Google AMP lowered our page speed, and there's no choice but to use it

https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-amp-page-speed

by luu • 7 years ago

519 300 7 years ago

dmethvin• 7 years ago

AMP is just a set of conventions and limitations that, when followed, make for a fast site. Anyone can make a fast site if they follow similar rules. Most sites don't do that because either the developers want to use something that's "nicer" to code but a lot bigger, or because the marketing department insists on loading 12 different tracking and analytics progams--when they probably only use one or two.

scoot_718• 7 years ago

How is it working at Google? AMP breaks sites and makes it look like they're hosted elsewhere.

It makes sites take multiple minutes to display after they redirect to the original version.

matz1• 7 years ago

Agree, I prefer to open amp site because most of time it simply load faster.

stephenr7• 7 years ago

I prefer to just use a content blocker to prevent the crap that slows down most sites from loading.

Fun fact, blocking the amp JS makes amp pages artificially slow because they hide everything in css by default.

AMP as a solution to slow websites is like a chainsaw as a solution to an itchy foot.

AlexandrB• 7 years ago

Did you read the article (or even the headline)? Specifically the part about the site being faster before AMP?

lern_too_spel10• 7 years ago

Impossible. For a site loaded from a SERP, the page will be preloaded if it is AMP. If you are creating an AMP page to be accessed directly (like the author), you fundamentally don't understand the problem that AMP solves and are using it wrong. PEBKAC.

stephenr7• 7 years ago

AMP is google flexing its control over the web.

If Google wanted to highlight fast/penalise slow sites, they could simply measure the load time of a site when they index it.

But that would only achieve their stated goals, it wouldn’t achieve their actual goals.

toufiqbarhamov• 7 years ago

It feels like AMP is Google nailing its own coffin to me. It probably felt like a winning move when Bell and AT&T made people buy their own products to use telephone systems, but it led directly to their disruption by the DOJ. Even though some poeple at Google probably realize that, it won’t matter if they cash out beforehand, if working on a project gets them promoted, and if institutional inertia is in control.

Google is hurtling toward an antitrust case they won’t win, and it will really be all their fault.

realusername4• 7 years ago

They could also just have mandated serving AMP with some random HTTP header and the client would cached a whitelist of the AMP scripts if got that header, nothing in the AMP design needs to have an AMP server, it's an arbitrary limitation from Google to control the web.

thrwwysearcheng2• 7 years ago

Throwaway Google search engineer here. People here really do care about making the web faster and moving metrics, both because that is how the company is set up to reward employees but also because they believe it makes the product better. Google has been penalizing slow sites forever. It stopped moving the needle (I suspect because it isn’t marketable). Amp on the other hand really is working, metrics show a faster, smoother experience, and user studies have been positive. That’s why Google is doubling down so much with it. Not because they have goals to control content providers or wall off the web, but because it makes a dramatic difference on the whole.

systemBuilder2• 7 years ago

No, they couldn't. That is browser and transport-dependent. There are some things even Google cannot do ....

manigandham8• 7 years ago

True, that's what the article says. It's about control over users and data, not performance or UX.

0815test5• 7 years ago

It's about control of preloaded content, specifically. If you don't care about your content being easily preloaded from the SERP page, then sure, no need to use AMP. And if, as a user, you don't care about quick access to preloaded content (because e.g. you're on a low-latency connection), feel free to scroll down from the top-stories carousel.

ClassyJacket• 7 years ago

Sure, but one of those conventions and limitations is that the page is hosted by google. It's not something you can deploy on your own server. It's not as if it's just some list of recommendations that make sites faster - you're signing up to a Google service, and you're at their mercy from then on.

joshuamorton5• 7 years ago

It's not something you can deploy on your own server.

But you can. Often it doesn't matter because you aren't a globally distributed cache, but if you are cloudflare[1] (or apparently Microsoft[2]), you can and do.

[1] https://amp.cloudflare.com/

[2] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/caches.jso...

whalabi7• 7 years ago

(author here)

It's not just conventions and limitations.

For example, you can't use an img tag on an AMP page. That's invalid AMP. You have to use an amp-img tag, which is rendered client side with js.

Another example is with forms. It forces you to include the amp-form js.

