No - expressing an opinion is called "freedom of speech", which goes hand in hand with the free market.
You'd be amazed at the number of initiatives launched by the supposed monopoly (Google) failing in the free market. Nacl lost out to wasm. Chrome OS never really took off.
Despite people's gripes about AMP, consumers are clearly loving faster, more responsive websites and hence it's relevance. Let this play out and we'll see where it leads
just a hypothetical, but if you were to assume that Google had no ill will here and was actually trying to make stuff better for users - what do you think the best way would be for people working at Google to do this?
I.e. say you worked on the gmail team, you really cared about users, you thought amp for email would be good for users, how would you go about making this happen in the world?
genuinely curious if its even possible for Google try and improve things without having some of the downsides you mentioned.
If I cared about users primarily, I would hope I wouldn't jump ahead to "amp for email is good." Your requisites for this thought exercise are too broad.
If Google wants to improve email, I would start by emphatically recognizing why their previous attempt to supplant it with Wave failed, and stop trying to break email's openness,
This is a pretty packed question, there's a lot of factors. The size of Google, and the fact that they own several complimentary monopolies makes it very hard for them to do anything without providing a new conflict of interest.
Take Chrome's ad blocking... there's no way this can be ethically done by Google, even if blocking annoying ads definitively improves user experience. If Chrome was not owned by Google, it wouldn't be at issue, but it is owned by Google, and there's no way for Google to approach this topic. Googlers who care about this should push Google to split off Chrome into an independent foundation.
AMP is a way to push content to centralized platforms. Even if others run AMP caches (which are pointless because Google Search uses Google's cache, etc.), it pulls the Internet towards centralized cloud providers of which Google is one of the top three. And again we cross a huge self-interest issue.
If Google wanted to retain enough goodwill to even start to walk this back, they need to move back to open protocols. RSS (or a newer JSON equivalent), XMPP (or a newer equivalent), etc. And deal with all the mess that comes with true decentralized open standards. It's not like Google can't afford the additional difficulties. If their AI is as great as they claim (it's not, G+ porn spam is rampant), it shouldn't be hard for them to provide good experiences on open federated systems.
Want to run apps in emails? Great. Does the user want it? Can I decide which apps I want running inside my emails, based on what's useful for me?
Will the user get to pick whether their AMP emails are dynamic or not? Google+ notifications have a long history in Gmail of overwriting the display of the actual email with a live page, which can try to obscure the email's original content, like in the case of a deleted message. You'd have to use an IMAP client to see the content of the message that was actually sent to you.
I was typing a long, long reply too but I just realized I wouldn't even use my own suggestions because I don't trust Google anymore, specially to do the right thing in the long run.
The point I was trying to get at with the hypothetical is that its quite possible that a lot of Googlers are good people with good intentions and that they are trying to do good.
The hypothetical tries to demonstrate that if Googlers are good, they would behave in a way that is indistinguishable from the behaviour you are seeing and attributing to evil.
Basically I find it very hard to believe that Googlers wake up in the morning and think how best they can screw over the internet to make a few more bucks for not themselves, but the company they work for. Maybe I'm an optimist.
The point I was trying to get at with the hypothetical is that its quite possible that a lot of Googlers are good people with good intentions and that they are trying to do good.
And in turn everyone is trying to explain that individual intentions in the context of a large organization don’t really matter. The only meaningful choice the well intentioned have is to work for a different company. I couldn’t care less if a Google employee has good intentions, but is willing to hang them up for a paycheck.
I wouldn't "launch this" because it's not needed in the first place. You should accept email for what it is. The same point the article is defending.
> and was actually trying to make stuff better for users
Now, if we're talking about making communication between users better than yeah you need to go beyond email. E2E, open protocol, something like jmap (imap sucks), focus on privacy and interoperability, yada yada, so many better stuff to "fix" before trying to amplify my inbox and adding more rendering issues between platforms. Do you see a trend? You're now treading a thin line between chat apps, social networks, Android instant apps and glorified iframes. And introducing a whole new set of problems at the same time, not to mention the monumental effort required for something like this to keep backward compatibility (just so you can still call it email and use the superset). And getting the implementation right the very first time.
I too want the worst problems of using email to be solved but since nobody wants to adopt open protocols and work with each other (or eee the whole thing a year later), like history showed us time and time again, it won't happen. So again, let's at least no lose what we have now.
The problem is not that it's difficult to run an SMTP server - botnets run millions of them. The problem is that telling a legitimate one from one that sends spam is an arms race.
Devin Coldewey against a bunch of Google employees, who will win? (sarcasm)
On a more serious note, if the idea of AMP is so bad as many people attest. How is that the "bad idea" passed over so many people at a company that praises itself of hiring some of the most smartest people in the field? Hyperbole, the author of this article is just generalizing. Maybe AMP for email works for some people, making it a good idea for them.
AMP is an excellent idea... for Google. (And only Google.) The point being that the benefit to Google is clearly larger than the PR hit they take for continuing to push a thing that's costing them a lot of goodwill with the Internet community.
Please consider what you're suggesting. Do you mean to say that Google cannot possibly do anything that isn't good? Really?
AMP is good for Google, and secondarily maybe also good for some subset of people who care more about short-term benefits on slow connections than the long-term damage to the open web.
> Do you mean to say that Google cannot possibly do anything that isn't good? Really?
No, that's not what I am saying, please don't put words in my mouth.
My comment is divided in three parts: 1) sarcasm 2) question and 3) counter argument.
The sarcasm is already labelled.
The question is what you assumed was an affirmation.
The counter argument is, "AMP works for some people", you said "AMP for email is good for Google alone" which proves that my counter argument is true. AMP, bad or not, works for some people (in your comment, Google employees), which is what I originally wrote in my parent comment. I don't see what do I need to reconsider from this. There is also comments in this thread from people who say they like AMP, probing my statement even more: "it works for some people".
> How is that the "bad idea" passed over so many people at a company that praises itself of hiring some of the most smartest people in the field?
That formulation is disingenuous at best, and your follow-up describing it as a "question" is just as bad.
How is it that you think your comment was acceptable when so many people disagree at a website that praises itself for having some of the smartest commenters on the web?
I hope that helps demonstrate the dishonesty of a question of that format. No need to answer.
> How is that the "bad idea" passed over so many people at a company that praises itself of hiring some of the most smartest people in the field?
The fact that Google produced AMP played a nontrivial part in me rejecting their job offer - I didn't want my work to be judged by the engineering standards of an organization that continues to staff and promote AMP.
I mean, other reasons included things like "they wouldn't match the competing offer" so it definitely wasn't just a principled stand :-) But even that aside, this was just a decision from self-interest, not a statement of protest: the sorts of engineering work I find interesting/engaging tend to involve doing the right thing for the users even if it involves more / longer work. I don't think that prioritizing getting the work done and shipped is objectively wrong, I just worry about what would happen if perf season rolls around and my current project is incomplete because I didn't want to take the expedient route.
"a company that praises itself of hiring some of the most smartest people in the field?"
Maybe because they are oblivious to the big difference between being a good developer, being generally smart, and being a decent person? These really are entirely different things, and selecting for the former would not necessarily give you the latter. And I very much doubt that they were selecting for the last one at all lately. If ever.
