From my perspective as a browser developer, AMP is an unfortunate disincentive to make anything faster unless Chrome already did it. Google bans things that are slow in Chrome from AMP, even if there's no good reason for them to be slow in the first place.
An example is off-main-thread animations. There's no intrinsic reason why animating, say, background-color should be slow. A lot of sites empirically do this sort of thing. But that animation is banned in AMP [1], because it's slow in Chrome (and in other browsers). Even if I work on making it faster, it'll stay banned until Chrome catches up (due to Chrome's market share), thus negating the incentive to make it faster in the first place. Without this competition, Web developers and users lose.
>Can anyone explain the reason why people think its ethically bad
This is just one of many reasons, but try this on a mobile phone.
Go to Google and search for "Trump"
Note what choices you have to pick from without excessive scrolling. They all end in either ads or Google urls.
Click one of the featured stories in the carousel, almost guaranteed to be an AMP site. Seems to be a prerequisite to sit in the carousel.
Lets say you land on a Washington Post story. What do you think a "right swipe" should do? Should it navigate to a competitor of Wapo? This is Wapo's page, right? So it should go to another Wapo page. Nope, it goes to Fox News.
Okay, so now you've navigated from Wapo to say Fox News. Hit the back button. It should go back to the Wapo story, right? Nope, goes back to Google.
How this isn't viewed as a land grab is a mystery to me.
For some reason I'm not experiencing the same at all.
I googled "Trump". First five stories in carousel (wapo, bbc et all) are not AMP. I see only one AMP link in the first page results. Click on it, page loads. Swipe right/back button gets me to Google results (as expected). Is it because I'm on an iPhone and this is an Android thing?
Not an iPhone issue - https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=trump returns. I thing but amp pages I’ve the carousel or the first page of results other than the links to Wikipedia and his Twitter page.
Same search though ddg with !g comes out completely different though....
what is this right-swipe business? You swipe and it, what, just takes you to a page that the makers of the current page think you should read next in your infinite time-sink staring at your phone‽
Many reasons. A popular one would be to flip through a gallery of photos related to the story. That one's VERY common.
Also, I missed mentioning the [X] button on the AMP header banner. I bet that most end users think that [X] button should make the AMP banner disappear, while leaving the page content there. Pretty common pattern, like for the EU cookie warning. That's not what it does, though.
Back to the "right swipe", at the very least, it should do nothing, assuming that an AMP page belongs to the publisher.
Ok, sure. Going through a slide-show makes total sense. So, you're saying that there's no normal behavior on a plain website for swiping right (yes? I don't use mobile much myself), but AMP adds a Google-centric swipe-right function regardless of whether there would otherwise be no swipe-right function or some other expected one. Am I understanding now?
Yes, that's it. Google hijacks the back button, swipes, and the [X] button on the AMP banner...in favor of Google, and to the detriment of the publisher.
That is indeed horrible. I am glad to learn that there isn't otherwise some new trend of people constantly right-swiping for no apparent reason though.
Thank you! I’ve been wondering what this AMP fiasco was all about when I have never seen such a site. It turns out I have developed banner-blindness on the Google search results. I have always scrolled to the “real” first result without ever considering the ads and carousels.
Also, before there was no guarantee that the organic results would contain Google ads as publishers could relatively easily find higher CPM payouts elsewhere.
Well, with AMP, the the mobile results are basically ads, then AMP results which are guaranteed to have Google ads. So the percentage of searches makes Google money increases while similar reducing revenue from competitive ad networks who are not approved.
The argument that swipe behavior should be entirely within the control of the publisher feels like an oversimplification. Plenty of UI elements are designed to work at a higher level of scope than the document: back, bookmark list, [X] button, home button, etc.
Yes, I did mention how Google hijacks the back button on AMP pages as well. The point being that AMP is a walled garden to serve Google's needs...not an honest effort to make sites perform better.
