'Some Cheers, A Few Sneers For Google's URL Solution For AMP' (theverge.com) 104
The Verge explains what all the commotion is about:
AMP stands for "Accelerated Mobile Pages," and you've probably noticed that those pages load super quickly and usually look much simpler than regular webpages. You may have also noticed that the URL at the top of your browser started with "www.google.com/somethingorother" instead of with the webpage you thought you were visiting. Google is trying to fix that by announcing support for something called "Signed Exchanges." What it should mean is that when you click on one of those links, your URL will be the original, correct URL for the story. Cloudflare is joining Google in supporting the standard for customers who use its services.
In order for this thing to work, every step in the chain of technologies involved in loading the AMP format has to support Signed Exchanges, including your browser, the search engine, and the website that published the link. Right now, that means the URL will be fixed only when a Chrome browser loads a Google search link to a published article that has implemented support.
Mozilla'a official position on signed exchanges is they're "harmful," arguing in a 51-page position paper that there's both security and privacy considerations. Pierre Far, a former Google employee, posted on Twitter that the change "breaks many assumptions about how the web works," and that in addition, "Google is acting too quickly. Other browsers and internet stakeholders have well-founded concerns, and the correct mechanism to address them is the standardization process. Google skipped all that. Naughty." Jeffrey Yaskin, from Chrome's web platform team, even acknowledged that criticism with a tweet of his own. "I think it's fair to say we're pushing it. The question is our motives, which I claim is to improve the web rather than to 'all your base' it, but I would say that either way."
Search Engine Land cited both tweets, and shared some concerns of their own. "The compromise we have to consider before getting on board with Signed HTTP Exchanges is whether we're willing to allow a third party to serve up our content without users being able to tell the difference.
"If we, as digital marketers, want to influence the conventions of our future work environment, we'll have to decide if the gains are enough to disrupt long-standing assumptions of how websites are delivered. If so, we'll also have to cede the ability to judge user intent over to Google and swallow the fact that it skipped over the standardization process to implement a process that one of its own created."
In order for this thing to work, every step in the chain of technologies involved in loading the AMP format has to support Signed Exchanges, including your browser, the search engine, and the website that published the link. Right now, that means the URL will be fixed only when a Chrome browser loads a Google search link to a published article that has implemented support.
Mozilla'a official position on signed exchanges is they're "harmful," arguing in a 51-page position paper that there's both security and privacy considerations. Pierre Far, a former Google employee, posted on Twitter that the change "breaks many assumptions about how the web works," and that in addition, "Google is acting too quickly. Other browsers and internet stakeholders have well-founded concerns, and the correct mechanism to address them is the standardization process. Google skipped all that. Naughty." Jeffrey Yaskin, from Chrome's web platform team, even acknowledged that criticism with a tweet of his own. "I think it's fair to say we're pushing it. The question is our motives, which I claim is to improve the web rather than to 'all your base' it, but I would say that either way."
Search Engine Land cited both tweets, and shared some concerns of their own. "The compromise we have to consider before getting on board with Signed HTTP Exchanges is whether we're willing to allow a third party to serve up our content without users being able to tell the difference.
"If we, as digital marketers, want to influence the conventions of our future work environment, we'll have to decide if the gains are enough to disrupt long-standing assumptions of how websites are delivered. If so, we'll also have to cede the ability to judge user intent over to Google and swallow the fact that it skipped over the standardization process to implement a process that one of its own created."
Walled gardens (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't just harmful for privacy, it is outright lethal for WWW and make it their own. It might not be possible to route around such large-scale assault, especially if they succeed at making Chrome a de facto standard..Not even Microsoft in its heydays of IE dominance were that evil.
Oh this is way worse than that (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
and soon - Google controlled driverless cars!
I'm sorry Senator, the computer glitched just as you were on your way to the latest Google antitrust vote, we're really sorry and will be working hard to ensure this kind of thing never happens again...
Re: (Score:1)
Re: Oh this is way worse than that (Score:1)
Re: Oh this is way worse than that (Score:2)
Re: Oh this is way worse than that (Score:2)
EVERYONE KNOWS that Google clearly has vast monopoly power.
EVERYONE KNOWS that Google regularly abuses their monopoly power.
EVERYONE KNOWS that Google should be broken up by Uncle Sam.
Re: (Score:3)
Except that anyone can run an AMP cache so there is absolutely no need for anything to run through Google's servers. In fact the damn summary mentions that Cloudflare has been running a cache for a while now.
Don't like caches? I'm afraid that boat sailed long ago, these days the majority of pages are served from some kind of CDN or cache and Cloudflare is by far the biggest, but we very rarely hear people moaning about that.
Re: Oh this is way worse than that (Score:1)
Why do you defend google in every thread? Please tell us why you defend a company who only exist to suck up your data and sell ad spots? Please explain.