Good luck! I had the "pleasure" of working on HTML emails a few months back. It was unbelievably painful. Getting even a simple email to display consistently across a dozen different mail clients is a huge pain. This is why so many marketing emails use giant images for everything--it's the simples way to get consistent rendering.
I predict whatever Google launches will work in GMail, and GMail only.
Most of the pain of HTML email is Microsoft’s fault, because they have persisted in using the MSO (Word) HTML render/editor in Outlook and Windows Mail, and it’s worse than IE 5.0. (Outlook 2003 switched to the IE renderer, and everyone rejoiced; then the Outlook 2007 went back to the MSO renderer for rather crummy reasons and all web people boggled and despaired.)
Sure, other clients have their inconsistencies, but they’re nowhere near as bad as MSO, and they actually get fixed over time. Microsoft, on the other hand, persist in using a rather buggy engine from twenty years ago, unchanged (I don’t know that there haven’t been any functional changes or bug fixes since then, but if there have been they’re minor or obscure).
Considering I did ISP tech support, including mail client setup, for a few years in the late 90's and early 2000's and never once encountered Lotus Notes, I think it may be like in kind, but nowhere near like in quantity.
I would have thought the same of Microsoft Outlook (not Outlook Express), but those calls were fairly common. Perhaps Microsoft Office was just more commonly encountered outside a corporate environment.
Outlook has always been fairly accessible to the home user, through home use programs or various versions of Office. It even comes with home editions these days.
I had to do client work once that required Lotus Notes support and I swear that program runs HTML through a blender before trying to render it. It makes Outlook look like Chromium.
Notes doesn't do HTML at all, at least not in the client. (The webmail client, running in the browser, does use HTML.) It uses a rich text format, and has to translate HTML to the nearest Notes rich text equivalent.
Marketing emails use giant images to push the text content below the fold, because they want to entice the user to enable images. Images need to be enabled to track opens.
Sometimes I think e-mail should have just stayed plain text. No HTML renderers or other fancy stuff. Just type what you want to say and to whom and send. You know what does fancy marketing "e-mails" really well without all the horrid HTML hackery? It is RSS (or Atom).
If HTML e-mail hadn't been invented then the need would have been fulfilled by something else, particularly for corporate environments where formatting and marking-up e-mails is essential to communication.
For a while in the late 90s / early 2000s we had RTF e-mail.
I'm just now finding out that google is planning AMP for email. :(
It seems almost comical. On the one hand, we are constantly told that email is losing out to modern instant messaging avenues for communication. On this hand, the plan for competing is to try and make it more heavy weight? Reminds me of when Wave supposedly was going to remake email.
I suspect someday I'll just be a luddite, as mentioned in another thread. I really hope this is not that day.
Whenever a service or company purports to make something "engaging" and "interactive" you just know that useability and actual, tangible usefulness are going to go out the window in favour of marketer-driven choices.
We don't 'engage more' with your software/service because you changed everything to optimise for engagement and time spent, we engaged more because it took more time/steps to get the same thing done.
Arguably what we should be doing is optimising for less time spent on an app/service for the purposes of enabling a better/more efficient/more enjoyable experience by letting users get what they want to do done quickly and easily.
Right, but I think it's fatalistic to just write off any attempt to come up with better solutions: nothing will change if we don't at least start thinking about, proposing and testing other ideas.
I think it's a reasonable assumption that most people here are devs or interested in software/programming/etc. Marketers aren't going to be the ones who are actually interested in making better products, they're practically premature-optimisation-in-user-hostile-directions personified, so someone else has to at least propose these ideas.
The whole idea of “selling” something that the customer don’t actually receive, and has no rights to, is insane. It’s tantamount to false advertising, and I think it should be made illegal.
As much as we all hate cable, telephone companies are more evil.
Verizon in particular is amazing in their priorities from an operational perspective are getting rid traditional phone business at all costs and spiting the CWA.
For totally unrelated tinfoil-hat reasons I started using fastmail yesterday. Now I feel very vindicated in my choice, but it makes me wonder; since Gmail is so pervasive, will this action by them end up f-ing up email for everyone, the same way that many sites claim to only work on Chrome?
AMP for email would be another reason to start using fastmail myself. I probably share the same "tinfoil-hat" reasons, but I never got around to it (shame).
Ugh. Hopefully unlike the serp results, nobody feels like they have to cave in here due to the carrot/stick Google wields in search.
If they do wield a similar influence because of the market share of Gmail, hopefully somebody challenges that under antitrust or some other consumer protection basis. Email doesn't need walled gardens. That's back to the AOL days. "You've got AMP mail!"
I don't know the technical details of what Google is planning, but if they build something that eases the pain of building cross platform HTML emails, that's a welcome innovation in my opinion. Building emails that "work" even just okay is a ridiculously hard task. Every company I've been at has made some attempt with mediocre results at best (oh, you're using _Outlook_?).
I'm not holding my breath for something good to come out of this, though. This could just as easily be a terribly executed product. But I'll try to be an optimist, because what we have now is outright trash.
HTML emails are here to stay, and the billions of dollars that companies pour into designing, building, and sending them are proof of that. Given the constraint that we're stuck writing and consuming them, I'd rather have a technology that does a good job than a technology that makes me want to boil my laptop.
If you're afraid of HTML, by all means please check your email from a sandboxed VM in the terminal. But some poor chump is still going to be toiling away to make the latest Pottery Barn newsletter look great on a Blackberry, so we'd might as well build better tools.
Seriously. Would be great if somebody could just declare a new mime-type such as "text/html5" that could be used to activate modern html rendering in email clients and would be shipped alongside the existing "text/html" and "text/plain" components. Eventually when enough email clients support this, we could stop generating the legacy html emails and only include text/html5 and text/plain mime types in emails.
Devil's advocate: there's more to keeping email safe than just not allowing JavaScript. Most browsers let you have up to 255 drop shadows on a single element, which can really heat up your laptop. CSS animations can also cause havoc. Imagine loading a GIF from a server that just streams frames forever. You also don't want to immediately load images (for privacy reasons), and you probably also want to ban audio and video while you're at it. In a web email client, you don't want the styles of the email to affect the chrome of the app. <iframe>, <object>, and <embed> lead to a world of bad ideas. <base> and <dialog> could potentially cause unusual issues. I can't think of anything off the top of my head, but I'm sure data URIs could be abused somehow (data URI-encoded SVGs something something loading content dynamically?).
CSS can cause problems, too. @import could cause privacy issues, as could @font-face. If images are not pre-downloaded, @media and @page could reveal when you print a message and @supports could leak details about your mail client. `position: fixed` would need to be banned outright I'd think, if the message isn't sandboxed in an iframe.
HTML5 as a whole is designed for building applications, not for making pretty messages. You want to have a subset of HTML5, but not too strict of a subset. Some APIs (e.g., @font-face) probably can't be used as-is and need a replacement. And of course, it all needs to be somehow backwards-compatible.
If one is reading mail, a good quality MUA will not be "loading a GIF from a server" in the first place. The content to show should be all right there in the message to start with, included using multipart/, or it does not get shown.