If it were just best practise, I'd be far happier to go along with it. Kind of the point here is that we were already using best practise, because the site was super fast.

hexo5• 7 years ago

Images rendered client side WITH JAVASCRIPT???? If my employee did AMP site for our company he'd immediately lose his job, no questions asked.

joegahona2• 7 years ago

I'd love for Google to explain the justification for putting _only_ AMP content in the "Top Stories" carousel. Google needs to either rename the carousel to be "Top AMP stories" or allow non-AMP stories to appear in the carousel. Isn't the whole purpose of search to prioritize the most relevant content, regardless of the type of HTML used to create it?

ben_jones• 7 years ago

No the purpose of Google Search is to facilitate selling Ads.

lern_too_spel10• 7 years ago

I'm not Google, but the reason is obvious to anyone who understands AMP. Only AMP can be guaranteed safe to preload through static analysis, and a carousel lets the search results page figure out which pages to preload trivially (the results currently visible in the the carousel).

realusername4• 7 years ago

Only AMP can be guaranteed safe to preload through static analysis

No, AMP pages can't be proven safe, because with AMP you can include ads which are a very common vector of malware.(if I understand your comment)

geofft• 7 years ago

Only AMP can be guaranteed safe to preload through static analysis

This isn't how static analysis works. Yes, the halting problem says you can't determine safety of any possible input in a Turing-complete language, and yes, JS is Turing-complete. But it doesn't say you can't determine safety of some inputs. You can write an algorithm that outputs "Yes," "No," and "I don't know" just fine. Google can, if they desire, specify some rules / annotations that would help its analyzer answer "Yes" to more pages. They've chosen not to do that, and instead to only build an analyzer for AMP.

Besides, preloading pages is about fetching content, not rendering them, I think.

codedokode3• 7 years ago

Cannot this problem be solved by producing a text-only version of the page using Firefox's reading mode algorithm that removes everything except the article text? This way publishers don't have to invest resources in making a second version of their site.

justinph• 7 years ago

I've asked the AMP team exactly this and they punted and demurred on the subject and said they have some vague plans to some day make it also contain sites that are as fast as AMP.

The AMP team will tell you that they are concerned with making the web faster, and it's the _search_ team that controls the carousel. Which is all well and good, but I can tell you that the _only_ reason any publisher is doing AMP is because they want the placement in the carousel and better search results.

As far as I can tell, google has no intention of ever allowing non-amp content they can't re-serve from their cache and add whatever analytics and tracking they want to from being ranked highly. AMP is a tactic to let them track the most lucrative mobile web users and take control away from publishers of original content.

devoply• 7 years ago

There should be a law!

ehnto3• 7 years ago

There is nothing about an AMP page that makes it inherently faster until it lands in and is served by a Google regional cache server. Otherwise my site is going to be just as fast. I can make just as fast web pages and serve them from a server sitting in the same state as my customers. There will be no need for Google level scale for my site as it is regional. Yet I still get put below AMP sites.

From many different angles, AMP getting preferential treatment is heavy handed and clumsy, manipulative and forcing technology standards on the web that no one agreed on.

burtonator• 7 years ago

Web users and independent sites need more stories like this as it's impossible to understand these things from their perspective unless you have this kind of traffic.

codedokode3• 7 years ago

Is looks like Google just needs AMP to be able to display other sites' pages on its site and mobile app. But I don't understand why they just don't take a "Reader mode" implementation from Firefox to produce text-only pages instead of making publishers develop a second version of their sites.

manigandham8• 7 years ago

With the coming ITP changes in Mobile Safari, it also helps Google maintain 1st-party cookies by never leaving their domains.

snek2• 7 years ago

The reason I have gotten from google employees is that the top stories carousel preloads content, and that in order to preload content without leaking a user's searches, google needs to serve their own cached version of a page. in order to make sure that cached version of a page isn't doing anything tricky, they need to heavily limit what it can do.

it's not about making the internet faster, it's about making it easy for google's stupid scroller.

codedokode3• 7 years ago

Another thing might be that this way Google can observe user's behaviour: how much time they spent reading the article, what part did they read carefully etc. which is only possible if the user stays on Google's domain.

Ajedi32• 7 years ago

it's not about making the internet faster

Are you saying preloading content _doesn't_ make the internet faster?

tyingq3• 7 years ago

That's a bit circular. The carousel predates AMP, so they somehow knew how to manage this in the past.

jeromebaek• 7 years ago

What do you think? :-) it's obvious, it's capitalism, isn't it?

petre• 7 years ago

They're looking at another antitrust case in the EU.

tjpnz• 7 years ago

It certainly smells of the shady shit Microsoft was doing back in the day.

3xblah• 7 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12542782

AMP is search engine "paid placement" reborn.

The "payment" is letting Google serve the pages and do the user tracking.

sergiotapia• 7 years ago

- Killing the web with AMP

- Killing email with gmail specific garbage

- Killing mobile phones with walled gardens

- Killing browsers by implementing their own spec and fuck everybody else

- Killing open source tools by releasing closed source extensions for VS Code

Google has done a complete and total 180 in the past 10 years. I remember when the name inspired and made you feel safe that this thing you were using was made with character and thought to your well-being. Now it's a dry-heave feeling having to touch anything Google.

stephenr7• 7 years ago

I don’t think they’ve done a 180, I just think we understand (through experience) their tactics better now.

incongruity• 7 years ago

We saw/feared where it would go and now it’s gone there.