You mention the [X] button. How many end users do you suppose think that the [X] on the AMP header bar should make the header bar go away...versus functioning like a back button, going all the way back to the google search? I suspect they are conditioned by things like the EU cookie warnings that an [X] on a header bar makes it go away.
An AMP page you reach from a Google search is Google's page, period. It's not the publisher's page. And that's no accident or side effect. It's the whole point. Performance is a secondary concern.
I'm not commenting on "ethics", but I can say why I dislike AMP as a user: I want to interact directly with a website, not through some third party. I especially don't want that third party observing my interactions or collecting data about them. I also don't want to allow that third party to run code (javascript) on my computer.
As a website designer (barely), basically the same reasons: I don't want my site under control of a third party, I don't want my users to have to run javascript to view my site, and I don't want them to have to consent to (possibly) being tracked. Most ironically, my site probably accomplishes more of the stated AMP goals (due to being pure html and light) than it would when AMPed up.
Quick edit: I also worry it can contribute to breaking or obfuscating hyperlinks, which is similar to the issue raised in this article. Having hyperlinks work correctly is crucial to the design of the web. I had similar problems when sites like Google search started making their search links redirect to some intermediate site before going to the actual link, and back when I used Google search I had an extension that removed them so I could e.g. right-click and copy the link.
I just want to mention (1) I view this as a bad thing and think we ought to try to move away from it; (2) I whitelist javascript so at least not all of the above is happening to me, and I think we ought to move toward all users having the tools and competence to do the same.
Leaving aside the lock-in issues, AMP causes me minor annoyances more often than it helps. For instance, when I open a search result from a site like Reddit, I get a static logged-out view, instead of the normal one that obeys my preferences. And if I want to copy the link, it takes a few extra taps to get the original one.
I still don't understand why Reddit signed up, it's a terrible experience for their users. I commonly search 'reddit x' when I want an opinion and know there will be a sub Reddit, but now Reddit have made that use case incredibly bad by enabling AMP.
I'd imagine a notoriously cash-strapped site like Reddit is enthusiastic that Google is willing to offload traffic originating from Google Search on Mobile to Google's own AMP CDN. This helps incidental visitors still consume Reddit content, while real Reddit users interacting with real website or through a Reddit app are still getting the normal experience. This arrangement only really frays at edge cases, where a logged-in Reddit user uses an external search like Google to look something up.
Because now there's a big back button as well as a browser back button both back to Google, instead of just a browser back button and a menu to explore the rest of the site.
Google is no longer neutral, they own those users, not you.
It isn't. I fully agree with the article that it should be optional, but it's hilarious how the only reason the author can give is that it "doesn't feel right".
They state "I just automatically go to the main url" without giving any real reason for it. They also mention how all studies show that it's a huge positive for users. And it is. It's much faster and easier way to browse content. You can try to shit on Google, but the reality is that people sucked at making fast content, so someone had to step in and no one was.
All else being equal, disabling ads and other javascript bs will speed up most websites, so if Google really cared about speed, they would (also) boost sites which didn't show ads and didn't rely heavily on JS. AMP is about keeping users on google's properties by using content that they didn't create.
Worth reading the HN posts linked in the article. IMO it's a band-aid for a larger problem - a problem that Google is now incentivised not to address through less hegemonic means.
You're right - Bing can't. Google knows a website's pageviews because it can cleverly cross information between the search engine, Google Analytics and Google Map's by-foot frequentation of shops (for shops and customers with tracking allowed). I'm just underlining that not owning a good share of all 3 of those may make it much harder for future competitors to enter the market.
Apart from everything else, in the last few weeks I've seen a bunch of AMP pages that include at most the first few paragraphs, possibly just a photo or something, and a "read more on our website" link below. This is strictly worse than a world with no AMP: I have to load the AMP page, and then I have to load the real website.
Because of that I'm starting to seriously wonder if Google is going to end up declaring AMP a failed project (and, being Google, the prior probability was reasonably high in the first place), and then AMP is an uncleanable stain on the web, with www.google.com/amp/ URLs being kept around forever.
