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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, 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.