Was it there 10 years ago? I don’t think so. At least not so explicitly.

0815test5• 7 years ago

Because IE6, Outlook-Web/Hotmail and Windows Mobile were so much better, right? I understand your POV, but this has nothing to do with Google specifically. Nothing has changed structurally since 10 years ago, the game is the same as it always was. The Internet will detect damage and route around it, as usual.

wahern3• 7 years ago

The brain damage caused by Outlook/Exchange and IE remain with us. The brokenness and complexity don't go away; it slowly grows, making it increasingly difficult for decentralized communities, and increasingly easier for large corporations, to take the reigns.

In many respects the Internet doesn't route around damage so much as accumulate damage. And that's partly the result of apologists within the engineering community endlessly excusing Google (and more recently Mozilla), as well as increasingly greater numbers of engineers having no memory or even conception of running fundamental services independently. As the base layers become increasingly complex economies of scale increasingly prefer centralization, both in design and especially implementation.

There will always be competition. In many respects Cloudflare is a breath of fresh air, pushing against the stampede to AWS. Likewise, Mozilla viz-a-viz Chrome. But there are certain interests that large players will always share to the detriment of small organizations and individuals. DoH and DoT embedded in the browser intrinsically favor large organizations, and specifically Google and Cloudflare. And why do they promote DoH and DoT in the browser rather than promoting it at the system level (i.e. in Windows, Systemd, etc)? Because it's (a) less costly for them and (b) furthers their competitive commercial interests in their battle with other large organizations.

One reads endless apologia on HN about how people would rather send their DNS requests to Cloudflare and Google rather than their ISP, as if those were the only realistic options, and no matter that doing so doesn't require delegating even more functionality to the browser oligopoly. They've already given up. They see their own role as choosing sides as consumers rather than actively participating as producers of these technologies, which is so utterly depressing from the perspectives of preserving an open internet and promoting free software. (For example, web developers are fine with DoH because they don't see how it effects their own server-side and client-side development. It doesn't matter to them that it would make it increasingly difficult to independently implement and maintain the software and systems--they're just consumers. QUIC? Not their concern--that's the responsibility of nginx and node.js, no matter that those projects likely never could have been founded outside large corporations if they first had to climb the steep hill to HTTP/3 and QUIC.)

How do we stop this? By keeping an eye on long-term goals. While IPv6 and DNSSEC are more complex than some alternatives, from a long-term perspective they minimize overall complexity and substantially preserve independence, such as it is. Some options are even more clear cut: push DoH and DoT into the system resolver (and OpenBSD is doing, and projects like unbound and even, IIRC, systemd already support).

manigandham8• 7 years ago

This is natural for corporations which grow to this size. It's not about good vs evil, they just weren't at a scale where they could do these projects which are all based in some combination of good intentions, serving customers, and profit.

Wowfunhappy2• 7 years ago

This isn't some law of physics. A corporation could decide that their ultimate goal is to improve society, the planet, employees’s lives, consumers’s lives, etc above pure profit. This would of course result in less profit.

tomComb3• 7 years ago

- Yeah, hate that Google walled garden. Much better to go with Apple.

- Yeah, that gmail specific stuff is evil, except it isn't gmail specific at all.

- Yeah, killing browsers with Chrome. Just like IE6 except it's open source, cross-platform, evergreen, and pushes standards forward rather then trying to subvert them. The biggest problem now is others like MS using their browser engine is reducing diversity, but I guess that's their fault for making it open source. evil!

- And yeah, they have now officially destroyed VSCode (which includes lots of closed source MS stuff) by releasing a closed source extension.

sosborn• 7 years ago

- Yeah, hate that Google walled garden. Much better to go with Apple.

For a lot of people, it is.

hcarvalhoalves• 7 years ago

These arguments don’t invalidate OP’s critique of Google’s positions though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_wrongs_make_a_right

jrockway• 7 years ago

For a start, anyone contributing to AMP is required to sign a contributor license agreement (CLA) for their code to be accepted into the project

This is pretty standard. You have to sign one to contribute to Emacs.

rpdillon• 7 years ago

I noticed this too, and immediately thought of the FSF. But I kept reading and thought this was different:

Note, you don’t grant these rights to the AMP Project, you grant them to Google. Google owns the code and patents.

vlovich123• 7 years ago

This is standard. Copyrights are assigned to the body that owns the project. For EMACS this is FSF, for AMP this is Google. The only time it's something different is if a project is owned by a foundation just for that project but super common in the OSS world. Have you done much OSS development?

scarejunba• 7 years ago

When you contribute to Ubuntu or related you sign away to Canonical. It makes sense.

hexo5• 7 years ago

that can be done in amarica, not here

thethirdone2• 7 years ago

Then there’s users begging Google to allow them to use more than 50kb of CSS. Yes, most site’s CSS is bloated. But 50kb is an absurdly small, arbitrary limit.

