How to Replace Google's AMP Without Slowing It Down

https://redfin.engineering/how-to-fix-googles-amp-without-slowing-it-down-522bc5e1e11d

by dfabulich • 8 years ago

159 116 8 years ago

JoshMnem8• 8 years ago

The WWW is supposed to be decentralized. There shouldn't be one (or a few) companies that host the Web. I don't want Google to visit sites on my behalf.

dfabulich11• 8 years ago

(Author here.) That's what's so great about the Web Packaging standard proposed in the article to replace AMP: everybody could use it. https://github.com/WICG/webpackage

Even HN could serve up prerendered Web Packages for all of the sites on the front page.

The result would be a more decentralized web.

JoshMnem8• 8 years ago

Why would other sites be motivated take on the extra bandwith loads?

Downloading websites before even clicking on the links seems like a huge waste of bandwidth for a problem that could be mostly solved by:

- writing better HTML

- stop writing bloated UIs with too much JS and CSS

kuschku5• 8 years ago

How does the web packaging spec guarantee that a user isn't served an outdated version?

A site may make a mistake, correct it, and web package caches could still serve the old version otherwise.

In fact, this basically leads to the update denial issue that also caused APT repositories to move to HTTPS.

zbentley• 8 years ago

Doesn't Google already visit sites on your behalf, to index them so they show up in the search results?

JoshMnem8• 8 years ago

Google Search isn't serving the sites.

ravenstine2• 8 years ago

Or we can simply deliver what the user needs and not include every analytics tracker under the sun, scrolljacking, or shove dozens of images and links in their face to improve "engagement".

dfabulich11• 8 years ago

(Author here.) Clearly AMP should be replaced, but I argue in the article that prerendering offers better performance even than bare HTML pages with no JavaScript.

"Delivering what the user needs" means performance, too; prerendering simply can't be beat.

The best solution will provide a way to prerender pages without AMP, without iframes, and without violating users' privacy. I claim that Web Packaging is a step in that direction, and even a further step toward re-decentralizing the web.

kuschku5• 8 years ago

Prerendering isn't necessary here either.

Usually you can get the above the fold content rendered in 2x latency + 10ms. That's around 3 to 5 frames.

Prerendering is only useful for sites where either large amounts of data need to be transmitted, or parsing and rendering is slow.

If parsing and rendering is too slow for realtime usage, we need to fix that - not try to circumvent it.

You can get a full JVM up, an entire major codebase parsed, JITedd, profiled, optimized, JITed again, running, and finishing in 40ms.

Yet we're seeing several seconds to parse some JS + HTML + CSS?

That's the true bottleneck.

ravenstine2• 8 years ago

I would certainly prefer some solution that's not centralized or controlled by a giant advertising firm, but prerendering just isn't needed for most webpages. Especially the kind of webpages that are delivering through AMP.

Shouldn't we be asking ourselves why the hell it takes so long to download and render news articles? Those are generally the kind of pages I see available through AMP. AMP does indeed try to ameliorate that issue, but in totally the wrong way(and without really solving it). Seriously now, the web was designed with the specific purpose of displaying pages of content, and now we should prerender these pages for performance reasons? Something's really wrong here if the answer is to prerender pages as a blanket solution rather than applying applying other performance solutions on a per-need basis.

What are all these sites doing that is so taxing that we need prerendering? How about just delivering text, minimal styling, and some scripts to help lazy-load and download optimized images? Virtually all the sites I see are delivering through AMP could easily do just that. Instead, their sites are littered with trash including multiple versions of jQuery, code that doesn't even execute on the given page but on others, ads galore, custom GA scripts, Mixpanel, Bootstrap, videos, etc. All trash, and poorly implemented trash at that.

Web Packaging IS better, I'll grant you that. I propose that, before we go down that road, our industry take good long look at itself. If all this other optimization that we're doing when we bundle and ship our code isn't working, then we're failing right out of the gate, and we don't need to add another optimization as fuel to the dumpster fire.

notatoad• 8 years ago

history has shown that no, we can't do that.

It'd be awesome if we could, but without the motivation of preferential placement in search results for pages that follow a specific set of rules, publishers will include as many advertising and tracking platforms as they possibly can.

on_and_off3• 8 years ago

It would be awesome but we don't live in this kind of utopia. In the meantime AMP is a good way to clean up pages.

headsoup2• 8 years ago

But doesn't it then just eventually become an excuse not to bother cleaning up pages?

