Google No Longer Requires AMP, But the Replacement Might Be Worse (theregister.com) 50
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Google stopped prioritizing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) format in its Top News carousel last month. This means website owners no longer need to publish an extra set of pages written in the AMP format. Instead sites need to meet what Google calls "Core Web Vitals." This sounds like great news. As a long-time critic of Google AMP, I wish I could say that Google AMP is over and done with, but I'm not convinced. As I wrote years ago when it launched, Google's AMP is bad -- bad in a potentially web-destroying way. It's bad for how the web is built, it's bad for publishers of credible online content, and it's bad for consumers of that content. Google AMP is only good for one party: Google. Unfortunately, the same can be said of Core Web Vitals.
[...] Before I get into why AMP's replacement might be worse, it would help to back up and define what AMP is, because things have changed since it launched. AMP is now an open-source web component framework developed by the AMP Open Source Project. See Google anywhere in that sentence? No, no you don't. Google has distanced itself from AMP considerably over the years, but it hasn't given up control. Google AMP began with the stated goal of speeding up the web. The logic behind AMP goes like this: web developers suck at making fast websites, let's strip out all the stuff people don't need and cache it on our super-fast servers. That sounds good. It's not hard to see how well-meaning people would get behind that idea. The problem is that being fast isn't what makes the web great. It's part of it, but it's not the most important part.
[...] Now AMP is no longer required of publishers, those of us shouting about how this is bad can just shut up now, right? Unfortunately, there are problems with AMP's replacement as well. And those problems go right back to what was wrong with AMP in the first place: Google is in charge of it. As web developer Ethan Marcotte points out: "While the shift to Core Web Vitals is a step in the right direction, it also means that Google alone determines what a 'great page experience' means." Currently it means your page should mostly load in 2.5 seconds. That's not a very high bar to be honest, but it is still a bar and the web does not do bars. Worse, that requirement might change tomorrow. Marcotte makes it clear that he thinks deprioritizing AMP in favor of Core Web Vitals is a very good thing, but I'm not so sure that's true. Neither, it seems, is Marcotte, who goes on to note that Google has "taken its proprietary document format, and swapped it out for a proprietary set of performance statistics that has even less external oversight."
[...] Before I get into why AMP's replacement might be worse, it would help to back up and define what AMP is, because things have changed since it launched. AMP is now an open-source web component framework developed by the AMP Open Source Project. See Google anywhere in that sentence? No, no you don't. Google has distanced itself from AMP considerably over the years, but it hasn't given up control. Google AMP began with the stated goal of speeding up the web. The logic behind AMP goes like this: web developers suck at making fast websites, let's strip out all the stuff people don't need and cache it on our super-fast servers. That sounds good. It's not hard to see how well-meaning people would get behind that idea. The problem is that being fast isn't what makes the web great. It's part of it, but it's not the most important part.
[...] Now AMP is no longer required of publishers, those of us shouting about how this is bad can just shut up now, right? Unfortunately, there are problems with AMP's replacement as well. And those problems go right back to what was wrong with AMP in the first place: Google is in charge of it. As web developer Ethan Marcotte points out: "While the shift to Core Web Vitals is a step in the right direction, it also means that Google alone determines what a 'great page experience' means." Currently it means your page should mostly load in 2.5 seconds. That's not a very high bar to be honest, but it is still a bar and the web does not do bars. Worse, that requirement might change tomorrow. Marcotte makes it clear that he thinks deprioritizing AMP in favor of Core Web Vitals is a very good thing, but I'm not so sure that's true. Neither, it seems, is Marcotte, who goes on to note that Google has "taken its proprietary document format, and swapped it out for a proprietary set of performance statistics that has even less external oversight."
The real problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The Web sucks because page creators want it to.
What sucks on the Web? Advertising, tracking, huge third-party JavaScript libraries.
Who wants that stuff? The people who make web pages.
None of it benefits the user at all.
Google wants the Web to suck, but they only like Google suckage.
They're actively working to reduce everyone else's.