I think for static articles 50kb should be plenty. The linked page itself uses only 35kb and a third of that is fontawesome. And 32kb of that is actually unused without javascript enabled. So the site only uses 3kb, but 50kb is absurdly small?

This site (Hacker News) gets by with 2 kb.

Fjolsvith• 7 years ago

Does this site run on AMP?

ceejayoz• 7 years ago

What in AMP would make HN need 50+ KB instead of 2 KB of CSS?

ehsankia3• 7 years ago

The whole of jQuery minified is 30kb. Why you would ever need 50kb for a single AMP page is beyond me.

ars• 7 years ago

It's mostly just long class names and things like that.

If you minified the css along with the html you could get it significantly smaller.

Also using individual css properties instead of combining them using the shorthand syntax, I assume any minifier would do that as well.

Of course it's probably really hard to do because some class names are en/dis-abled in javascript and the names have to stay.

dmitriid5• 7 years ago

There are no AMP pages that weigh less than 1MB.

However, since Google aggressively preloads most of that data while you search, it gives you the illusion of AMP pages being lightweight.

Non-AMP pages? Oh, Google will happily penalize them even if they perform better.

underwater3• 7 years ago

A given page may only need a dozen kilobytes of CSS, but the combined amount that covers any possible page might be higher. For example a news article might have a video player, audio player, image carousel, map, data tables, scroll away images, etc.

Normally a page could insert a link for a global CSS document, or have a document corresponding to each feature (video.css, audio.css). AMP doesn't allow this, you have to inline the styles into a single style block in the head of the document.

The only way to do this if you have a site with a long tail of features is to track which elements are rendered and then before flushing the page calculate which styles should be inlined.

AMP's approach is workable, but is at odds with how most sites and frameworks use CSS, and means the web framework and static resource build pipeline have to be redesigned around AMP constraints. And in the worse case, you'll discover than some content combinations happen to trip the 50k limit anyway, and silently fail.

thethirdone2• 7 years ago

A given page may only need a dozen kilobytes of CSS

I think you would be challenged to find a single page that needed that much; please give an example if you have one. Most single page articles I have tested use less than 5kb. codepen.com uses like 6 kb on load of a new pen. gmail.com completely loads with 5kb and doesn't load more.

For example a news article might have a video player, audio player, image carousel, map, data tables, scroll away images, etc.

This is definitely a concern, but 50kb is high enough that you should be able to fit custom css for everything you mentioned. I think 10x what most single pages use is pretty reasonable, and certainly not "an absurdly small, arbitrary limit".

A significant portion of time is spent calculating styles from css so keeping it small is a real bonus to load times.

AMP's approach is workable, but is at odds with how most sites and frameworks use CSS, and means the web framework and static resource build pipeline have to be redesigned around AMP constraints.

Pretty much every site I have looked at since my first comment besides Github loads less than 50kb (much of which is unused) anyway. If you are really hitting the 50kb limit, you probably need to redesign anyway for desktop so AMP should come mostly for free.

marssaxman• 7 years ago

If limiting CSS to 50k per page would prevent news articles from including "a video player, audio player, image carousel, map, data tables, scroll away images, etc." then I wish browser makers would include it as an option so I could apply it as a filter everywhere. I don't want all that stuff to begin with.

codegoblins• 7 years ago

To be fair, HN looks like it was designed in the mid-2000s

scarface743• 7 years ago

HN was designed in the mid 2000s and has changed very little and that’s a good thing.

Just for grins and giggles, I occasionally charge my first gen iPod Touch from 2007. Most web pages are unusable - except for HN and daringfireball.

I have no affiliation with the site below. I just saw it on Show HN a few years ago.

http://tenyearsago.io/news.ycombinator.com

rangerpolitic2• 7 years ago

And yet it works.

The problem is designers and their bosses/clients. They equate design with looks. As a result, they see design as solving the problem of aesthetic. They fail to realize this is a problem which very few people care about on the web. So long as it passes the smell test of credibility, no one cares. (Excluding a handful of cases.)

As a result, we, the users, must suffer.

adrianN• 7 years ago

You say that as if it's a bad thing.

ionised• 7 years ago

And that's a bad thing, why?