As heresey as it might be to HN I can't wait until everyone in the world onboards onto one unified communication platform. Once (and if) lte and unlimited data becomes ubiquitous I look forward to be able to make phone calls, email, messages, video messaging, blogging etc all from one username and account. I want to hand someone my username and be done with it. Facebook is trying, but it's execution leaves much to be desired
I don't think this will ever happen. There are just far too many people, with far too many requirements.
For example, I would never use a centralized, proprietary platform for these services. Some folks don't care, but they may want it to work on <insert latest device fad here>. Even if it works on that device, it will likely need to comply with local regulations around the world, each with their own requirements.
If we (humans) can't even get a single, agree on unified service for something 'simple' like web search, what makes you think we'll ever converge on dozens of mediums/services/protocols?
So long as said account has not been banned for tripping some unknown algorithm, and have received the "this is the last communication on this matter" message. At which point in such a world where there is one, and only one, communication platform, do you even exist?
>It all comes down a simple but very dangerous shift: the major websites of today's web are not built for the visitor, but as means of using her. Our visitor has become a data point, a customer profile, a potential lead -- a proverbial fly in the spider's web. In the guise of user-centered design, we're building an increasingly user-hostile web.
In this case page load times are being valued over everything (not just AMP but also the search rankings algorithm).
I'm not 100% sure if it's a vanity metric for Google or not.
...Google does have some of the greatest statistical minds in the world, just maybe not the best product/UX minds.
KPI's can be highly misleading when it's disconnected from raw UX. It's difficult to measure user emotional experience, especially when you have a monopoly on user attention with Google Search and total product lock-in with Gmail. When users don't have alternative options analytics stats can be deceiving.
And just because a user completes X task a hundred milliseconds faster it doesn't necessarily mean the UX was better. And just because the UX was made incrementally worse doesn't mean I'm going to use Google/Gmail any less. But enough of small cuts can build up into a serious wound.
I remember reading that article and thinking that the author either isn't old enough to remember the 90s web or has memory loss about how hostile it was to the user.
Ubiquitous banner ads, "free" 56k if you use our browser and click links, cookie bonanza, link hijacking etc... have been part of the web since day one.
> Ubiquitous banner ads, "free" 56k if you use our browser and click links, cookie bonanza, link hijacking etc... have been part of the web since day one.
No they haven't. I definitely remember the web before those were common, and it was great.
And while yes, the web was hostile back then, we also thought about it as hostile. There's been a definite shift in how the web is presented. Back then, we taught "Don't put anything personal online, it's all shady." But now, we want users to give us everything they can, and we've changed the language to allow it. "It's OK for you to give this data to us. We're Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc. There's no way we'd be irresponsible with that data"
It's not like we've come up with some new, super-secure way to store that data. The web is even more shady nowadays, but we're training users not to think about it that way.
AMP is, to begin with, Google exerting its market power to extend its control over others’ content. Facebook is doing it, so Google has to.
As a consumer, I actually love AMP. Everytime I click a news link on mobile and am taken to AMP, I'm relieved to be free from the extremely distracting original websites.
Google has done a lot of exciting work on open standards like JSON-LD [0] and Microdata [1] to bring a better experience to both Google search results and Gmail. I love clicking the inline "Confirm subscription" button [2] instead of opening emails from Mailchimp and searching for a link. I'm not that scared of the future becoming locked into Google. I believe they'll improve upon and create better standards for emails. Most things aren't entirely altruistic, and that's OK. Gmail being an early adopter to these standards is a good enough reason for them.
We have the exact opposite opinion then. I moved to DuckDuckGo on iOS because I thought the AMP formatted Google search results were so user-hostile.
Maybe they’ve fixed the bizarre scrolling and overly sensitive links by now, but I see no reason to find out, because I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.
For what it's worth, I only use my phone seriously when I'm out and about, and a lot of times, my internet connection isn't the best, e.g. while in metro
This is true for me too, but I still find that using AMP pages on Android is basically nonfunctional. They load fast, but scrolling is shoddy and every single linking function (back button, hyperlink, and new tab alike) is a mess.
If I want to load a single page with dense content, view it without scrolling much, and close the tab, AMP makes my mobile experience better. If I want to do anything else, AMP on Android starts to interfere with basic functionality.
Which is a pretty sad story for a Google CDN on a Google browser on a Google OS.
Why not blame Apple for building a buggy browser that you have no choice but to use? Stop buying buggy user-hostile phones. AMP pages work perfectly fine in Firefox for Android.
Let’s say you’re an engineer about to roll out a feature to (literally) a billion users. Through testing, you know your feature is busted for the ~14.5% of your users who use Safari. But it’s not your fault! Apple should fix it.
Quick quiz: do you release a feature that is broken for 145M users, which brokenness they might plausibly encounter multiple times a day?
In a typical organization, the answer would probably be an unambiguous “no”.
Without passing judgment, I find the fact that Google decided to ship anyway to be a useful indicator of their beliefs, culture, and priorities.
You could turn that around and ask why Apple didn't bother to fix something that was causing pain for some of their users and continued not to fix it after it was causing pain for most of their users. Google made a bad engineering decision, but I would place most of the blame on Apple.
It's the same for IE and web applications that didn't work in that browser. Luckily, people (for the most part) stopped using IE. We can only hope that iOS Safari will share that fate.
It doesn’t feel equivalent to me; I tend to think that there’s a meaningful distinction between a bug known before shipping and a bug discovered after.
That said, it’s fair to ask why Apple hasn’t placed priority on the scrolling bug, post-AMP. What the real dynamics are I can only guess; I’d love to hear from lurking AMP or WebKit engineers.
The three main issues are that scrolling behavior was busted, clicking on the top bar doesn't scroll to the top like it does in all other scroll views in the system, and the URL bar doesn't show the 'real site' so links shared via the built-in mechanism are links to google, not to the actual site content.
All three of these are Google not taking into account mobile browser design. None of these can really be classified as issues in Safari, rather they are consequences of the Safari design and the design choices Google made.
The first two are due to the content being embedded within an iframe.
The scrolling issue was partly because Safari implemented custom scroll behavior (supposedly due to a Steve Jobs request) for its main web view, but scrollable iframes did not override the scrolling behavior. The fix here (I believe it was rolled out in iOS 11) was to change system-wide behavior for Safari to use the system default scrolling behavior, so that everything behaved the same.
The title bar issue is due to the content not being a scroll view, but a view the size of the screen containing one or more scroll views (the iframes). Which of these should be scrolled to the top on a tap? Changing this behavior could change it for deployed sites, so rolling out any sort of new heuristic requires testing and probably wouldn't be done outside a new major version (e.g. iOS 12).
The third issue is across all browsers - Google is the one serving the content, not the third party that wrote the content. Because of this, any attempt to change where the browser 'thinks' a page is being served to another domain runs afoul of pretty fundamental web security principles. You might be able to design some sort of call (similar to CORS) to ask if google is representing your content in order to get permission to forge the address, but that would be a new web standard that hasn't been written yet.