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the real REAL problem (Score:2)
Some misguided person in 1998, right or wrong, decided that layout, content and styling should be in different files.
Forward 25 years (!) and the fundamental web problems are the same:
- Binding - No clean way built into html/css/JavaScript to build a reusable component. One not requiring lots of cut and paste, complex handler registration, arcane binding, un-capsulatable css styling, or a 1000 pound blind gorilla JavaScript framework
- Magic strings - No clean way to declare variables for dom elements in HT
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We don't need that, but developers choose to build it that way. Dynamic content is not a necessity for serving news, yet every news site is loaded with dynamic content anyways and the requisite scripting that slows everything down.
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This actually sounds quite good. If a page doesn't load in under 2 seconds I'll probably close the tab anyway.
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You want your website/web app to run fast, and consistently.
1. Follow the open HTML Standards W3C [w3.org]. Most of the modern web browsers for both PC's and Mobile follow the W3C fairly consistently.
2. Don't use 3rd party JavaScript libraries, make your own... Jquery, Angle.js and the like are like candy, makes some things easy to code however you also often add on a far more complex JS code than what you really need. you are bypassing hundreds of additional JS code needing to be ran.
3. Know your balance between
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A couple years ago, I created a new web page for a small group I belong to. I was interested in security-first design, so when I set it up, the first page that existed was the password reset page, and no method ever existed to authenticate a user based on anything other than bcrypt hashes. It's not like this group is a high-value target, so it's likely not that big a deal, but it was so easy to set the site up with security from the beginning, it's amazing to me whenever I hear
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Don't code your own JS library.
It will be slow, the browser has to download and parse the whole thing. Well known libraries will be cached and pre-compiled.
It will also probably be buggy, or at least buggier than mature libraries.
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Well known libraries will be cached and pre-compiled.
You're a little confused about how 3rd party libraries affect browser performance. It was a nice theory. But only applicable to the very first time a page on the domain is loaded. And it is absolutely meaningless. What matters is how much total JS you're linking to, and how much of it wants to run at load time. And furthermore, the 3rd party scripts do all sorts of things that benefit these third parties, but that you wouldn't have any reason to do yourself with domain-hosted JS. And so by getting rid of 3r
What other than ads or monthly subscriptions? (Score:2)
What sucks on the Web? Advertising, tracking, huge third-party JavaScript libraries.
Who wants that stuff? The people who make web pages.
None of it benefits the user at all.
Would most users prefer to have to pay a monthly subscription to each professionally maintained website that each user visits? "Sorry, I couidn't read that article you shared with me because the site it's on isn't in my current subscription package." What third option other than ads or subscriptions am I missing?
* Other than sites that act as customer support for a physical product that you have purchased.
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derp derp, false choice is false, news at 11.
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Patronage. It's not the most popular model, but I think that e.g. Wikipedia could fairly be described as following it, and while it's arguable as to whether it's professionally maintained (infrastructure yes and content no?) it's unquestionable that it has larger server costs than most sites.
I think there's value in questioning your implicit assumptions, too. You mention articles: news or opinion? It seems to me that many opinion articles are wr
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Patronage. It's not the most popular model, but I think that e.g. Wikipedia could fairly be described as following it
In my experience, "patronage" degrades to either advertising-lite or a paywall. Sites operated by non-profit organizations that use the "patronage" model, such as Let's Encrypt and Covid Act Now, show the logos of their sponsors. And on Patreon, a platform whose name resembles the word "patronage", numerous creators make the bulk of their posts available only to patrons at a specific monthly pledge tier or higher, making it equivalent to a paywall.
You mention articles: news or opinion?
I'm thinking about things like NYTimes's deep investigative
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Yes, it's fair to say that most high-volume "patronage" sites aren't funded entirely by anonymous benefactors, although to Wikipedia I could add archive.org as an example of a high-volume high-value site which doesn't really fall under advertising-lite or paywall, although it does periodically have a begging nag-panel at the top.
I don't think I would say that reviews inherently deserve to be relegated to a vanity press, but on the other hand I don't think they've ever been something that more than a handful
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When people post arguments like this, I often wonder if they were on the Web circa 2000.