Crinus2• 7 years ago

Early to mid 2000s was the best time in web design. Everything before that was "omg, i can put animated images and color on the web, LETS PUT ALL OF THEM IN THERE!" (aka the Geocities School of Style) and after after that was "OMG iPhone is kewl, lets make everything 20x sized so that people can rub their screens with ease (desktop? what desktop? that is sooo yesterday, and dying, get with the times grampah, today real programmers make web applications in their iPads while drinking latte soda cappuccinos and eating gluten free croissants at plate free coffee shops with hand demoisturized tables)".

I mean, early/mid 2000s design was still bad (especially when people learned about the gradient tool and drop shadow filter), but at least browsers were limited enough to mostly contain the damage.

JohnFen4• 7 years ago

That's a good thing.

xiphias2• 7 years ago

,,50kb is an absurdly small.... responsive queries so that your site looks great on mobile and desktop (and tablet and landscape and Android and iPhone.)''

Why would I need CSS for iPhone? I don't have an iPhone. Also I'm now browsing from my laptop, so I don't need mobile specific CSS either. Isn't there a way for the responsive site to load CSS specific to the device/display?

untog2• 7 years ago

No. Especially not with AMP, because Google sits between you and your user so you never get to know what device they are using.

In theory on your own site you could use user agent sniffing to worn out what CSS to send, but it's still not a great idea because you'll be wrong at least some of the time.

33degrees• 7 years ago

User agent sniffing is how we ended up with things like "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.77 Safari/537.36"

rolph• 7 years ago

"you'll be wrong at least some of the time."

I think the adoption rate for UserAgentSpoofers, could be a related metric, approximating the value of "some of the time"

my user agent rotates randomly, or when the spoofer button is clicked

BenMorganIO• 7 years ago

You can sort of, but you'd need your own server. Google has control over this and I'm not sure if they permit different content for each device. They probably don't.

pagespeedisb• 7 years ago

One point here: stop using Google Pagespeed Scores unless you're having serious speed issues that need correcting.

Google only uses this in an incredibly small way, yet I've seen SEO people at multiple companies hammering on it like it's some magical SEO juicer. It's not. Just don't be in the bottom 10% (Google uses a slice even smaller than 10%).

I like that Google wants the web to be faster, but if I could axe one product that causes a lot of angst, it's that damn pagespeed score.

geggam3• 7 years ago

Soon enough Google will face the fate of Ma Bell

giobox• 7 years ago

Not so sure. We live in a very different time, and appetites for breaking up very large companies with dominant market positions in the US seemed to die with the Clinton administration’s failed attempt on Microsoft.

int_19h2• 7 years ago

It's not just appetites. The laws themselves have been reinterpreted, and the AT&T breakup happened right as it was going on - it might have not happened 10 years later.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/robert-bork...

JustSomeNobody• 7 years ago

Be split up only to later recombine into a larger entity?

geggam3• 7 years ago

Not sure, I cant get a feel for society as a whole. If the apathy is actually gone or its just those pockets of "I want to be angry" still kicking

jessaustin• 7 years ago

...at tremendous profit to executives and bankers. All of the resources that various investors sank into building "competing" infrastructure, consumed through strong-armed acquisitions as everyone slowly realized that FCC was just as opposed to competition as they always have been.

ronnier• 7 years ago

Times have changed. It’ll never happen as it creates risks of a Chinese competitor taking hold, and the US government doesn’t want that.

joering2• 7 years ago

Until Google will allow me to block whole swaths of IPs in effort to lower spam getting into my Inbox, I don't care much about other upgrades.

For few months now it seems to me that Sparkpost is a favorite choice of spammers. Perhaps its the low cost or maybe its because they never ever answered to a single spam@sparkpost.com email I send forwarding abusers content. None, zero nada! I can report someone... silence... an then 3 days new letter pops up from a new domain (but same IP) from Sparkpost.

That's why I need to be able to block whole IPs.

kristianp2• 7 years ago

This link on the page is dead (404): https://unlikekinds.com/article/how-google-is-creating-the-o...

Edit, apparently it should be linked from here, as the title and url of the article has changed: http://unlikekinds.com/t/how-google-is-creating-the-one-page...

whalabi7• 7 years ago

Thanks! Fixed :)

kristianp2• 7 years ago

Practically, they probably weren't faster than their AMP page on mobile as a search result, because of preloading and google CDNage of the AMP cache of the page.

acdha3• 7 years ago

That’s the sales pitch but I usually notice AMP pages because they take so long to render at all, waiting for a ton of JavaScript to load before anything displays. Mobile caches are small and unless you hit Google a lot in the same browser you see those delays frequently compared to sites which follow other Google teams’ recommendations for performance.

ronlobo• 7 years ago

I am wondering when the EU is finally giving this BS a fine.

taytus5• 7 years ago

Hi, full disclosure I'm the founder of a company providing AMP services.

