I hate AMP. Not even kind of, I mean so much I've started using Bing (DuckDuckGo hasn't been so useful for me).

Beyond the distasteful navigation hijacking, and often broken or buggy page loading... I think Google throwing its weight around to force publishers to use it is an abusive use of power. I also think it's an unnecessary standard since it's nothing more than simple well wittten HTML and CSS.

Yes, we should make less shitty (meaning bloated) web pages that are rendered server side especially for mobile clients-- but that doesn't mean that if we don't we should be second class citizens.

More and more Googles search results are being materially affected by this choice. That is to say, AMP pages with no or little significance to my query are pushed to the top; while, relevant ones are not to be found. I find this primarily true with historical content or localized content where the host/author/org doesn't spend time updating things that aren't broken. Further, the companies prone to adopting AMP are doing as many things as they can simply to generate more traffic (i.e. click bait). So it's a race to the top for advertisers/media companies and a race to the bottom for quality results.

I will resume using google IFF they allow me to permanently opt out of AMP otherwise I will begin the slow arduous migration off all Google services.

Google trying to be the source of content instead of the guide to content will be its downfall from the top. I'm not saying they'll go out of business just that they'll someday be made less relevant from it.

I implemented AMP on my own project and we implemented it at some clients ... all regret it.

The bounce rate, time on site, average page views of AMP pages is always worse than on the responsive version. And as we now have responsive webpages + an AMP version to maintain the overall project costs got higher. Additional the AMP pages are already falling behind as devs and management just hate them.

And outside of the news vertical we haven't seen any major positive traffic impact (and as stated above, the usage values of the AMP-traffic is crap.)

Also we spoke with some users and they all were confused of "what happened to our site...".

AMP is a horrible idea with an even worse implementation.

There is zero reason for AMP to be hijacking URLs or embedding any additional elements into a page that are detectable by the average user.

Beyond that, universal opt-out should be possible and stats on the percentage of users opting out should be published real-time.

As such, until this is addressed, I am against AMP.

There's a lot of hate going on in this thread towards Google ... maybe unfairly.

Keep in mind, a huge reason why Google created AMP is because website bloat has gotten out of control. It's not uncommon for a simply Wordpress blog to be 4MB in size and have 70 requested objects to fetch.

I live in a geography that has LTE and web site are painfully slow to load on mobile devices. I can't even imagine what the Internet experience is like in parts of the world still on 2G or 3G.

If people would stop for a moment and question to themselves "do I really need to use 5 different JavaScript frameworks just to post to my simply personal blog", there's a good chance AMP would not need to exist.

I think HN crowd doesn't fully appreciate the benefits of AMP to people having slow connections. In third world countries still on 2G networks AMP has been an absolute boon. Additionally, lot of these users have limited data packs so they're better served by pages which are light in data consumption. This is true even for a lot of low income neighborhoods in the US. Making AMP opt-in would defeat the purpose as a lot of the target users would be unaware/unable to opt-in.

The most annoying thing about AMP is that there is no way to get the original link easily. I don't necessarily mind reading the AMP version, but if I bookmark or share the link I want to be able to use the original and not Google's copy. Whose to say the AMP link will work as long as the original copy? And what if I explicitly want to use the result as an entryway into the site because I might be looking for other similar articles on the site or need other aspects of the full site experience? AMP seems like it could be maybe be a good thing, but the lack of a method to get a link to the original article exposes AMP, IMO, as the traffic and power grab that it really is.

I have a bad feeling. Google is creating a proprietary version of the mobile Internet, a layer between them and us. Looking at the specs, it's open but paired with the AMP cache and Google's ranking algorithm which already clearly prefers AMPed pages it doesn't feel like a free choice.

What if I don't want to use Google's AMP cache and rather my own CDN? What if I don't want this useless AMP banner at the top of my AMPed pages which takes 25% of the screen estate for nothing? What if I can build fast mobile sites without following the AMP spec?

"At Google we believe in designing products with speed as a core principle. The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) format helps ensure that content reliably loads fast [...]"

Yeah, that's certainly one way to look at it. Yet in my book, the "AMP 'format'" (emph. mine), above all, ensures the continued assimilation of the open web, and with it most of ad revenue collected there, into the huge moloch that is Google (and its AdWords and Analytics infrastructure). I think it's a disgusting technology to adopt, and none of its supposed benefits are worth the drawback that you're giving away control over the end-to-end communication with your actual users.

To me AMP feels like embrace and extend for the whole mobile web. I find them caching things this way both pointless and dangerous. I find it hard to believe that publishers so readily lifted up their skirt for Google controlling their content... however I suppose search engine rankings are everything now.

EDIT Also I'd add further that at some point, this "free" and compulsory AMP cache will start inserting google ads directly into pages and Google will pay publishers a small percentage of what those slots are worth.

AMP is breaking the web, and while it offers great speed, I think the consequences of breaking and hijacking all urls greatly outweighs the advantages.

Really can't be in favor of it until those issues are fixed.

Contrarian view: I love AMP and I find myself clicking AMP links far more often because I can get the information I want much faster. And this is on LTE.

AMP should be supported by CDNs and toggleable in the browsers though.

I'm against AMP simply because it doesn't work with Safari on iOS. In fact, I switched to DuckDuckGo as a default search engine because less accurate search is still better than a list of accurate results that simply don't open.

I've been critical of AMP in some previous posts, but an AMP like infrastructure has the impressive advantage of trying out such optimizations and solutions, without a large affect on the users.

I'd still like to push for an open, standards based approach to tackling the issue of content delivery under resource constraints.