Google should have just not used a scrolling iframe. MobileSafari has this beautiful quirk that iframes greater than 8 pixels tall automatically expand to the size of their content, solving all of the awkward coordination problems of sizing the iframe. It would have been just so damned simple for Google to fix this in MobileSafari :/.
The AMP viewer and the AMP cache page are served from different domains. Leaking the size of the cache page to the viewer page would be a security bug, which is worse than the scrolling bug that Apple actually had.
> That said, it’s fair to ask why Apple hasn’t placed priority on the scrolling bug, post-AMP
Because Apple is incapable of fixing a browser bug without an OS update. You should be asking why Apple won't let you use a non-buggy browser on your phone to begin with.
I’m not going to switch my browser or my hardware platform over some trivial bug that only surfaces on one website. I’m just not going to visit that website.
Don't blame anybody else for your poor choices. If you choose to use IE 6 or iOS, don't cry if the world doesn't bend over to support your buggy platform. Work within the shrinking confinements of your platform.
No, not really. Most UX issues with AMP on Safari rather stem from the approach Google has taken with the html. For instance, it’s not a WebKit bug that tapping the top of the screen on an AMP page does not scroll to top - something that works on virtually all other webpages.
AMP scrolling is still broken. I don’t see why it needs to touch the scroll behavior at all. Plain html is both fast and scrolls naturally. It doesn’t break mobile safari. I don’t get why Google needed to render AMP on such a way that they need to try hard to emulate native scroll behavior (still getting it wrong, previously it was too fast and now it’s a smidge too slow) instead of just using the native behavior.
>The tapping top of screen hasn't been fixed, as it likely is hard to do.
Plain HTML+CSS is hard to do?
Google has gone to an exceptional effort to make things not work like they do by default. That it's even more effort to now get basic UX back shows just how misguided the entire team is.
It doesn't matter how you "feel", I know for a matter of fact, objectively and measurably, that my load times have gotten significantly faster, and that AMP has achieved what thousands of sites have failed to do.
So feel free to call it names and bring up feelings, but what I care about is the actual objective experience I'm getting.
That's being a bit obtuse. Of course it matters how it feels, however you look at it! Such as if a loading bar makes something feel better as it loads - then good!
There are still UX problems on Android too. I tend to open links in a new window and then close the one I'm looking at when I'm done with it. This experience is totally broken with Amp pages in mobile Chrome. Uhg.
When AMP was announced, I was excited about it specifically for my phone - it's where I care most about loading speeds.
These days, I actively avoid AMP links on Android. It's such a hideously buggy, functionality-disabling system on my phone that it's not worth loading those pages at any speed.
Honestly if AMP is such a nice format, how hard can it be to just format the content in plain HTML+CSS and let the browser do the scrolling and UI bits?
Only if that doesn't work pleasantly, then you get to complain about the browser not doing its job properly. (this remark aimed at some other replies in this subthread)
It's probably not hard at all, it's just that Google's priorities are currently at "fuck you" especially if you try to avoid being tracked.
As a consumer I like the speed of AMP but hate the usability of it (ever try sharing a link? ugh).
As a developer and a content creator? I absolutely hate it. Not only is my content hosted outside of my control but they give them a visual weighting in Google search results. So now, if I want my content to have the best chance to be seen, I have to use AMP.
I wish they would have just made AMP a framework or build system that out spit out optimized web pages. Instead they force us to use their CDN which also has multiple trust issues.
I don’t like how usual ios controls stop to work with amp, e.g. scroll to top by tapping on time; back button works[-ed] wrongly. Also there is annoying amp bar at the top that pops up constantly when I scroll. They can’t distinguish between swipe-and-stop and swipe-and-letitscroll in browser, so it doesn’t work as safari header bar.
Better they completely faked dns/cert in some wat and presented me copied content from their amp cache. I don’t check sources anyway.
Thank goodness that a bunch of clever kids are going to replace boring old SMTP n MTAs n MUAs and stuff with this bollocks: https://www.ampproject.org/ 8)
email works and doesn't need fixing. It (nearly) transports more messages every day than is countable and just works. SNR - now that needs fixing and a good start would be enforcing plain text.
As a marketer my fear is Google sees what FB is doing to monetize the feed format and it is moving to turn email into the next algorithmically controlled feed it can turn into a dynamic auction.
There is already a Gmail placement for AdWords ok the GDN. However for the most part, if I as a marketer send emails to my customers, I can be more or less certain they will get delivered if my deliverability is high.
What I see Google doing here is gradually exerting control until they tell brands "hey, you know those messages you used to send to customers for basically free? Now you need to pay a dynamic price we control in order to get any "organic" reach."
And just like that they will have turned one of the most valuable, scalable and cost effective marketing channels into another large revenue stream for themselves that gives them even more leverage over marketers.
> algorithmically controlled feed it can turn into a dynamic auction.
That's already happened with GMail, hasn't it? The filters for Promotion, Social, and of course Spam already control what/where users see (and it'd be trivial for Google to charge a fee here based off visibility of Promotion-categorized messages).
It's still in a linear and usually legible way, of course, and I think it's arguably user-friendly if imperfect. Doing what facebook does with feed/status updates with email would be absolutely ludicrous, it would make GMail a ghost town overnight.
I don't think introducing ads into the feed is as ludicrous as you say from a business standpoint. If done properly, I could see Google avoiding a mass exodus while simultaneously opening up more inventory for them. In some ways, I see Inbox as a test towards this vision.
My broader concern is a fundamental shift in the ownership of a customer/user relationship and the cost of reaching them. In today's world, you pay a fixed price for your ESP, and then some CPM rate for volume typically. Your costs are known, often negligible, and entirely under your control. Likewise, as long as you follow best email practices and nurture healthy relationships with those on your email lists, you have an expectation that your email will land in their inbox if they want to receive it.
That is similar to what FB had back in the day when someone Liked your brand page. If you posted, they would see it assuming they scrolled through their feed enough.
My fear is that Google will change that dynamic such that you cannot be guarantee to reach your audience (even if you have great deliverability) without entering into an auction and paying a constantly changing price that presumably will always increase as they maintain control as the new gatekeeper of that customer communication.
The "active email" demo on the original article is a great example. I want to ensure that my primary inbox is a place where others can never ever send something like that.
It's an exaggerated version of the image-heavy email newsletters - these are obviously nice for the marketer, but the messages that I want to receive are not like that, they don't need this feature, it's only useful for those who want to steal my attention.
If marketers really need it, perhaps it could be a useful way to automatically forward any messages using this technology to spam.
Somehow I expect that GMail's search box will get a "usesAMP:yes" or "content:AMP" filter or something. It has a lot of filter keywords like this[0], undoubtedly they'll add it.
You can easily add a filter rule to automatically mark all messages matching a filter as "spam".
If enough people do that, they might get the message. (and probably just remove the search filter option, sigh)
[0] come to think of it, GMail's search is a delight exactly because almost still kind of works like how Google Web Search used to work back when it was still good, a mere decade ago ...
Nothing says “we’re listening to your concerns about AMP” like rolling it out further to interfere with a function that is even less suited for AMP.