You can hate and have valid arguments against AMP, but... on this article, in particular, where is the data?

How can people comment and form an opinion based on basically nothing?

Am I missing the "before and after" links with the benchmarks?

whalabi7• 7 years ago

(Author here)

You can run the test yourself on the AMP and non-AMP versions of an identical article to see yourself.

(Note: sometimes the numbers are off the first couple of times you run tests. If you run them multiple times, the AMP articles tend to score (sometimes significantly) lower.)

Non-AMP: https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-amp-page-speed (Results: https://imgur.com/OVpdwyh)

AMP: https://unlikekinds.com/amp/article/google-amp-page-speed (Results: https://imgur.com/I3ha7Gi)

Edit: More data here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19630846

taytus5• 7 years ago

The AMP version gives me better results: https://www.dropbox.com/s/g4jchw76sh9x49k/Screenshot%202019-...

Non AMP version:https://www.dropbox.com/s/lclqqdbdliuofjf/Screenshot%202019-...

My email is on my profile if you want to talk about this. Maybe we can help.

Edit: If you compare against the cached version, the version that your mobile users are going to hit, the results are much much better: https://www.dropbox.com/s/c2y5akqclcim7tm/Screenshot%202019-...

ehsankia3• 7 years ago

I got the same score on both. And yes, I agree that if you hand optimize your site, you can achieve speeds as good as AMP, but the point of AMP is to standardize it and force bloat off of these pages.

RhodesianHunter• 7 years ago

The numbers are always going to be different for different people based on your geographic location and provider, and whether amp or your CDN has closer servers.

jefftk4• 7 years ago

PageSpeed and Lighthouse measure the site load mark you down for things it thinks you could fix. For a head to head comparison like this WebPageTest is often a better tool:

non-amp: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/190411_1B_7c5b8e0d2f067ad...

amp: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/190411_RF_776066ee3b0226f...

Your site does pretty similarly with non-AMP and AMP. On the median of 9 runs PLT and fully loaded time are better on AMP, but speed index and time to interactive are better on non-AMP. Digging into it more, the time difference is completely due to how long it takes your site to serve HTML, and the biggest thing you could do to speed your site up would be making the server return the HTML sooner, perhaps by adding a cache.

Testing with curl, your site takes 880ms on average to serve non-AMP, but 1120ms to serve non-AMP. Graph: https://i.imgur.com/BlWqSoo.png

That's not an AMP thing, that's a your-serving-stack thing.

(Disclosure: I work at Google, and used to work on mod_pagespeed)

ehsankia3• 7 years ago

It's unfortunate that you're being downvoted for asking for data. If there is in fact a configuration where the AMP page is slower, then it's either a bug or there's something very wrong with AMP. But either way there's no way for us readers to tell without seeing the actual page.

taytus5• 7 years ago

Thank you, I appreciate that.

I love technology and love to learn. When something isn't working as supposed, I want to learn why.

I provided links where it shows that all these claims are not actually true.

But if there is something wrong with my methodology, I want to learn about that as well!

sureaboutthis• 7 years ago

This is not the first article I've read about this very same thing. One by a very well known author. Unfortunately, I can't provide the link data for any of that but I'm sure you can Google for it but I don't think it will show up in AMP.

auslander• 7 years ago

Google today is a single gateway where business go to sell and users go to do anything. Its a monopoly power. Nothing will change until there are better alternatives. Binq is big but stupid. DDG is too small. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, CDNs should all create good search engines, and allow SE aggregators to live.

seanwilson• 7 years ago

Then there’s users begging Google to allow them to use more than 50kb of CSS. Yes, most site’s CSS is bloated. But 50kb is an absurdly small, arbitrary limit. Stylesheets these days handle resets for normalising behaviour between browsers, grid systems so you can lay things out without resorting to murder-suicide, and responsive queries so that your site looks great on mobile and desktop (and tablet and landscape and Android and iPhone.) These essential components will take you a decent way to to the 50kb already.

As far as I know, the 50KB limit is per page. I can't see why a typical single page should require that much CSS where the CSS included is actively used on that page. If you're going to include e.g. the CSS for every Bootstrap component on every page you're easily going to go over the limit but the whole point of the limit is to discourage you from doing that.

The OP article should only require a modest amount of CSS I think, same for most pages. People here hate on AMP a lot, but "avoid excessive CSS" is a good guideline in my opinion.

mtaksrud• 7 years ago

Google needs to be split up and shut down. Why aren’t the American authorities using the antitrust laws that is already there?

sfifs2• 7 years ago

Basically because the current philosophy of the US justice department anti trust prosecutions is whether market dominance of the player harms ordinary people or causes them to incur higher cost. It is not really about actual monopoly power. Google has been pretty careful to stay consistent with this philosophy.

