckers you need to suck up to.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Tuesday March 13 2018, @09:17AM
AMP is supposed to speed up the web. Google could do this without a new non-standard language for web pages: all they have to do is make speed part of their ranking algorithm. (Important detail: they would have to ensure that they see the same page that users do.) Whatever the motivation for AMP is, it is solving the wrong problem. Anyway: AMP is not HTML, it is not standard. If this were Microsoft, we would all be saying "embrace, extend, extinguish", because that's exactly what it looks like.
A few sites have seen the light. I recently subscribed to Ars Technica, because they promise no ads and no trackers for subscribers; everything but the comments section works just fine without scripts. So, guess what, the site is fast without AMP. I subscribe to Soylent for the same reason.
The big, ad-laden, script-heavy sites? I sincerely hope most of them won't be around in another 5-10 years. Unfortunately, AMP will give them a new lease on life, with their broken business models.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 13 2018, @04:00PM
Google loves to embrace and extend, they think the web is their natural monopoly, and they punish those who don't "play ball" with their requests by making access to their near-monopolistic platform difficult.
Well, they are different from the old Microsoft in that they are spying machines that respect nothing about their users--at least Microsoft for the most part only targetted BUSINESSES with their shenaningans.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday March 13 2018, @04:51PM (1 child)
As a user, I hate AMP because it puts a sticky header at the top of my screen. I hate it for other reasons as a concerned citizen, but practically speaking, stealing some of my screen for a pointless reminder of where I am is extremely annoying. Unfortunately I can't seem to tell Google to stop giving me AMP pages.
I'd try switching to Bing again, but there's a good reason that switch has never lasted for more than a few minutes.
Anybody got a suggestion for a search engine that isn't Google and is better than Bing?
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 3, Informative) by DavePolaschek on Tuesday March 13 2018, @07:25PM
http://duckduckgo.com/ [duckduckgo.com] works pretty well, and if you use a !g at the start of your search term, you get google's search, but without the tracking.