Personally I'm just wondering where the legitimate demand for this (slightly faster page loading) is coming from: Consumers or ad/data networks?

alpb• 8 years ago

Funny, a similar post in the opposite direction from Airbnb is also in the front page right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16422763

lern_too_spel2• 8 years ago

The AMP brand is only toxic on HN, among iOS users who don't know any better. The article itself perpetuates a common mistaken belief among iOS users — that AMP implements its own scrolling. The problem stems from the root source of all of the author's listed problems — that AMP uses iframes. Mobile Safari had a bug where iframe scrolling is different from scrolling in the rest of the system. On every Android browser, it works just fine.

Similarly, that Mobile Safari's reader mode doesn't work with AMP is simply because it doesn't understand iframes and doesn't work on canonical URLs, unlike every other reader mode (both websites like outline.com and browsers like Firefox) I have used.

The real issue is that Safari is such a buggy, rarely updated browser that publishers have to choose between speed or UX.

JoshMnem8• 8 years ago

among iOS users

The main arguments against AMP have nothing to do with iOS or Safari. I don't have any Apple devices.

Also, how is that the top comment just a minute after being posted on a site where most people don't like AMP?

dragonwriter3• 8 years ago

Also, how is that the top comment just a minute after being posted on a site where most people don't like AMP?

I think that it's quite possible that there is a false impression the proportion of the HN community that dislikes AMP just because the people that do dislike it have intense need to wave that around, while the people that don't dislike it aren't rushing out to post their "eh, it doesn't really bother me." Or even to question the attacks, as that often fails to produce any kind of substantive response.

dfabulich11• 8 years ago

(Author here.) I think the AMP brand is toxic roughly everywhere.

Many users don't know what AMP is, and don't really care—in fact, there's some evidence that users like AMP in search results, or at least they like the performance—but as far as I can see in tech communities like HN and Reddit, the vast majority of people who know what AMP is also know that they hate AMP. (Scroll up and down on this thread a bit!)

As for why it's toxic, I don't think we have to agree about that, but it's not just the UI problem. The URL problem (AMP URLs point to google.com instead of the original site) is a real, significant problem in its own right.

The URL problem is the root of the claim that "AMP is Google's attempt to take over the open web."

IMO, if it were just an iOS scrolling issue, AMP would just be controversial: love the speed, hate the scrolling, eh, it's a wash. But the URL problem is what really gets the flamethrowers running!

lern_too_spel2• 8 years ago

Saying that the URL problem is Google's attempt at taking over the open web is nonsensical. Google's main competitors in large markets, like Microsoft, Yahoo Japan, and Baidu, also implement AMP caches. How does that help any of them fend off any of the others? Each one of them gets to prerender the same provably prerender-friendly pages.

I am not an AMP publisher or an AMP developer, but I vastly prefer AMP results, and I suspect my preference lines up with the majority outside of HN, or why else would all these search engines do this?

basch• 8 years ago

in tech communities like HN and Reddit, the vast majority of people who know what AMP is also know that they hate AMP.

which is an extremely tiny portion of people clicking links on the internet.

ihsw2• 8 years ago

Tech person here, I think AMP is the bee's knees and it should be shoved down media creators' throats. Media property owners have shoved garbage down our throats, complained when we installed ad-blockers to keep from being damaged, and this is sweet revenge.

I'm more than happy to admit that some icon in search results (not the AMP icon as that's already in use) should highlight performant websites but it should be held to as high of a standard (if not higher) than what AMP expects and revoked swiftly when the offending site strays from the expected standards.

tyingq3• 8 years ago

What's not to like about giving up control of the most important part of your page to a third party?

Digg tried it, worked well for them.

Ajedi32• 8 years ago

They're actually going to fix the URL problem once and for all using [Cross-Origin Server Push][1] in the upcoming Signed HTTP Exchanges standard. Here's their blogpost on that: https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/improving-urls-for-...

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin-http-origin-signed...

underwater• 8 years ago

The AMP brand is toxic because it’s a blatant example of Google trying to fork the web and take control of the new standard. It wasn’t done in collaboration with the community and outreach has been sloppy.

I attended the AMP roadshow and the devs come across as condescending as hell and clearly have no interest in hearing about what the community wants. It was a poorly disguised sales pitch filled with unscientific cases studies.

AMP has some good ideas, but Google can’t be trusted with the future of the web.

htk• 8 years ago

No, the real issue is that the iPhone is so widely used that Google should do a better job at making AMP work without breaking a bunch of things.