This wasn't always so in the US and it's not the same philosophy in EU. However, it is a valid and consistent view.

telltruth• 7 years ago

Corollary 1: You are legally allowed to kill all of your competition while not improving your monopoly product as long as you keep your product free.

Corollary 2: Human attention is considered equivalent to monetary value of exactly $0 by US government.

Corollary 3: You should never trust your government to be smart or do right thing for you.

fx32s• 7 years ago

Why would it need to be shut down.

int_19h2• 7 years ago

Because they were reinterpreted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox

tflinton• 7 years ago

Why on earth do we look to this bizarre for technical capability?

Romanulus2• 7 years ago

Thus far, this whole AMP business seems like Google's tech-tipped thrust to control information (apart from their other methods thus far).

lllr_finger2• 7 years ago

It's definitely control, but it's almost a lesser of three evils - it's no coincidence that as a large web publisher at the time, we were approached by Google, Facebook, and Apple at almost the same time and asked to deliver content for their respective walled gardens.

I'd happily choose the web over the other two alternatives. Sure it'd be great to have an open standard achieving the same thing as AMP, but it's 2019 and we haven't seen it yet.

Romanulus2• 7 years ago

I just think they are going about it in a pushy yet guarded way. I'd prefer good architects over good architecture as it breeds creativity/variety

pcarolan• 7 years ago

Google isn’t the web. To make the point that they’re dictating web standards is like saying that walmart makes people sick by only placing unhealthy products on their end caps. Like it or not, it is Google’s store and if you don’t like it, sell your wares in the Whole Foods down the street (duck duck go) or find a more creative channel than SEO (Instagram, podcasts, Twitter, etc).

taurath• 7 years ago

Google isn’t the web like the banking system isn’t the only way to move money - you can do it, but it’s really really difficult and if you have business ambitions it’s almost certainly the wrong choice to avoid it.

scarface743• 7 years ago

I don’t think Ben Thompson (stratechery.com) spends too much time worrying about SEO and Google. He built a solid reputation with excellent idea and he did this strange model of getting people to pay money for stuff - over 3000 people to pay him $100 a year to read his content.

emerongi3• 7 years ago

google.com is 100% the most powerful, influential site existing by a wide margin. Can you say that about Whole Foods or Walmart? No, they're just another shop in town.

Google IS the web.

headsoup• 7 years ago

I think the most fundamental issue here is that organisations are rebuilding their websites with AMP to align to Google search, when Google search is not the only search product available (much as you could believe otherwise from the discussion!).

How did all the work this company did add any value for someone using DuckDuckGo, Bing, Ecosia, etc considering the site was already fast?

This type of activity is a bad outcome.

lern_too_spel10• 7 years ago

Bing also preloads AMP pages, so this work would add value for Bing users. https://blogs.bing.com/Webmaster-Blog/September-2018/Introdu...

Same with Baidu. https://9to5google.com/2017/03/07/accelerated-mobile-pages-e...

amgin3• 7 years ago

AMP has totally ruined the internet for desktop users. ~90% of AMP sites don't even provide a link to the full desktop version of the page (unless you want to dig through the source code of the page, but even then it is hit and miss), and AMP sites are linked to more and more on social media sites like reddit.

kevmo• 7 years ago

Google/Alphabet needs to be broken up.

Causality12• 7 years ago

Why the hell does AMP and AMP alone get the privilege of hijacking chrome mobile's menu bar and hiding it from the user until we scroll all the way up to the top of the page and then drag it back down? It's like they've never heard of tabbed browsing before.

jjtheblunt• 7 years ago

"Why the hell use Chrome?" : a corollary, no?

Causality12• 7 years ago

Good tab management, to be honest. Other mobile browsers like Firefox and the Adblock browser have issues where swiping the tab away only works in a specific direction or in a very straight line, or is annoyingly difficult when the device is in landscape mode because you have to swipe twice as far for some reason, or the UI for opening the tabs page is inconvenient.

lern_too_spel10• 7 years ago

Anybody can do it. You better have a good reason though. https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/native-hardwa...

gdsdfe• 7 years ago

I think breaking Google's monopoly over search is the biggest challenge that nobody is trying to solve ... Maybe nobody's knows how to, maybe nobody's willing to invest in such endeavor but I hope people will realize soon that the cost of doing nothing is becoming much higher than the cost of trying ... And yeah I know there's duckduckgo but we need at least 2 or 3 much better duckduckgo's

dagenix4• 7 years ago

This article would be much more interesting if they showed that the AMP version of the page actually was slower than the non-AMP version. Instead, they just say that Google's Page Speed score is lower for the AMP version. But _nobody_ cares about the Page Speed score - it's just a rough proxy for user experience. The author of the article, however, doesn't do anything to look at actual user experience.