Also, technology companies have a real problem assigning appropriate value to maintenance tasks that just keep things stable and usable. I’ve had infrastructure responsibilities over the years and the hardest thing about it was that nobody really knows or cares how much trouble you put into having things work flawlessly for months or years on end. It was important to find lots of visible tasks to go along with the invisible ones. I guess you end up with things like 40 Google chat clients and “hey let’s screw with E-mail” when there isn’t enough promotion-worthy work left to do in those areas.
And it will supplant Duo and Allo, that were/are supposed to supplant (or augment, or co-exist -- can't we all just get along?) Hangouts, that was supposed to integrate SMS and MMS, but bollocks.
Anyway, I prefer my email to remain immutable after initial transmission. I don't need another Snapbookthingie...
Which reminds me, Google: You already hosed search results with your first... or second, or third, buzzzzzz... big social, dynamic (comments) push, Plus.
And almost nobody liked Buzz, nor the way you tried to shove it down our throats.
Are you really going to take another stab at sabotaging one of your successful products -- this time, Gmail?
You HAD a successful social platform: Reader. And you nuked it.
You want "social" and "changing content"? Bring back Reader.
I was really upset by it too. I used to start my day with Google Reader the same way my dad used to start his day reading the newspaper. This was a crucial part of my morning ritual, and I trusted and relied on Google to maintain it for me. The sudden announcement that it would be taken away felt like a betrayal. It shattered my image of Google and made me completely rethink my dependence on them and seek out alternatives wherever I could.
It was probably the single best social thing I’ve ever used. It was unique as it was actually social. Both my teams at work and family/friends used it as a way to comment on news and share stuff of interest. It was also a product of an earlier era where there was excitement over anything Google released.
Google+ tried to capture many of the good parts of reader... but it was too forced.
The social aspect was the one part of Reader I never got. I don't think anyone I know uses RSS feeds outside of podcast subscriptions. I just liked that it was the only RSS reader I had ever found that just worked, and it synced my state as a bonus.
AFAIK, Google Now, which is well baked into Android uses RSS feeds. It might not be that people subscribe to them manually, but I'm sure there are plenty of people who do consume content from RSS feeds through things like Google Now. I personally find it nifty to receive updates on blogs according to my search history.
I was too. For personal use I eschew new products by Google. iPhone is starting to have big issues but I'll never go back to a Google phone, computer, tablet etc.
AMP has gotten me to finally switch to Duck Duck Go. Gmail is too difficult to leave, but AMP for gmail may finally get me over the edge.
Still wish there was an rss reader as good as G. Reader.
Part of why I don't advocate for CDNs when you don't need them is because I want to build robust sites that work for years untouched. For timespans over a year, anything not on your server is brittle. Oops, CDN changed its URL/didn't update their ssl ciphers/went bust and shut down completely and now {js-framework}/{css-library} is missing and my site is broken. What an unforeseeable circumstance!
That's why I like to map one of my own subdomains to the cdn service.
So everything is at cdn.example.com and if I change providers, it's just a dns record change and everything is ready, even if I want to just host my own content.
Doesn't that kill the possibility that a visitor will already have common content cached when visiting your site for the first time? I know that's not the only reason to use a CDN, but it's a pretty big one.
Honestly with all the versions of js libraries and all the CDN hosts, the limitations of cache size and the insane bloat of webpages, I think you're going to have to be pretty lucky to get any beneficial cache hits from unrelated third party sites.
In my experience, the variety of specific versions of libraries sites are locked to dilutes that performance benefit. Just look at a cross-sampling of sites calling jQuery or <insert your favorite library or framework here>.
In theory, the maximum benefit of a CDN only comes if everyone is on 1) the same version or, similar but different, 2) an evergreen version. And the latter is a big red neon sign screaming "DANGER".
IF you have some stuff you think some visitors will have cached, well then you can use the standard google or jquery CDN or whatever (they're free anyway). For everything else you would run from your own CDN url.
I thought that too but even for the most common stuff like font awesome cdn cannot be trusted - just too many silent outages that were only discovered from user complaining because they impacted different geographical areas differently..
IIRC the argument was that JS bloat is okay "because we can cache common content through CDNs" ... or that's how it felt at the time :)
It sort of/kind of started with jQuery, and in those days including jQuery was considered somewhat bloaty. I think it was about 18kB minified back then? Today their site says it's 30kB.
Either way that's miniscule compared to having a few pictures on your webpage. Having much more JS than that, honestly seems like true bloat to me, which I don't think CDNs should facilitate anyway (so much untrusted unknown unchecked code doing very, very filthy things).
My point is, it wasn't a very good argument back then either, but it became normal because people did it for other reasons, too.
The main reason people did it, was that it was just so much easier. Just copypaste those 1.5 lines of code in your <HEAD> section to include the latest version of jQuery from Google's CDN, instead of downloading it and putting it somewhere in your source tree and now you've got to keep track that different parts of your codebase written months apart don't accidentally use slightly different versions (because it's ugly, not because it mattered a lot otherwise), etc.
Such convenience!
And if someone asked if it was really a good idea to blindly load 3rd party code and run it in the context of your own domain? Even I told people this sometimes: Well if you can't trust Google serving you secure code, then the web is basically fucked anyway, and we got much bigger problems. Which seemed like a reasonable threat model / security trade off at the time.
And now we're here.
About a week ago Google got caught hosting hostile ads that included cryptocoin miners inefficiently wasting users' electricity for a few bucks (profit insignificant compared to the cost of energy wasted). And apparently Google's offering to blindly host 3rd party JS to all users on the entire Internet everywhere (except the adblockerati), via their fucking ad network, has been expected behaviour for over a year at least and nobody gave a peep when that malfeature appeared.
I still don't know the exact date when or if there even was an announcement when they allowed advertisers "sure do whatever you like to their browsers, run some code, compute stuff, track them in all the ways we haven't dared to deploy publicly, or yet thought of, have at it, you need this, you do you".
So yeah, the web is fucked, we got bigger problems and hell no you can't trust Google any more.
> Either way that's miniscule compared to having a few pictures on your webpage.
A visitor can decide to not display images to improve performance and this will not break the website, blocking the (often not useful) js on the other hand...
> And if someone asked if it was really a good idea to blindly load 3rd party code and run it in the context of your own domain? Even I told people this sometimes: Well if you can't trust Google serving you secure code,
You overlooked the privacy and personal data issue here. It's a bad idea to rely on anything google because it means that you give away the privacy of your visitor to one of the worst offender no less.
> About a week ago Google got caught hosting hostile ads ...
Google has been delivering malware, spyware and that kind of things for years. It was even considered a major vector of infection (usually someone looked for flash on google and clicked on the first results which happened to be a google ad for an infected flash installer)
Many providers simply map to your live site structure. So I keep everything on my own site and do the initial upload there. The CDN looks to my site to get the original copy when they receive a request for a file they don't have cached.
Why would it fail today? If I can't serve an asset then my whole server is down.
If you are an e-commerce site serving hundreds of images worldwide then CDNs make a tonne of sense.
If you just have a simple site or SaaS getting decent traffic, why add a failure point by including your choosen JS with a CDN. No one batts an eyelid when you add ten images to the homepage but somehow a single, much smaller JS file is too much extra load. It doesn't stand up to reason.
