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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 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?