Or at least have the option to disable it.

vernie• 8 years ago

Oh gee I wonder why AMP works fine on Android and not iOS.

baddox2• 8 years ago

This iOS thing is news to me. I’ve always had a great experience with AMP on iPhone Safari. No scroll problems at all.

comex• 8 years ago

The scrolling issue is fixed as of iOS 11, which got rid of the inconsistency in scrolling physics between iframes and full pages. See also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14386292

monochromatic• 8 years ago

No, AMP is garbage in design and in execution.

Angostura2• 8 years ago

It’s toxic among anyone who try to copy and paste links from address bars

ficklepickle• 8 years ago

I think the alleged performance improvements are only an illusion. The device still has to use data and electricity, in fact more because it is fetching a bunch of things you probably don't want.

Link prefetching is already a thing, so I don't see why we need another standard to resolve this.

Also the privacy argument is moot, I believe. In the questionable example of the AIDS patient, you are instead trusting Google with this info. That is not any better to me.

I'm a front-end developer and I see so many sites bogged down with many analytics and tracking providers, some multiple times. I can't help but feel like AMP is an attempt to maintain the tracking and analytics status quo, while giving the illusion of performance, instead of just chilling out on the multiple redundant client-side analytics.

nbsd4lyfe• 8 years ago

I have an awful ISP - having a local mirror is a massive improvement.

It almost seems like the web is unusable aside from companies large enough to have a mirror here.

prepend2• 8 years ago

How many years will it take until Google introduces “google keywords” instead of DNS?

Mark my words, this non-open, non-standards stuff is a slippery slope. AOL has good intentions as well, and only toward the end went full rent seeking.

Google can solve a lot of its problems by allowing companies to pay for and register keywords so they can make a safe, vetted Internet that advertisers will like without worrying about their brands showing up next to ISIS.

DennisAleynikov• 8 years ago

this comment has nothing to do with the article. The author addresses that amp sucks and talks about getting similar functionality without people getting mad at google for being skynet. google isn't trying to replace dns or other core web tech just trying to make delivery lubricated which gets them so much hate. if a cdn introduced AMP it wouldn't be plagued by this phobia of over centralizing.

prepend2• 8 years ago

Good point. I should have described more clearly to make the link that AMP is Google unilaterally exerting more control over the web and making it less open.

If a CDN introduced this, they wouldn’t have the massive market position that Google does. So they’d have to either propose a standard and get adherents or just add it to the pile of stuff that isn’t used. Google is different because of their search dominance.

But I think this that Google is turning into more a controller who isn’t concerned with open standards. The keywords thing was just an example of how much AOL sucked when Google started up.

JepZ• 8 years ago

Its the first time I read about Web Packages[1] but when you combine it with service workers it could really make sense. Just imagine downloading an .wpk and install it to your local environment like a .deb or *.apk package. I think that could be a nice way to solve the omnipresent dependency on servers for PWAs.

https://github.com/WICG/webpackage

peterwwillis4• 8 years ago

We used to have applications.

Applications were a thing you downloaded once and ran locally. They did things offline. If you needed something extra, it could communicate with a remote host to give you the thing you needed. Eventually, packagers were created to distribute applications more easily.

Then we had web pages.

Web pages were supposed to enable us to browse remote documents. They worked, for a time. But then people either forgot or were annoyed by making applications.

Then we had web applications.

Entire systems of software development combined a web page with an application. You couldn't use it offline, and it didn't browse documents so much as allow you to use an application remotely. The browser would show you an application with which you would browse documents. And it worked, for a time. But then people apparently got tired of distributing apps over a web page.

So now we have web packaging?

If you wanted a universal application platform, make a less shitty form of Java or something. But stop pretending that hypertext is an application, trying to make me jump through hoops to read some text. I don't need my content proxied, prettified, modified, imaged, scripted, stylized, or customized. I don't need it faster, or better, or more private, or more anything. I really just want to read the text of the article I wanted to read. Honestly.

I'm sick of new wheels. I'm sick of progress. I'm sick of advertisements, scripts, pretty fonts, pop ups, pagination, and columns of useless distraction. I'm sick of commentary by ignorant intolerant insensitive paranoid outraged strangers. I'm sick of trying to read a news article and being assaulted by the equivalent of five kinds of media warring for my attention. I'm sick of likes. I'm sick of sharing. I'm sick of people who have seemingly made it their purpose in life to annoy me. I'm sick of technology.

cromwellian3• 8 years ago

AMP isn't being used for applications, it's being used to deliver mostly static text documents with images. It's pretty bare bones, but people didn't like Google's implementation that works on unmodified browsers, and so now there's a new proposed implementation that requires browsers to implement it natively.