The challenge is those labels aren't standards-based. Gmail has all sorts of weird issues when you interact with it over IMAP. Even Google's own Takeout will end up making multiple copies of your messages, one per label, as it converts to folders. For a while I still had Gmail but used platforms Google didn't support with first-party apps, and I had a lot of pain points. (Gmail also likes to "archive" items [or remove that particular label] that you tell Gmail to "delete" via IMAP. It's annoying.)
FastMail does an excellent job hanging on real standards, and so supporting these Gmail-specific features requires that the standards themselves, support such things.
In the spec, they supercede IMAP folders with “keywords”, which are comparable to labels in Gmail.
“Users may add arbitrary keywords to an email. For compatibility with IMAP, a keyword is a (case-sensitive) string of 1–255 characters in the ASCII subset %x21–%x7e (excludes control chars and space), and MUST NOT include any of these characters: ( ) { ] % * " \”
Indeed, and as the case is "The data model is backwards compatible with both IMAP folders and gmail-style labels".
Even so, unless you have a wide multiplatform selection of JMAP-based apps which work properly with labels, you are better off with folders.
EDIT/Am at rate limit: I survived migrating from labels back to folders, and probably wouldn't start using multiple labels again, should they be available, until a point where it's a very common, well-supported standard behavior. No more proprietary nonsense for me.
It really is coming in JMAP! Come along to IETF in London to have a play, or I'll be pushing out links to updated JMAP Proxy in the next couple of weeks and you can play with it there :)
This was exactly what occurred to me. I haven't read the spec, but I presume they want to display AMP content pre-click.
As you pointed out, that violates user's expectations about what security vulnerabilities they are initiating when they open an email. Indeed, even lay users may sense that it just feels "wrong" for an email to act dynamically without anything being clicked.
Indeed. I can definitely see a reason one might want a dynamic experience in an email. I'd love to interact with some notifications without leaving my inbox. But that'd be select apps I want to work with, not something my email client should assume I want. Every marketing email I get shouldn't be an interactive page by any means.
I direct a lot of things to email like social notifications just so everything comes to one place. I end up doing a lot of bounces off to various sites to "respond" with a Like, +1, Retweet, etc.
But like, an interactive email should be a whitelisted opt-in behavior. "Hey, I want my Twitter notifs to be interactive so I can reply and retweet without leaving my email, so let me enable the Twitter app in my email client."
Everybody had a computer that could run any program, but used only their web browser, so they made the web browser pretend to be any program, but then everybody had a web browser that could run any program, but used only webmail, so they made webmail pretend to be any program? Where does that end?
Or are these ”engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences.” more limited than the current web applications? If so, what are their limitations?
Also, I guess all clicks in those experiences will go through Google’s servers.
> Also, I guess all clicks in those experiences will go through Google’s servers.
And therein lies the motivation. Why would all these Gmail users want to be clicking on web apps that aren't hosted on and monetized by Google, when they could be doing all these things inside Gmail?
Another thread here summarized it quite well. All these expensive engineers need to do something. If it ends that would mean most of the employees have no purpose anymore.
At Google, we feel email security is a top priority. That is why the new AMP-enabled GMail runs on a Go interpreter, in a walled Java-based virtual machine, inside Chrome, installed the OS of your choice.
> Also, I guess all clicks in those experiences will go through Google’s servers.
That's the main thing I mind.
Really, the UI of webmail clients suck. The point of computing is automatization; there's shit ton of things that could be better integrated with each other in search, e-mail, calendaring, etc. But for that to be good, you'd have to own that integration. When a third party owns it, you become slave to that third party.
> Also, I guess all clicks in those experiences will go through Google’s servers.
They already do, when I click a link in my GMail (Android) app, and it opens in Firefox (Android), I can sometimes quickly see a Google redirection URL flit by before loading the actual page. They basically did a similar shitty trick to what they did to the Search result pages, pretending to be direct links but inserting a tracking redirect at the onbeforeunclick event or such.
Hey, btw anyone know of a nice Firefox Add-on or something that rewrites/stops the Google Search result links from redirecting at the last moment? I've been meaning to code up something like that myself, but I bet it already exists (and I'm mostly using DDG these days any way).
With the expansion of AMP, it's crazy to think of Google more likely to undermine the health of the internet than the ISPs in a post net neutrality world.
It seems like HN has lost religion on open standards and freedom of user agents. If my MUA (which happens to be Gmail) can receive, interpret, and display a certain type of payload (which happens to be AMP), then good for me. It is nobody else's business what my MUA does with my messages.
As a marketer emails are really limited. This opens up possibility of higher engagement and less friction for what you want Gmail customers to do. I work for a loan company - get a rate quote IN YOUR EMAIL! Customer saves time and I just cut 2 steps out of our funnel.
The required coding and browser compatibility scare me a bit though. Nothing to piss off consumers than an email that doesnt work as promised.
As a fellow marketer, how will you feel if email, an incredibly high performing and cost effective (essentially free) channel, turns into a auction where you have to pay a dynamic price to get any reach similar to FB?
I see AMP as a stepping stone towards building a walled garden for the web. There's a lot of benefits, but definitely a loss of control and leverage for marketers in some ways.
My concern is that as Gmail diverges away from the rest of the email world, if a significant percentage of a business's users still use Gmail, they lose direct ownership of that relationship. The tabs were just the first step. I see AMP as potentially the second.
> I see AMP as a stepping stone towards building a walled garden for the web.
In what way? AMP is merely a subset of HTML that any mail client can implement.
> definitely a loss of control and leverage for marketers in some ways.
You still have to explain yourself on this point. It adds one more option for marketers in addition to the MIME types already supported. How does this cause marketers to lose control?
I think there will be very legitimate advantages to AMP for email. However as more and more marketers embrace it, that gives away leverage. It is a very gradual thing.
However much like the ad ecosystem, if Google can control the entire email experience from inbox to landing page, and marketers become dependent on it, then that allows Google to exert pressure in other areas that benefit it. My bet is that this eventually takes the form of an auction model for ensuring your messages reach the inbox of the users. But this is a very long-term thing, which is why I see AMP as merely a stepping stone (and not necessarily a direct one). Hope that clarifies a bit.
I'm not sure if this is a sarcastic comment or not. I don't want even more obnoxious emails from marketers. As someone else pointed out the only interactivity I want from email is unsubscribe. What you described is everything that's wrong with the internet and Google on particular. I don't want any needs marketers have to be part of decision making process for new web standards.
Cool, and as a user, I want every marketeer to be hanged and quartered </sarcasm> But really, marketing as a whole is broken.
Do you actually like watching advertising, and getting hundreds of spam and impossible-to-unsubscribe marketing emails every day?
If not, why do you think your users will?
There's nothing good in marketing. It doesn't help the ability of users to buy products (if the goal is that the user buys the best product for the lowest price, the best tool for that would be providing more independent comparable reviews, and better price comparison search), and it certainly doesn't help the user get to the content they want (which is not the ad).
The only reason users ever subscribe to marketing content are (a) to figure out when sales are, snd (b) coupons. Actually sell everything at a better price all year round, improve price comparison engines, and you won't need any of that anymore. The net benefit for society is negative.
As a user, screw you.