Re: (Score:2)
And if we had a society of anarchists / freedom lovers there would be hangings.
I'd rather use IE11 forever (Score:1)
Anyone who uses Chrome de facto supports this cancer of a company
Re: (Score:2)
Of course they are. That's their business.
Of more serious concern is that they're net noobs, and don't know the "whats and whys" of the Internet, but have maximal hubris to think they do. They don't, they're doing it wrong, and forcing their mistakes on a mass collective.
Re: (Score:1)
Google hires a hell of a lot of tech veterans, they aren't inexperienced. Facebook is inexperienced. Google has to compete with idiots that want to host the world's news content; so they came up with a compromise measure. Keep your content on the open web, but in a restricted format we can cache and distribute ourselves. This probably saved news providers from strangulation at the hands of Zuckerberg but created a whole new problem with the resulting URLs.
Google's proposal is to make browsers aware of autho
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Explain how this is a walled garden, when anyone is free to implement it and free to use it or not. Explain how this is anything like what, say, Apple does regarding iOS apps.
I don't see the comparison. (Score:3)
- AMP is an open spec. Anyone can implement it, not just Google. Twitter already does. Expect MANY websites to.
- SXG is an open spec. Anyone can implement it. CloudFlare is going to. Expect Akamai to as well. If Firefox chooses not to implement it, that doesn't make it not open. I expect Edge is going to support it.
How is this a walled garden? It seems more to me like it is Mozilla with a stick up its butt.
So you broke the web (again) (Score:1)
and now you're trying to take over with "AMP"? Just like to facebook's "internet.org basics"-landgrab, I say no to this thing.
I think it's time to dump the crud and get something more useful going. No W3C-bullshit, so no html, no xml, no css, no to all that. Anything from any "tech giant" is suspect by default, and therefore so is AMP. Which was already shown to be a bad idea in the first place. So we need something else entirely.
How about... let's resurrect DisplayPostScript to deliver content. Take window
Thoroughly disgusting stratagem (Score:5, Informative)
Not only does Google want to route all traffic through their spy centers, they hope to do it surreptitiously. Anyone who cheers this is a) working for Google and b) lacking a moral compass.
Re: Thoroughly disgusting stratagem (Score:3)
"lacking a moral compass"
I believe the term for that is "Googliness".
Re: (Score:2)
Correct.
The real AMP problem (Score:1, Insightful)
Google isn't actually the underlying problem here. They're trying to provide a solution, albeit a less than stellar one, to a problem that shouldn't exist. AMP exists because web designers load up their pages with lots of unwanted scripts ad trackers. Users generally don't want these things, which seriously degrade the browsing experience. AMP is an attempt to solve this problem by stripping out many of these unwanted "features" that slow down the loading speeds of pages. AMP wouldn't exist if web designers
Re: (Score:2)
AMP exists because web designers load up their pages with lots of unwanted scripts ad trackers.
How about letting those web site continue to operate as-is while people choose to visit other, less crap-loaded sites instead. You know, a market-driven solution that naturally rewards good behavior rather than one that enables bad behavior. Oh, that's right, Google is in the business of delivering crap.
Re: (Score:2)
AMP exists because web designers load up their pages with lots of unwanted scripts ad trackers. Users generally don't want these things, which seriously degrade the browsing experience.
You know what is actually a solution to that problem? uBlock Origin.
You know what Google is doing to help? Deprecating the APIs it uses.
OH! Look! (Score:2)
Look at that falling out of the sky! What is it?.....
It's the OTHER SHOE!
The question is our motives (Score:3)
Your motives aren't important, it's your results that count.
Something something road to hell.
Re: (Score:2)
FTFY (damn lies) (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now, that means the URL will be ***FAKED*** only when a Chrome browser loads a Google search link to a published article that has implemented support. Fixed that for you.
TL;DR; Google wants to display fake urls pretending that the page you are viewing comes from another website, when in actuality it comes from Google.
I am still a Chrome user, but this will def. ensure I return to Firefox. URL has to represent the actual source of the data. Anything else is a MITM attack.
Re:FTFY (damn lies) (Score:5, Interesting)
What I don't get is why they don't just use the mechanism that already exists for this: the CNAME record.
CDNs do this shit all the time. If you want to host someone else's content for them, have them CNAME to you, and you can go get it from the origin like the cache you are. The only difference with AMP would be that the origin serves it in a special format so they can muck with it on the way through.
To me, this whole thing stinks of "Hi. We want to be a CDN with some interesting features, but without actually doing the work involved in being a CDN. So here, let's break the standard in ways that will end up severely compromising security!"
Google has been losing more and more of my respect every day, both on the business and engineering side.
Re: (Score:3)
URL has to represent the actual source of the data. Anything else is a MITM attack.