Static HTML was so much better for so many of the things I want to read online.
And of course, hobbyist pages maintained as a labor of love by people who care about what they're writing and pay their own hosting costs have always been better than the cynical commercial crap full of dark patterns.
Let the advertising-supported Web die.
Would home ISPs have had economies of scale? (Score:2)
Consider a hypothetical situation in which most works published to the Internet are A. self-published by hobbyists each paying for their own writing and their own hosting, or B. published through governments or private charities. I doubt an Internet with only (or almost only) government, nonprofit, and hobbyist material would have provided enough demand for home broadband Internet access (defined in the United States as at least 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up) to support building out and maintaining the last mi
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Wouldn't it be awesome if sites like Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter had paywalls? Seriously.
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Would you still be on Slashdot if it had a paywall, or if even more of the featured articles had a paywall than already do?
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I don't care what you think (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't think people understand how AMP works anyway. The idea is that most of the page is standard libraries of cached, pre complied code that doesn't need to be downloaded again so didn't ping Google.
Of course Google search results ping Google when you click the links anyway.
Re:I don't care what you think (Score:5, Insightful)
If you've got a problem with AMP, it's because you value your crusade to deprive Google of data over basic user experience.
A) A good content blocker solves the exact problem you described, and more. Not only does it maintain a good user experience, it also works across all sites (rather than just AMP pages), doesn't require a middleman like AMP does, and is tremendously more configurable to your specific tastes and preferences.
B) It's fairly rich to suggest that AMP pages provide a better UX, given that AMP pages have been notorious for all sorts of bad UI/UX behavior, particularly on iOS. For instance:
- The address bar misleadingly shows an address other than the canonical URL of the source material
- Link sharing is made worse because the canonical URL is buried several taps deep in menus
- AMP adds a large, non-dismissible header to every page, wasting a huge amount of vertical real estate on mobile
- AMP implements its own, broken scroll logic that doesn't work properly on iOS, so system-wide conventions such as hiding window chrome on scroll or being able to tap the status bar to jump back to the top of the page don't work, leaving users with visual clutter and needless scrolling
- AMP pages don't support Reader mode in iOS, making them inaccessible to users who rely on it
- AMP pages can't be searched by text on iOS, making it more difficult to find references to specific text within the page
And the list goes on. Mind you, these are all things that just work on any normal, standards-compliant web page, so AMP is literally damaging the functionality of otherwise-working pages that would have been fine had they been left to their own. For my part, I'm aware of the iOS issues because that's the pond I swim in, and I wouldn't be surprised in the least if Google addressed these issues by adding some special sauce to Chrome on Android, but the fact that they had to do so would be fairly strong evidence that AMP is both a terrible protocol and antithetical to the core principles underpinning the open Web. Your Web experience shouldn't depend on special sauce to work.
Many of us lived through the dark days of the Web, and the last thing I want to see is unnecessary, proprietary, page-breaking nonsense like AMP being foisted on people who are better served by existing solutions.
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Almost sounds like they were trying to make the experience on iOS shitty. It works much better on Android.
Is it the OS or is it Safari? Chrome and Firefox on Android are fine, I have not tried them on iOS.
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Is it the OS or is it Safari?
Not sure, but that's usually a distinction without difference on iOS, since all iOS browsers use Apple's rendering engine (it's an Apple-imposed requirement). As such, questions regarding page rendering/behavior on iOS tend to have the same answer regardless of browser.
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AMP makes shitty websites work better on mobile, and, as a results oriented person, that's what I care about.
Google should have specified the goal rather than the means.
If they had said, "your average page load time when we query it should be less than 500ms" it would be great. Instead they forced people to use a weird technology set.
Re: I don't care what you think (Score:2)
I think we all know Google's goal. :) If a technology was introduced that made the internet 2x as fast, 2x as secure, and 2x private, but it somehow regulated/standardized search results --or prohibited third party indexers, they would call major foul.