Sorry to be harsh, but the fact of the matter is the harder your life is, the easier my life becomes, no joke.
I dont want AMP. In fact, I want emails to go the other way. It already annoys me that email marketers can track whether i have read their email or not.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 549 ms ] threadI welcome Google's attempt at this - let the free market decide it's success
Also even if you believe in Santa Claus and free markets, people getting on their soapbox to say “this is a terrible idea” is part of the free market.
You'd be amazed at the number of initiatives launched by the supposed monopoly (Google) failing in the free market. Nacl lost out to wasm. Chrome OS never really took off.
Despite people's gripes about AMP, consumers are clearly loving faster, more responsive websites and hence it's relevance. Let this play out and we'll see where it leads
imagine thinking this was a killer counterpoint
Re: Amp, this topic always leads to people foaming at the mouth on HN. I don't expect to see much actual discussion occur.
I.e. say you worked on the gmail team, you really cared about users, you thought amp for email would be good for users, how would you go about making this happen in the world?
genuinely curious if its even possible for Google try and improve things without having some of the downsides you mentioned.
Hypothetically, you’d be making an assumption at odds with years of anti-consumer behavior.
If Google wants to improve email, I would start by emphatically recognizing why their previous attempt to supplant it with Wave failed, and stop trying to break email's openness,
Take Chrome's ad blocking... there's no way this can be ethically done by Google, even if blocking annoying ads definitively improves user experience. If Chrome was not owned by Google, it wouldn't be at issue, but it is owned by Google, and there's no way for Google to approach this topic. Googlers who care about this should push Google to split off Chrome into an independent foundation.
AMP is a way to push content to centralized platforms. Even if others run AMP caches (which are pointless because Google Search uses Google's cache, etc.), it pulls the Internet towards centralized cloud providers of which Google is one of the top three. And again we cross a huge self-interest issue.
If Google wanted to retain enough goodwill to even start to walk this back, they need to move back to open protocols. RSS (or a newer JSON equivalent), XMPP (or a newer equivalent), etc. And deal with all the mess that comes with true decentralized open standards. It's not like Google can't afford the additional difficulties. If their AI is as great as they claim (it's not, G+ porn spam is rampant), it shouldn't be hard for them to provide good experiences on open federated systems.
Want to run apps in emails? Great. Does the user want it? Can I decide which apps I want running inside my emails, based on what's useful for me?
Will the user get to pick whether their AMP emails are dynamic or not? Google+ notifications have a long history in Gmail of overwriting the display of the actual email with a live page, which can try to obscure the email's original content, like in the case of a deleted message. You'd have to use an IMAP client to see the content of the message that was actually sent to you.
The hypothetical tries to demonstrate that if Googlers are good, they would behave in a way that is indistinguishable from the behaviour you are seeing and attributing to evil.
Basically I find it very hard to believe that Googlers wake up in the morning and think how best they can screw over the internet to make a few more bucks for not themselves, but the company they work for. Maybe I'm an optimist.
And in turn everyone is trying to explain that individual intentions in the context of a large organization don’t really matter. The only meaningful choice the well intentioned have is to work for a different company. I couldn’t care less if a Google employee has good intentions, but is willing to hang them up for a paycheck.
> and was actually trying to make stuff better for users
Now, if we're talking about making communication between users better than yeah you need to go beyond email. E2E, open protocol, something like jmap (imap sucks), focus on privacy and interoperability, yada yada, so many better stuff to "fix" before trying to amplify my inbox and adding more rendering issues between platforms. Do you see a trend? You're now treading a thin line between chat apps, social networks, Android instant apps and glorified iframes. And introducing a whole new set of problems at the same time, not to mention the monumental effort required for something like this to keep backward compatibility (just so you can still call it email and use the superset). And getting the implementation right the very first time.
I too want the worst problems of using email to be solved but since nobody wants to adopt open protocols and work with each other (or eee the whole thing a year later), like history showed us time and time again, it won't happen. So again, let's at least no lose what we have now.
(Sorry I'm a little tired so my writing is bad)
Yeah, the free market is a good metric there...
On a more serious note, if the idea of AMP is so bad as many people attest. How is that the "bad idea" passed over so many people at a company that praises itself of hiring some of the most smartest people in the field? Hyperbole, the author of this article is just generalizing. Maybe AMP for email works for some people, making it a good idea for them.
AMP is good for Google, and secondarily maybe also good for some subset of people who care more about short-term benefits on slow connections than the long-term damage to the open web.
AMP for email is good for Google alone.
No, that's not what I am saying, please don't put words in my mouth.
My comment is divided in three parts: 1) sarcasm 2) question and 3) counter argument.
The sarcasm is already labelled.
The question is what you assumed was an affirmation.
The counter argument is, "AMP works for some people", you said "AMP for email is good for Google alone" which proves that my counter argument is true. AMP, bad or not, works for some people (in your comment, Google employees), which is what I originally wrote in my parent comment. I don't see what do I need to reconsider from this. There is also comments in this thread from people who say they like AMP, probing my statement even more: "it works for some people".
That formulation is disingenuous at best, and your follow-up describing it as a "question" is just as bad.
How is it that you think your comment was acceptable when so many people disagree at a website that praises itself for having some of the smartest commenters on the web?
I hope that helps demonstrate the dishonesty of a question of that format. No need to answer.
Maybe they don't actually hire the smartest people in the field, or maybe the smart people they hire do not have their users' best interests in mind.
This is probably the answer to my question.
I don't know why people got — kind of — "angry" for going against an article that goes against a project.
The fact that Google produced AMP played a nontrivial part in me rejecting their job offer - I didn't want my work to be judged by the engineering standards of an organization that continues to staff and promote AMP.
Maybe because they are oblivious to the big difference between being a good developer, being generally smart, and being a decent person? These really are entirely different things, and selecting for the former would not necessarily give you the latter. And I very much doubt that they were selecting for the last one at all lately. If ever.
I predict whatever Google launches will work in GMail, and GMail only.
Sure, other clients have their inconsistencies, but they’re nowhere near as bad as MSO, and they actually get fixed over time. Microsoft, on the other hand, persist in using a rather buggy engine from twenty years ago, unchanged (I don’t know that there haven’t been any functional changes or bug fixes since then, but if there have been they’re minor or obscure).
For a while in the late 90s / early 2000s we had RTF e-mail.
It seems almost comical. On the one hand, we are constantly told that email is losing out to modern instant messaging avenues for communication. On this hand, the plan for competing is to try and make it more heavy weight? Reminds me of when Wave supposedly was going to remake email.
I suspect someday I'll just be a luddite, as mentioned in another thread. I really hope this is not that day.
Whenever a service or company purports to make something "engaging" and "interactive" you just know that useability and actual, tangible usefulness are going to go out the window in favour of marketer-driven choices.
We don't 'engage more' with your software/service because you changed everything to optimise for engagement and time spent, we engaged more because it took more time/steps to get the same thing done.
Arguably what we should be doing is optimising for less time spent on an app/service for the purposes of enabling a better/more efficient/more enjoyable experience by letting users get what they want to do done quickly and easily.
