I don't get it. What's there to have a long lunch about? The concept wasn't particularly complicated. Get rid of the horrible and dishonest user experience where you click on a link to a page hut don't get taken to that page.
> I think I did a decent job communicating this concern to Paul and Malte. They both assured me that they understood the problem and are confident that they can find a solution that will work for everyone.
How about instead they just order some delivery and delete the fucking part where URL's were rendered unusable instead of this vague "is there anything else I can reassure you about" non-answer?
AMP is terrible. I ignore any results that start with the AMP symbol.
From time to time I still check if they included a way to go the real site.
My fear is that websites start using AMP as their CMS, because I can see it looking like a good idea "Hey guys, we don't need to manage how content! Let's just publish directly to Google and be done with it. So long, node.js"
Assuming good intent here seems ridiculous given the clear purpose of AMP and the many opportunities they had to implement it differently. Doing it correctly is not difficult. All you'd need is a subdomain (amp.x.com) with a cname or A record pointing to google's cache servers and you get all the speed benefits provided by AMP without letting them control the whole internet. It's obviously a walled garden play and pretending otherwise is cynical and dishonest.
I wish they'd just be up-front about it. Then it's just a straightforward decision: Are you willing to give Google control over your URLs in exchange for access to a speedy Google CDN with preferential search ranking? For some people, that is an extremely good trade-off (at least in the short term. It seems naive and dangerous to me in the long-term, but I'm not a CEO.)
> Fat bar at the top ... scroll out of the view as you scroll into content
I think you have been drinking the punch at your lunch. That bar is still a problem and should not be there. There is a native back button, and there is no need for that bar. It lowers conversions for everyone's websites and increases everyones bounce rates.
Of course there is no problem with everything else google has implemented in terms of speeding up the web. That's great. It was a major achievement and a lot of good engineering went in to the caching, rendering, and image resizing and optimization machine that is AMP.
Your meeting should have been about hijacking the ui.
> For now if you want to vote or comment and you end up on an AMP page click the “View more comments” button below the first set of comments. This will take you to our regular mobile web experience where you can vote and comment to your heart's content.
View more comments did nothing. This is going back 1-2 weeks ago. Maybe it was broken or my phone had an issue.
Either way I'm not sure how to feel about AMP. I think it may force web devs to actually do something about bloat which is a very good thing or make bloat worse by offsetting mobile users to use AMP pages only and serving bloat pages to desktops.
Agreed. You can avoid it by using `encrypted.google.com` directly, which does not include AMP results as far as I can tell. Or alternatively, switch to Bing.
We all confronted Google with an abuse of power in a previous AMP HN thread[1] and Malte Ubl and Paul Bakaus from Google seem to follow our sentiments closely but didn't dare to reply in the previous thread. Instead they preferred to have a quiet and safe lunch with just one of us. Good to know.
Malte and Paul, what you are doing is a huge abuse of power with a random specced product and you are not listening to your users, especially those on Github. Many people made lists of drawbacks and the previous thread is full of many more. AMP is heavily flawed and beside the abuse of power, AMP is from a UI perspective an utter disaster: You wan't to improve the mobile user experience but steal so much screen real estate from am already limited mobile view, I made a quick mockup: http://imgur.com/a/VYVZ0 Just tell us, why does the bottom navbar on iOS stays now with AMP sites forever and does steal even more real estate? Who made this design decision and all the other random design decisions?
It would be great if Malte and Paul finally take the responsibility and comment to all the previous attacks here. I guess that Sundar has been informed about the dissatisfaction with AMP and it's now really time to give a statement. It seems that Google has already slightly deranked AMP sites in their SERPs which shows that even internally Malte and Paul are not fully backed up.
I'll take the unpopular opinion from the end-user's perspective here: When I was recently traveling and only had access to an overused satellite connection and my phone, the only pages that were even remotely usable were AMP pages. Given that I can definitely see the niche that they're trying to fix, not really to help us with a blazing fast, low latency 5G connection on a new top end phone.
Sure you could argue that companies can create a similar experience with their web sites but let's be honest that only few would invest the time for it, and then they'd still have a discoverability problem.
AMP might still be somewhat flawed, but it's a centralized step in the right direction, and it does sound like the team is open to feedback, so I'll give them points there even if they haven't made it perfect yet.
17 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 60.7 ms ] thread> I think I did a decent job communicating this concern to Paul and Malte. They both assured me that they understood the problem and are confident that they can find a solution that will work for everyone.
How about instead they just order some delivery and delete the fucking part where URL's were rendered unusable instead of this vague "is there anything else I can reassure you about" non-answer?
From time to time I still check if they included a way to go the real site.
My fear is that websites start using AMP as their CMS, because I can see it looking like a good idea "Hey guys, we don't need to manage how content! Let's just publish directly to Google and be done with it. So long, node.js"
I wish they'd just be up-front about it. Then it's just a straightforward decision: Are you willing to give Google control over your URLs in exchange for access to a speedy Google CDN with preferential search ranking? For some people, that is an extremely good trade-off (at least in the short term. It seems naive and dangerous to me in the long-term, but I'm not a CEO.)
I think you have been drinking the punch at your lunch. That bar is still a problem and should not be there. There is a native back button, and there is no need for that bar. It lowers conversions for everyone's websites and increases everyones bounce rates.
Of course there is no problem with everything else google has implemented in terms of speeding up the web. That's great. It was a major achievement and a lot of good engineering went in to the caching, rendering, and image resizing and optimization machine that is AMP.
Your meeting should have been about hijacking the ui.
> I did not bring this up because I forgot :)
You punked out [0]
[0] https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
I've set DuckDuckGo as my search engine on my phone for the time being as Google Search is practically unusable to me.
Sure, I could bookmark it and use it that way but I like the convenience of being able to search from the address bar.
I visited a subreddit with AMP and couldn't see nested comments or do sorting and other things. It literally hijacks the functionality.
Why reinvent the wheel to add those features when I am happy visiting the site to get it natively.
> For now if you want to vote or comment and you end up on an AMP page click the “View more comments” button below the first set of comments. This will take you to our regular mobile web experience where you can vote and comment to your heart's content.
Either way I'm not sure how to feel about AMP. I think it may force web devs to actually do something about bloat which is a very good thing or make bloat worse by offsetting mobile users to use AMP pages only and serving bloat pages to desktops.
Malte and Paul, what you are doing is a huge abuse of power with a random specced product and you are not listening to your users, especially those on Github. Many people made lists of drawbacks and the previous thread is full of many more. AMP is heavily flawed and beside the abuse of power, AMP is from a UI perspective an utter disaster: You wan't to improve the mobile user experience but steal so much screen real estate from am already limited mobile view, I made a quick mockup: http://imgur.com/a/VYVZ0 Just tell us, why does the bottom navbar on iOS stays now with AMP sites forever and does steal even more real estate? Who made this design decision and all the other random design decisions?
It would be great if Malte and Paul finally take the responsibility and comment to all the previous attacks here. I guess that Sundar has been informed about the dissatisfaction with AMP and it's now really time to give a statement. It seems that Google has already slightly deranked AMP sites in their SERPs which shows that even internally Malte and Paul are not fully backed up.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414570
Sure you could argue that companies can create a similar experience with their web sites but let's be honest that only few would invest the time for it, and then they'd still have a discoverability problem.
AMP might still be somewhat flawed, but it's a centralized step in the right direction, and it does sound like the team is open to feedback, so I'll give them points there even if they haven't made it perfect yet.