0xfaded• 7 years ago

The irony is that the web version of google news on mobile is horrendously slow. Hackernews seems to have good performance though, maybe they can take some design cues.

ww520• 7 years ago

Microsoft was sued by DOJ by bundling IE with the OS. Google is doing a similar thing with AMP. They are walking a fine line.

kkarakk2• 7 years ago

you don't HAVE to use google search. everyone just prefers it. people prefer bing for searching videos(less censorship) and duck duck go for more organic results.

i don't think the AMP carousel is anything but a feature. people need to stop treating companies as services. products can go away in the blink of an eye.

Un1corn• 7 years ago

You never HAD to use Windows

cyborgx72• 7 years ago

Why is there constant advocacy to do away with anti-trust laws on this website?

emerongi3• 7 years ago

It's not just a feature if clearly the first page on mobile search is all AMP. Anyone with half a brain realizes that if they want to get to first page on mobile, they need to use AMP. It's a requirement now, not a feature.

hexo5• 7 years ago

so, kill google news. who cares about it anyway and if anyone do I just don't get why. google platform stinks more than anything ever microsoft did

zapzupnz2• 7 years ago

Google News is a very useful tool for a lot of people trying to find coverage from sources other than the select few that they might often frequent. I use it to find how international articles affect my country, my area, etc. I also use it to find articles in other languages.

Aside from that, Google News content is heavily integrated into the normal Google Search pages. It's not simply a matter of simply ignoring it; Google makes their Google News results some of the top results for searches for current events.

hexo5• 7 years ago

Yes it certainly is matter of ignoring it. Only not ignoring that stuff gives it credibility as we gave microsoft products.

jocoda• 7 years ago

From the article:

... the position on Google’s results that can literally mean the difference between a failed business and one that makes millions of dollars

looks to me like your business is the tail, and here you are trying to wag the dog.

xyzal• 7 years ago

A reminder to all AMP-haters like me: When using Firefox mobile, Google search results become free of AMP crap.

Also, you get the added benefit of a browser whose maker has no interest in tracking your every move.

vanderZwan• 7 years ago

And it has extensions like desktop browsers do, including ones that remove even more modern website bloat

gourou• 7 years ago

You mean built-in extensions or can you add some now?

C1sc0cat3• 7 years ago

All good points. But not sure why "unlike kinds" should actually be featured - lets be honest your not exactly a household name in publishing.

Its hard enough getting a major publishing brand accepted by google as a news publisher.

pizzamoney• 7 years ago

Why in the earth you would use Google s sandbox es ?

dcbadacd3• 7 years ago

People say AMP is disgusting, but I say that the alternative is even worse. Just go visit delfi.ee, postimees.ee, õhtuleht.ee and you'll see how damn bloated sites become if there's no market pressure to leanness.

patentatt4• 7 years ago

For any other uninformed readers of this comment: .ee is the internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) of Estonia, operated by the Estonian Internet Foundation.

(I had to look it up too)

acdha3• 7 years ago

This is true but consider an alternate history where Google cared more about web performance than pushing sites to adopt their proprietary JavaScript toolkit: search rankings would simply incorporate page performance/size measured in real browsers and all of those sites would have a strong incentive to reduce page weight and they could load faster without needing 100KB of AMP JavaScript to successfully load before they start rendering.

dcbadacd3• 7 years ago

I'd be glad if that alternate history were the case, but currently AMP seems to be the lesser evil. AMP doesn't make my laptop's fans spin up.

crazygringo• 7 years ago

Can someone explain how an AMP page would possibly be slower?

Especially given Google's CDN and the fact it's likely to be preloaded in practice?

I find myself wondering if this isn't just some artifact of the Chrome tool being used to measure performance -- especially since that tool reports an overall score like "94", not an actual speed -- and the weightings it uses [1] could be different from what AMP is designed specifically to speed up. Also it would have to be measured across a wide variety of locations worldwide, etc., certainly if the author's webserver is in their own city, for example.

A lot more data, measured rigorously, would be needed to prove that AMP is actually slower in practice -- it's a bold claim.

[1] https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/scoring

lllr_finger2• 7 years ago

Unless things have changed, you can't think of it as a real CDN. The Google engineer assigned to our AMP launch told us to think of it as a proxy without actually calling it that. Our testing showed that to be an accurate description of how it worked in practice.

cphoover• 7 years ago

Google AMP needs to die...

JohnFen4• 7 years ago

I personally have a choice about AMP pages -- I ignore them. AMP blows, and if I can't get a non-AMP version of a page, that page doesn't exist for me.

Google AMP lowered our page speed, and there's no choice but to use it

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