I tried to share an AMP article from Gizmodo with my wife the other day. I just texted her the link that I copied from my Firefox Mobile browser. She said it was broken. And sure enough, it was broken. What a pain, the url only works for me? Edit: wording

I absolutely hate AMP. I don't understand it at all. In fact, I completely ignore the benefits – this is simply due to the UX. Any link I see with AMP in it makes me want to not tap on it on my phone. It's seriously a horrible experience on iPhone. The entire navigation is uncanny valley territory. I don't have a detailed reason why, but I know that when trying to use the browser I'm frustrated and want to leave. This feels like a poor move.

It'd be far more useful if they benchmarked rendering speed for pages (game-able, obviously, but so is everything), and just favored faster ones. AMP could be one of many systems then, instead of taking as much control as possible.

Instead, we have a one-size-fits-all that they control utterly. No option to do something that works just as well, via different means (your own image compression, optimized http2 support, etc).

Kill it with fire.

I definitely agree with the overall feeling on HN – AMP is probably one of the worst things to happen to the open web.

I could even just ignore this problem if there was a way for me to say "I have a 10Mbps 4G connection, please show me the actual site and not this broken half-implementation of it." Even then, it's sketchy.

I think the root issue here is that most websites are now designed by people who don't even know HTML. ("You had one job!")

From there, we get years of unoptimized, bloated websites made by people drawing pictures with HTML editors. They are exclusively focused on visual presentation and ignore any mechanics under the hood. Not everyone, but most. Finally Google can't take it anymore and creates AMP as an angry middle finger to these people. ("I drink your milkshake!")

IMO the right solution is to use speed as an increasingly more important ranking signal. Push crummy bloated websites to the bottom where they belong. I read the article but didn't see Google address this rather obvious idea.

"We remove image data that is invisible to users, such as thumbnail and geolocation metadata. For JPEG images, we also reduce quality and color samples if they are higher than necessary."

Great. Except that that information might be deliberately a part of the image.

These things should be opt-in.

To everyone who's against AMP - try opening any article on an extremely slow 2G connection when you're travelling and try the same with AMP. The difference is night and day.

You may be against some principles, but it's an absolute life-saver sometimes.

And don't forget: at least 99% of users will be completely unaware of AMP. They'll use it by default because lots of Google search results use AMP.

Google gets to make this happen because they own the users, and there's very little to be done about it.

The only countermeasure I can think of is if lots of publishers were to boycott AMP en masse. But publishers have been unable to reduce web bloat any other way, so what would their upside be?

Me personally, I dislike AMP but would be fine with some way to copy the goddamned URL of the page I'm on. The way it currently stands, AMP sort of breaks how one intuitively expects browsers to work.

Is there a way to block AMP and load the real page instead?

Surprised to see so many people hate AMP. I understand why developer/publisher may hate AMP because of development effort/stealing content... But as a reader I am inclined to click the link with the lightening bolt icon and I don't recall to see many broken page.

Google should focus on making their own shit load faster instead of digging their nails into other websites. Google Groups for example is terrible.

We used to have RSS, a standard that allowed to read articles easily and efficiently, and it died with the help of google when it killed google reader. And now they have created this new "standard" in their own garden and expect people to go and play it in exchange of better positioning. I think I'll take the suggestion I've seen here and I'll use duckduckgo

I hate AMP! Please check this thread: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm...

AMP was originally a more interesting project called PageSpeed that was open to anyone running webserver(s). I helped the Goog guys work on it by dint of having founded a premium adexchange company. It was great. AMP? Somewhat less great.

From what I read, majority of the focus of page bytes reduction to optimize fro mobile experiences is on lowering JPEG image quality (AMP Lite) and/or fixate it to 85% for AMP.

I wonder why Google is taking a fixed reduction of image quality reduction rather than considering a dynamic image quality reduction approach like JPEGMini[1] and Kraken.io[2] took?

The latter ones will take visual perceptions into consideration hence they are usually able to squeeze out more bytes savings in the end.

[1]: https://www.jpegmini.com

[2]: https://kraken.io

Is there a standard way to get to the original page from the AMP page? I've ended up on too many AMP pages with no way to get to the original link.

To all people who are defending AMP with 2g arguments, i never have 2g, 3g is the minimum. I don't like it. Make it opt-out please :)

No one here seems to have mentioned Google's back-end wins from cached smaller, standardized code and images.

It's their datacenter using fewer ops on more content to do what they initially set out to do--organize the world's information.

Normalized images associated with a reduction in front-end presentation content can train the IRL bots orders of magnitude more quickly.

Even w/o AMP you need to have a no javascript version for SEO.

Even w/o AMP you need to have fast downloading images.

Even w/o AMP you must use a CDN.

So don't call it AMP. Call it: "SEO optimized and for when users are not on Wi-Fi or for huge scale/load". You can include the lighting bolt or not.

Wha, wha.

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Absolutely hate AMP and the inability to opt out of it.

Yep. Google Results are better but I switched to DDG because of AMP too. Crappy implementation that does not let me get the URL to share a link.

How does Google do this legally at all? Can I just download and redistribute any and all content I find on the net, and then present it as if it's the original?

More specifically, how do they not get sued into oblivion for copyright infringement? They are after all redistributing content they are not licensed to redistribute.

What the what? I thought AMP was designed specifically to be performant and light?

What about announcing AMP Null, a way to disable this abomination?

To me AMP feels like embrace and extend for the whole mobile web. I find them caching things this way both pointless and dangerous. I find it hard to believe that publishers so readily lifted up their skirt for Google controlling their content... however I suppose search engine rankings are everything now.