Most of the anti-AMP commentators keep repeating over and over again that people can make documents which render as fast, but the Redfin article essentially points out that this goes beyond stripping out all JS, and having quick HTML parsing. You could reduce parse/layout to 0 and still be slower than AMP.

Do you want to install a native application just to read each article? It doesn't scale. Even simple things like DNS lookups on mobile networks can add hundreds of milliseconds delay (from 80ms at the median to 500ms at the 90th percentile), and the subjective delay causes people to feel the bad.

peterwwillis4• 8 years ago

It takes several seconds to load most web pages on modern browsers because modern browsers have more code in them than my operating system, my browser wants to load everything encrypted, and most web pages are designed to deliver so much unnecessary crap in such an obnoxious way as to make it take significantly longer on purpose just to get to the content.

Google's response is "No worries, we'll just download it for you, screw it up, and then present it to you." Thanks, Google. I didn't ask for that, but that sure never stops you from encroaching ever more into my life.

Incidentally, all ISPs could provide simple proxies that cache and return pages faster, but not with HTTPS. Google being our grand overlord and de facto tech nanny state, they would rather provide this solution themselves than allow ISPs to not do it perfectly (and at the same time siphon up any potential metadata that a carrier could use to monetize traffic going over its infrastructure)

Google didn't invent advertising-driven free services, but they sure as hell perfected it. Most of the annoyances on the web are due to free services - not latency. And mobile providers could prioritize latency over bandwidth, but lower latency does not sell new mobile plans.

dingo_bat2• 8 years ago

Do you want to install a native application just to read each article?

We had google reader. It was fast and painless. At least on android.

superkuh2• 8 years ago

Websites are at least supposedly are sandboxed so they are not as much of a risk as running native binaries. But this is getting worse and worse though as browsers expose more and more of their host operating system's functionality. The benefits of using a website instead of a native app are quickly disappearing, while the drawbacks have only been somewhat mitigated. We're getting to the point where browsers are worthy of the decades old criticism Emacs has received. They have eventually become an OS with many fine features - simply lacking a good web browser. For the privacy conscious user, modern web technologies will undermine you every step of the way, or simply break if you choose to stand your ground.

asymmetric• 8 years ago

There’s no way to work around this privacy problem while allowing your browser to visit 10 random sites.

Wrong. Browsers could intelligently delete cookies after a short time, which is what Apple is doing with Intelligent Tracking Prevention[0].

More sophisticated users can install browser extensions that allow them to do this manually[1].

[0] https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking-prevention...

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...

whyagaindavid• 8 years ago

AMP can be hosted by 'YOU'. See Guardian.com 's own AMP cache. It is not google taking over the web.

https://amp.theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2016/feb/24/todays-re...

zingmars• 8 years ago

Does google respect self-hosted AMP caches and will link to them instead of theirs in search results?

dingo_bat2• 8 years ago

It would defeat the most important purpose, the pages won't be as fast. So I'm guessing they won't.

martin_drapeau• 8 years ago

Yes, AMP pages load fast, but you don’t need AMP for fast-loading web pages. If you are a publisher and your web pages don’t load fast, the sane solution is to fix your [fricking] website so that pages load fast, not to throw your hands up in the air and implement AMP.

I'm a developer and took some time to analyze AMP from a developer's perspective. The above conclusion is the only sane one. AMP, Web Packing Standard, damn proxy - they are all workarounds that complicate things. Don't be lazy - fix your shit and make your website fast. https://medium.com/@martindrapeau/amp-for-developers-the-tec...

digi_owl3• 8 years ago

I fear the inherent problem is that a "lazy" dev team ships/publishes earlier...

dfabulich11• 8 years ago

(Author here.) You and I agree that AMP has serious problems, but your article doesn't evaluate the Web Packaging standard at all, which is the whole point of the article.

Prerendering is faster than the fastest web site you can build, faster than http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/, as fast as switching tabs.

On noisy cellular networks, where even one network request can take seconds, even the fastest sites can be slow; prerendering can fix this.

I don't think it makes sense to say, "Prerendering makes even the fastest sites faster?! Bah, humbug! Web sites are fast enough if you do them right."

Web sites are pretty fast if you do them right. But making them even faster is hardly lazy.

sbuk• 8 years ago

Lost me at "AMP haters"...

How to Replace Google's AMP Without Slowing It Down

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