I have bad news for you. Basic HTML allows elements of the page to be loaded from other URLs, and in fact that's very common now with things like ad networks and Javascript used for dynamic content. Even worse, the standard DNS CNAME system allows sites to use CDNs and other caches to deliver content from pretty much anywhere.
Even the URL itself subverts what you think a URL is, because dynamic pages can serve different content based on hidden variables and state information.
URLs have been broken for decade
You're conflating source and delivery mechanism (Score:2)
Should the URL of every page be your ISP, because you got the content from your ISP?
I think no, one should understand the difference between the source (creator) of the page vs companies involved in delivering it to you.
Signed exchanges GUARANTEE where the content cane from - who created it. A Slashdot.org HSE is cryptographically proven to have come from Slashdot.org. The source *is* Slashdot, regardless of which ISP and cache deliver it to you.
I have an simpler solution to load pages faster: (Score:5, Insightful)
* Has to load 'content' from 50 different domains just to read the text
* Has to run a shitload of javascript just for a basic page view
*
NoScript and adblockers can only do so much. Then they start moving some of the necessary, actual content of the page to the same servers the ads come from, so you can't even see the basic page without having ads shoved at you, too. Ridiculous.
Re: (Score:2)
You really think a web page slows down because it has a slider or a button? Give me a break. We had those on machines with snail-slow CPUs and 64K of RAM back in the day, and they were just fine. And the current internet is far faster than storage was back in those days, so the transfer time isn't an excuse either.
You need to fix either the platform or the developers.
I know which one has my vote.
Re: (Score:3)
Speed is the reason AMP exists: It's supposed to address the problem of pages loading slowly because they need so many dependencies, by instead making those sites need only the dependencies Google has determined essential and performance-optimised.
The alternative is to just not have so many dependencies, but site operators do need to make a profit, and profit demands extensive tracking and advertising capability which depends on third-party integration.
Re: (Score:3)
That's actually what AMP does. It limits pages to a subset of features, uses standardized resources and makes most of the content load from caches, which means it can be cached locally too. It's an effort to de-bloat the web so that it loads faster on mobile where latency really hammers pages that need resources from all over the place.
Re: (Score:3)
Could they not have accomplished the same thing by adjusting their algorithms to de-emphasize poorly loading applications?
Oh wait, of course not. Double-click et al are the reason why sites are loading so slow in the first place, and Google can't block that.
AMP doesn't solve anything other than problems Google itself caused in the first place.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually they did that. Slow loading pages have been down-ranked for years.
Re: (Score:2)
The REAL solution to Google's URL problem (Score:5, Informative)
Tracking-b-gone [github.com] greasemonkey userscript.
(There are plenty others as well. The Google-tries-to-wedge-itself-everywhere problem is not new)
Because you know what? The "Google URL problem" only exists because Google wants to track you. No tracking, no problem. Essentially, AMP is a solution to a problem only they have, which is "how do we present innocent-looking links and still track the shit out of however clicks on them".
Fuck Google.
Re:The REAL solution to Google's URL problem (Score:5, Insightful)
>"Because you know what? The "Google URL problem" only exists because Google wants to track you. No tracking, no problem. Essentially, AMP is a solution to a problem only they have, which is "how do we present innocent-looking links and still track the shit out of however clicks on them". Fuck Google."
There is an even simpler solution. One that not only addresses this issue, but many others too:
STOP USING CHROME.
Every person that buys into using Chrome is giving Google more control and more power. Install and use Firefox and encourage others to do the same. There is really is no reason not to. In all reasonable metrics, it performs the same and uses the same or fewer resources. It is available for all modern operating systems, including mobile. It is true open-source. It adheres to actual standards. And it is community-driven.
Re:The REAL solution to Google's URL problem (Score:4, Insightful)
>"The problem is Firefox doesn't listen to its users and is a pile of shit."
Actually, the first part of your statement is somewhat correct, but the second part is not. What most people were upset about was loosing the addon compatibility and variety. But this was absolutely necessary for the browser to move forward and gain the needed security and performance that now makes those as good as Chrome. It will get better as the API expands and improves.
>"The interface is awful and gets worse with every revision"
It was Chromified. And while I don't like that, the alternative is.... Chrome, which looks and acts the same, except with far less ability to tweak it.
>"and they keep implementing shit nobody wants instead of fixing things people complain about."
Except almost all of it can be turned off. It is a problem with lots of large open-source projects: It isn't glamorous or fun to fix bugs.
So while I agree with some of the things you said, that doesn't change what I originally posted. We need to support and use Firefox (and complain LOUDLY to any entity which creates 'broken' websites), or the alternative is that Google will completely take over the browser space, the web, and our privacy and leave us with a monobrowser based on Google's whims and desires instead of based on actual standards. It seems like a no-brainer.
