AMP is shit. Kill it with fire!
Google AMP supremo whinges at being called out on team's bulls***
The creator and lead developer of Google's news-sucking AMP service is unhappy about being called a liar. Malte Ubi responded Monday morning to a blog post written by Irish web developer Jeremy Keith in which Keith called Google out for painting its service as something for the greater good rather than a corporate money-making …
COMMENTS
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Monday 30th October 2017 21:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
So why does El Reg (amongst many others) publish AMP-formatted pages? And why do so many people voluntarily view them?
Because, like it or not, they respectively dramatically increase reach, and leave out masses of pointless bloat-ridden scripts and other crap. Two things which are not unrelated.
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Monday 30th October 2017 22:09 GMT Orv
It's possible to make fast mobile pages without AMP, but AMP enforces restrictions that tend to result in fast pages. And I admit they are fast, although I don't like the proprietary nature of them or the sqidgy navigation that comes from rewriting a lot of the normal browser UI in Javascript.
The whole "bug not a feature" comment is probably a reference to how Google has, at least in theory, set things up so people other than them can run AMP caches. As far as I know no one has, because why would they? But that fig leaf is there to make it look less like an attempt to create a Google-dependent version of the web.
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Tuesday 31st October 2017 06:58 GMT Dan 55
Take a look at El Reg's AMP version vs m.register if you want an example of Google doing something absurd and the world asking "how high?"
m.register is faster than AMP, if other publishers are saying "oh wow, our pages load 300% faster" it's because they didn't know how to design (mobile) websites in the first place.
Yet El Reg is obliged to make an AMP version otherwise it won't get listed at or near the top.
Also worth noting that Google saying this is open source. It always is, at the start. Then the open source part disappears.
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Monday 30th October 2017 22:30 GMT Adam 52
"So why does El Reg (amongst many others) publish AMP-formatted pages?"
Because they bring in Ad revenue and new readers. At least short term.
"And why do so many people voluntarily view them?"
Because they appear first in the Google search results.
"Because, like it or not, they respectively dramatically increase reach, and leave out masses of pointless bloat-ridden scripts and other crap. Two things which are not unrelated."
I think they are unrelated. The increased reach is due to prominent positioning in Google search, nothing else. Nobody goes scrolling past a conventional page to find an AMP version of the same thing. If I were a competition regulator I'd be looking long and hard at an attempt to control news publishing by using a near monopoly in the web search space.
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Tuesday 31st October 2017 06:31 GMT Voland's right hand
If I were a competition regulator I'd be looking long and hard at an attempt to control news publishing by using a near monopoly in the web search space.
AFAIK the Knitting Lady is looking at it based on complaints from some of the usual suspects in Germany. None of the English speaking media even dared to consider emitting a squeak which speaks volumes about the power of the G00G.
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Tuesday 31st October 2017 09:00 GMT Ben Tasker
So why does El Reg (amongst many others) publish AMP-formatted pages? And why do so many people voluntarily view them?
It's not always voluntary.
If you hit a link on Twitter to (say) Ars Technica on a mobile device - you'll almost certainly go to the AMP page first, and then have to click a link to go to the properly formatted version.
Aside from AMP pages being unadulterated dogshit (IMO) one of the common complaints about it is that there's no way to opt-out of being served the AMP crap.
They've got more reach because of the way Google is pushing them - it doesn't automatically mean that AMP is a better solution. It's more than possible to create a page that'll load quickly on a mobile without AMP, and doesn't even take that much effort.
If you like AMP pages, that's fine. The difference is, that those of us who don't like them are getting them pushed with no way to say once (whether per-site, or globally) that we'd actually rather have the full-fat version of the site. IMO it's as, if not more, annoying than the sites that insist on loading a modal to say "We see you're on a mobile, why not install our app?" every time you visit.
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Monday 30th October 2017 21:49 GMT David 132
Not directly relevant, but..
...for those who are puzzled - as I used to be - by the references in this article and elsewhere to "Kool-Aid" and "Jim Jones", I can *highly* recommend this PBS documentary on the Youtubes:
American Experience - The Jonestown Massacre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elrV-14_m5w
Worth watching if you want an appropriately terrifying Halloween-time reminder of how a single charismatic individual can inspire, subvert and ultimately, destroy a large group of people.
<poker face> Thank goodness nothing remotely comparable has happened since or could ever happen again.</poker face>
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Monday 30th October 2017 22:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
i must be missing something
I find AMP pages have trouble loading and are therefore slower than regular ones (on my mobile device).
I have tried a few times and its always the same ... now i avoid the AMP stamped links in google.
Oh and i use chrome on my mobile too (its even signed into my google account most of the time).
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Monday 30th October 2017 22:49 GMT John Smith 19
"In other words, Google was talking to itself in the mirror." AMP --> WAP for the 2010's?
Didn't work out too well.
As for Google, well it seem you really do have to have absolutely no critical facilities or knowledge of other IT systems whatsoever to.
Is anyone thinking "sounds like a Microsoft employee."
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Tuesday 31st October 2017 07:25 GMT JimC
Google imagines itself ... more important than ... people creating
> Google imagines itself, as the aggregator of other people's content,
> as more important than the people creating that content. And, sadly,
> in terms of reach, they are.
Nothing new there. Its the whole big advertising ethos that only silicon valley megacorps are allowed to earn money and the creators can go starve.
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Tuesday 31st October 2017 09:57 GMT RyokuMas
AMP is basically the first step on the slippery slope that leads from SEO to content control. Now not only do you have to have all the Google-approved tags and trackers on your page in order to hit those the top spots on the results page (the only ones that 90-odd percent bother with), but now on mobile, you have to present your content in the way Google want, using their proprietary, non-standard markup.
Meantime you also have Google trying to dictate what ads you can and cannot see - again, another step on that slippery slope towards controlling and censoring what we can and can't see on the internet.
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Tuesday 31st October 2017 19:31 GMT Mr D Spenser
Gobsmacked
The other night I booted up an old laptop to help track down an issue on another machine. Google noticed that the date time on my machine was off by a couple of years and politely refused to answer my queries until I reset it to the current day.
Really Google? Have you become so arrogant that forcing me to set my clock a particular way seems OK to you or that you are so clueless that you don't understand why that is bad behavior.
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Tuesday 31st October 2017 10:58 GMT m0rt
AMP will die
It will disappear. It will be quietly dropped, or rather given a new name, which is similar to the name of another project, then they will be 'merged for efficiency', then that will be it. Quietly dropped.
The web is a mess. Pages of trackers and ads, which ironically, google is king at, and it has had its toll. We have faster computers to serve ever more complex pages, to ever more complex computers/tablets and we are in a loop of 'progress' without any real refinement.
Someone will come along to, excuse me for this, 'disrupt' the current thinking. When that happens people will flock to that, the ease of use, transparancy, speed, simplicity. Then the entire loop begins again...
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Tuesday 31st October 2017 15:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
Freetard alert
So happy to be reading this on el Reg. A site of purity with absolutely no profit motive and thus -> no ads. I am sure the kind hearted soul who wrote this article doesn't receive one nickel for his efforts.
Also love to read the Freetard comments on this... the typical Trump'esque stuff such as - "we are bigly, everyone else is not". So much substance here ;)
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