The official AMP project blog announces features and changes to Google-backed AMP, including web packaging, email, and governance.
HN commenters use it in heated debates about AMP, with some defending the Google cache as a CDN and others disputing the article's claims.
Basically, because it isn't actually possible to make a website that loads in under 100ms on poor connections any other way. For reference, on the fast university wifi I am currently connected to, news.ycombinator.com loads in 499ms. When I switch to my phone's hotspot, that rises to 2.38 seconds, and on a simulated slow 3G network, that rises to 6.51 seconds. I haven't tested a 2G connection in India, but wouldn't be surprised if it exceeds 10 seconds. Hacker News is not a heavy webpage, in fact, it is probably about as lightweight a webpage as is reasonably possible to create.
The key technique that AMP promises will beat the limits of network latency is precaching. Unfortunately, users have a strong privacy expectation that random websites will not be notified that you are interested in them until you actually click the link in search results (or news, or whatever). For precaching to work without violating user privacy, the data needs to be loaded from some server that already knows that the link was shown to you, so there is no privacy violation from giving it that information. AMP's solution is for the host company of the results page to fill that role.
The AMP lightning bolt is intended to mean "this page is already downloaded offline on your device, and so will load instantly", not just "this page is well-designed and fast". The difference is minor for blazing fast connections, but that isn't true for developing world users with weak connections and devices.
Google…
I don't work on AMP (I've never even written an AMP page); this is purely my personal perspective:
The difference is trust:
These AMP rants invariably look to the use of Google's CDN, or to the "google.com" domain in the address bar, and infer malintent. I presume the team had good intentions, particularly for end users.
The AMP team saw a problem (websites take a stupid amount of time to load on mobile, even on nice phones/networks) and devised a solution: "Google has one of the best network infrastructures on the planet. It serves things quickly. Let's cache pages that don't do slow things on that network, so they're fast for users." They devised some criteria for what they mean by "don't do slow things," and wrote tooling to assert it.
I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm developers into using their framework, or to funnel all traffic through Google. I trust that they are well-intentioned people who are trying to do the right thing. They're not proud of the limitations of their original solution, and are making progress on fixing them: for instance, they pushed forward a new web standard (packaging) to fix the address bar problem:
https://blog.amp.dev/2018/05/08/a-first-look-at-using-web-packaging-to-improve-amp-urls/
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Many words have been written about the ramifications of echo chambers on our political discourse. Those same ideas apply here on HN too.
The more I see hyperbolic comments presuming everyone/thing is evil/bad/stupid,…
> I'm curious now: would it be possible to use use the content/markup intended for use by the amp cache to view a static/unscripted/readable version of the page's main content? If so, why hasn't anyone built a browser extension to do so?
If the goal is to get around the AMP CDN, you don't even need to read the main page content. The AMP URL contains the original source URL itself [1].
The extension you are describing would just need to capture all requests with the prefix https://www.google.com/amp (or whatever CDN you are trying to get around), parse out the original URL, and then fetch it, and do what you will with it.
If the goal is to disable scripting on the AMP CDN delivered content, first note that AMP pages can't contain page-author-written JS [2], and any implicit JS has to run async.
But if that's insufficient, you can disable JS in the browser altogether, which would disable it in the loaded AMP content.
You could also try to parse out the main content from your extension from the AMP page if you know from the URL that it's an AMP page. Because AMP's forces relative terseness and simplicity of HTML content, it is probably easier to parse than original page's content. Obviously that won't generalize easily given the large variety of possible of content representations, but you stand a better chance of achieving this with AMP content than the original content.
And if you generalize it enough, you will end up with one component of a web crawl / indexing…
This caught my eye as well. The quote is pulled from the final paragraph of this EFF blog post:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/googles-amp-canonical-web-and-importance-web-standards-0
That post also doesn't really explain, but justifies its position by linking to the AMP blog:
https://blog.amp.dev/2018/02/13/amps-new-horizons/
That page is basically trumpeting the massive adoption of AMP. So my read here is that the author is viewing this a bit like Flash: yes, we could kill it, but it would take years, because of the billions of pages that use it, as well as the custom markup it uses, along with the unique caching structure discussed in the EFF post.
I don't find that particularly compelling, but I can see the reasoning. It may be a case where it would be possible to just redirect all traffic away from AMP, but that would kill page speed, and therefore search ranking, for those using it. Theoretically possible? Sure. Practical? Possibly not.
> And yes, this topic is something of an exception.
Is it, though? The top comments include ad hominem attacks on Google engineers, such as the replies to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19886610
I appreciate how you responded to the worst attack, at least, but the general viciousness is still disappointing. I don't work for Google, but I'm sure not eager to present a contrary view if I'm just going to be mislabeled a shill. Doubly so for anyone who does work at Google, I imagine. Possibly developers from other members of the AMP Project's governing committees as well, including Cloudflare, Twitter, and Microsoft: https://blog.amp.dev/2018/11/30/amp-projects-new-governance-model-now-in-effect/
I don't want criticism of AMP censored, but I don't think AMP should be an exception to the rule against negativity either.
The whole article is riddled with lies and misleading points.
> they didn’t go to BBC’s website; they view a copy of the BBC’s content on google.com
That's exactly what a CDN is. The only difference between AMP cache and CloudFlare is that the latter uses some DNS trickery to show BBC's domain name, whereas Google can't. Google solved this in Chrome, and there are other ways to solve this with Web Packages [1] and Signed HTTP exchanges which allows the content to be served from Google but with the original url, without DNS changes.
[1] https://blog.amp.dev/2018/05/08/a-first-look-at-using-web-packaging-to-improve-amp-urls/