It might be difficult to participate in Firefox and sway Mozilla's design directions, but it is 1,000 times easier than trying it with Chrome and Google. And as much as I hate IE/Edge, its takeover by Google/Chrome should be an extremely loud and clear alarm for anyone who understands history and what this can and will mean for us all.
Install and use Firefox. Tell everyone you know to do the same. Do so because you value freedom, privacy, and standards. Do it while most web-sites are still standards-based and their owners care about compatibility. Do it before it is too late. We are reaching a threshold where there may never be any return if action is not taken NOW.
Re: (Score:2)
We need to support and use Firefox (and complain LOUDLY to any entity which creates 'broken' websites), or the alternative is that Google will completely take over the browser space, the web, and our privacy and leave us with a monobrowser based on Google's whims and desires instead of based on actual standards. It seems like a no-brainer.
Precisely. Chrome is the new IE. How quickly we forget...
Google's trying to make unblockable ads (Score:1, Insightful)
Google's trying to make unblockable ads, given away by the single quote we saw in the summary of ""If we, as digital marketers, want to influence the conventions of our future work environment, we'll have to decide if the gains are enough to disrupt long-standing assumptions of how websites are delivered."
Bottom line (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, Google is offering a purportedly faster web browsing experience and hoping that most people won't bother to look behind the curtain and ascertain exactly why Google is doing it.
Google is an company who makes all their money by selling your information to other entities - anything they can do to collect more information means more dollars in their pockets. Everything they do should be interpreted through that filter. When Google says "X is better for the web", people need to understand they're dissembling because the company's fundamental motivation would not be acceptable to the average person.
Silk Browser (Score:5, Interesting)
This reminds me of the Silk web browser built into the Kindle Fire and other Amazon devices. It has a feature that loads optimized web pages via Amazon servers, and the URL bar doesn't indicate this IIRC. However, there is a browser setting that disables this feature if for some reason you don't want Amazon to know every site you browse to.
This reminds me of the malfeature that BCC's the URL I click on to arbitrary destinations. If I click on a URL, then I expect that address should be the only site that knows about it. I suppose that's somewhat undermined by Cloudflare and other CDNs, though.
welcome new IE (Score:2)
Re: welcome new IE (Score:2)
Google is evil (Score:2, Interesting)
Really not much more to be said but I will anyway.
If Google displays your pages, they own your pages. Not you anymore. You become the free content creator. They become the publisher and owner.
Next up will be the usual mandatory tracking, the ads, the 30% revenue share you have to do with Google, and then they will get editorial control and finally will have all non Google hosted pages blocked from the net.
Oh you wanted to have an ad based web site? Sorry, we only support ads on amp.
Oh, by the way, amp ru
I own a search marketing company (Score:1)
Re: I own a search marketing company (Score:2)
If all software developers were part of a union or guild, we could stand together in solidarity and refuse to implement evil shit like this.
Individually we are powerless. We do the job as Capital commands, or we starve in unemployment. Together in solidarity we would have enough power, as citizens and free men, to stand up against this unamerican creeping totalitarianism.
Re: (Score:1)
You could all work for Microsoft; who don't play this sort of game. Their telemetry stuff is far more aggregated and doesn't track you in particular. They were trying to run their own web browser... but google won through youtube and Google fighting dirty by lambasting Edge when you used Google.com
MS isn't perfect.
But they seem far less evil than Google.
It helps their income streams more diversified than just advertising.
Need more proof? (Score:3)
Anyone need more evidence Google is evil and hell bent on nothing less than centralizing all of the web?
The only reason for making content hosted at Google appear in URL bar to be served from somewhere other than Google is intentional deception.
Much like Google's webmaster blog post:
Today we are rolling out support in Google Searchâ(TM)s AMP web results (also known as âoeblue linksâ) to link to signed exchanges, an emerging new feature of the web enabled by the IETF web packaging specification. (https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-yasskin-dispatch-web-packaging-00.html)
The author clearly intended to deceive the reader into drawing the conclusion this is "IETF web packaging specification" when all it really is was someone from Google submitting an ID where the only requirement to acceptance is passing automated normative checks. This submission hasn't even been adopted by a WG. To phrase it in this manner can only be explained by an effort to intentionally mislead.
AMP (Score:4, Interesting)
AMP is one of the many cancers that is killing the internet. Though most sites that use it are just clikcbait linkfarms masquerading as news sites.
Note: spellcheck is trying to change clickbait to clitoral.
The ol' days of the wild wild net (Score:2)
We had the browser wars, crazy times.
Don't need AMP (Score:2)
My personal web pages load faster than any of those... Oh, right, that's because mine are static HTML, with NO scripting, and, since I wrote them in vi, don't have a ton of crap, like what every word processor dumps into the file, when you say "save as html".
But then, my pages are about content, not style for 16-yr-olds.