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So maybe just throw up a page for those folks that says "Fuck you, go get a better phone."
Of even turn down the extra crap you're serving those users, so it loads faster?
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" it's because you value your crusade to deprive Google of data over basic user experience."
No, it is because we value having no company with as much control over the web as Google. It is your kind that values dictatorships over democracies.
"Might be worse" (Score:3)
"But the Replacement Might Be Worse"
Of course it is, because this is Google we're talking about!
And then 6 months later, the "replacement" will meet its expected fate. [killedbygoogle.com]
The devil you know, huh (Score:2)
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No, this is why you don't build your business to rely on google in any way; they will tell you how and when you have to change your business model, and whatever they tell you to do, they'll cancel it soon and tell you something different.
In any case, google news used to list content by publishers that they knew was popular. They now mostly list videos. That's why they're unhappy with their engagement now, and having to change it; they shot themselves in the foot by trying to compete with cable television in
The replacement is not worse, it's excellent (Score:5, Interesting)
The article is trolling. It is 100% right that AMP sucks. But while the title says "What replaces it might be worse" there's not a single criticism of Core Web Vitals in the article.
The only complaint the article has is the one copied in the Slashdot summary which amounts to "oh no, they might change it." Google can use whatever metrics it wants to determine what ranks highest. The speed that the page loads is a decent statistic. My only complaint is that sites will likely serve minimal pages very quickly when they are requested from a Google IP address. I think Google knows this and tries to combat it. Overall, this concept is way way way better than AMP, which simply broke the internet.
I know it is cool to complain and whine, but we should instead be cheering this move. Google is getting back to basics: determining which sites should be ranked highest, based on objective criteria. Stop complaining when people do the right thing, just for internet points.
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I know it is cool to complain and whine, but we should instead be cheering this move. Google is getting back to basics: determining which sites should be ranked highest, based on objective criteria. Stop complaining when people do the right thing, just for internet points.
Reputations are earned over a long period of time. It's kind of hard to convince people that Google has turned over a new leaf and isn't trying to secretly fuck everyone over again. Bear in mind that at this very moment, Google is still pushing that FLoC thing.
So, pardon me for being skeptical of your opinion.
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I know it is cool to complain and whine, but we should instead be cheering this move. Google is getting back to basics: determining which sites should be ranked highest, based on objective criteria. Stop complaining when people do the right thing, just for internet points.
Reputations are earned over a long period of time. It's kind of hard to convince people that Google has turned over a new leaf and isn't trying to secretly fuck everyone over again. Bear in mind that at this very moment, Google is still pushing that FLoC thing.
The FLoC thing is a great idea. A way to enable users to stop being tracked without killing the business model that supports the web. There are really only two kinds of opponents of FLoC: The idealists who would like the pull the plug on personalized advertising entirely, and damn the consequences, and the advertisers who insist on knowing everything about everyone. The former I can respect, though I think they're foolish. The latter are the really bad people in this discussion, and are the ones funding m
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No one in this thread is trying to convince people that Google has turned over a new leaf. The topic is: Is Core Web Vitals better or worse than AMP? Since both are Google creations, Google's reputation has no bearing on that comparison. If you wish to provide an explanation as to why Core Web Vitals is worse than AMP, then please post it.
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This is the correct position. This is better than AMP. AMP took away power from web publishers by attaching their sites to google URLs and then further had google prioritize AMP sites in a bid to push publishers to implement it. Then AMP kept creating its own versions of tags in order to incorporate more and more standard web features (eg. video) which didn't really help its case either.
Also it's not the case that ads are the primary problem, some common tools for rendering on the web (like elementor) are a
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Wow, almost like Chrom* (Score:2)
>"AMP is now an open-source web component framework developed by the AMP Open Source Project. See Google anywhere in that sentence? No, no you don't. Google has distanced itself from AMP considerably over the years, but it hasn't given up control. "
Wow, almost like Chromium. People point to it being open source without realizing that Google still almost completely controls the project that makes every single multiplatform browser EXCEPT Firefox. It is not a community project nor driven by any real, ope