I think it's a reasonable assumption that most people here are devs or interested in software/programming/etc. Marketers aren't going to be the ones who are actually interested in making better products, they're practically premature-optimisation-in-user-hostile-directions personified, so someone else has to at least propose these ideas.
...doubt it.
Was escalation as simple as "I would like to speak to a supervisor, please," or was there a more complicated incantation?
Verizon in particular is amazing in their priorities from an operational perspective are getting rid traditional phone business at all costs and spiting the CWA.
FTFY. I cannot wait for this cancer to die off. For now, I avoid anything by Google as much I can.
If they do wield a similar influence because of the market share of Gmail, hopefully somebody challenges that under antitrust or some other consumer protection basis. Email doesn't need walled gardens. That's back to the AOL days. "You've got AMP mail!"
I'm not holding my breath for something good to come out of this, though. This could just as easily be a terribly executed product. But I'll try to be an optimist, because what we have now is outright trash.
On the other hand, if HTML is excluded then the message gets through without scope for mischief.
If you're afraid of HTML, by all means please check your email from a sandboxed VM in the terminal. But some poor chump is still going to be toiling away to make the latest Pottery Barn newsletter look great on a Blackberry, so we'd might as well build better tools.
CSS can cause problems, too. @import could cause privacy issues, as could @font-face. If images are not pre-downloaded, @media and @page could reveal when you print a message and @supports could leak details about your mail client. `position: fixed` would need to be banned outright I'd think, if the message isn't sandboxed in an iframe.
HTML5 as a whole is designed for building applications, not for making pretty messages. You want to have a subset of HTML5, but not too strict of a subset. Some APIs (e.g., @font-face) probably can't be used as-is and need a replacement. And of course, it all needs to be somehow backwards-compatible.
* http://jdebp.eu./Proposals/gnksoa-mua.html#NoAutoFetchExtern...
For example, I would never use a centralized, proprietary platform for these services. Some folks don't care, but they may want it to work on <insert latest device fad here>. Even if it works on that device, it will likely need to comply with local regulations around the world, each with their own requirements.
If we (humans) can't even get a single, agree on unified service for something 'simple' like web search, what makes you think we'll ever converge on dozens of mediums/services/protocols?
For phone calls you have telephones, again hand me your phone number and I will call you.
Video is annoying, it would be nice to bypass Skype/Google Hangouts etc.
>It all comes down a simple but very dangerous shift: the major websites of today's web are not built for the visitor, but as means of using her. Our visitor has become a data point, a customer profile, a potential lead -- a proverbial fly in the spider's web. In the guise of user-centered design, we're building an increasingly user-hostile web.
I'm not 100% sure if it's a vanity metric for Google or not.
...Google does have some of the greatest statistical minds in the world, just maybe not the best product/UX minds.
KPI's can be highly misleading when it's disconnected from raw UX. It's difficult to measure user emotional experience, especially when you have a monopoly on user attention with Google Search and total product lock-in with Gmail. When users don't have alternative options analytics stats can be deceiving.
And just because a user completes X task a hundred milliseconds faster it doesn't necessarily mean the UX was better. And just because the UX was made incrementally worse doesn't mean I'm going to use Google/Gmail any less. But enough of small cuts can build up into a serious wound.
Ubiquitous banner ads, "free" 56k if you use our browser and click links, cookie bonanza, link hijacking etc... have been part of the web since day one.
No they haven't. I definitely remember the web before those were common, and it was great.
And while yes, the web was hostile back then, we also thought about it as hostile. There's been a definite shift in how the web is presented. Back then, we taught "Don't put anything personal online, it's all shady." But now, we want users to give us everything they can, and we've changed the language to allow it. "It's OK for you to give this data to us. We're Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc. There's no way we'd be irresponsible with that data"
It's not like we've come up with some new, super-secure way to store that data. The web is even more shady nowadays, but we're training users not to think about it that way.
Google has done a lot of exciting work on open standards like JSON-LD [0] and Microdata [1] to bring a better experience to both Google search results and Gmail. I love clicking the inline "Confirm subscription" button [2] instead of opening emails from Mailchimp and searching for a link. I'm not that scared of the future becoming locked into Google. I believe they'll improve upon and create better standards for emails. Most things aren't entirely altruistic, and that's OK. Gmail being an early adopter to these standards is a good enough reason for them.
[0]: https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/formats...
[1]: https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/formats...
[2]: https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/one-cli...
Maybe they’ve fixed the bizarre scrolling and overly sensitive links by now, but I see no reason to find out, because I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.
If I want to load a single page with dense content, view it without scrolling much, and close the tab, AMP makes my mobile experience better. If I want to do anything else, AMP on Android starts to interfere with basic functionality.
Which is a pretty sad story for a Google CDN on a Google browser on a Google OS.
Quick quiz: do you release a feature that is broken for 145M users, which brokenness they might plausibly encounter multiple times a day?
In a typical organization, the answer would probably be an unambiguous “no”.
Without passing judgment, I find the fact that Google decided to ship anyway to be a useful indicator of their beliefs, culture, and priorities.
It's the same for IE and web applications that didn't work in that browser. Luckily, people (for the most part) stopped using IE. We can only hope that iOS Safari will share that fate.
That said, it’s fair to ask why Apple hasn’t placed priority on the scrolling bug, post-AMP. What the real dynamics are I can only guess; I’d love to hear from lurking AMP or WebKit engineers.
All three of these are Google not taking into account mobile browser design. None of these can really be classified as issues in Safari, rather they are consequences of the Safari design and the design choices Google made.
The first two are due to the content being embedded within an iframe.
The scrolling issue was partly because Safari implemented custom scroll behavior (supposedly due to a Steve Jobs request) for its main web view, but scrollable iframes did not override the scrolling behavior. The fix here (I believe it was rolled out in iOS 11) was to change system-wide behavior for Safari to use the system default scrolling behavior, so that everything behaved the same.
The title bar issue is due to the content not being a scroll view, but a view the size of the screen containing one or more scroll views (the iframes). Which of these should be scrolled to the top on a tap? Changing this behavior could change it for deployed sites, so rolling out any sort of new heuristic requires testing and probably wouldn't be done outside a new major version (e.g. iOS 12).
The third issue is across all browsers - Google is the one serving the content, not the third party that wrote the content. Because of this, any attempt to change where the browser 'thinks' a page is being served to another domain runs afoul of pretty fundamental web security principles. You might be able to design some sort of call (similar to CORS) to ask if google is representing your content in order to get permission to forge the address, but that would be a new web standard that hasn't been written yet.
Definitely useful, though, why isn't that a feature in HTML5?
A WebKit engineer explained the scrolling bug and how they fixed it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14386292
> That said, it’s fair to ask why Apple hasn’t placed priority on the scrolling bug, post-AMP
Because Apple is incapable of fixing a browser bug without an OS update. You should be asking why Apple won't let you use a non-buggy browser on your phone to begin with.
Don't blame anybody else for your poor choices. If you choose to use IE 6 or iOS, don't cry if the world doesn't bend over to support your buggy platform. Work within the shrinking confinements of your platform.
As for other work on scrolling:
Person contracted to fix some webkit issues: http://frederic-wang.fr/amp-and-igalia-working-together-to-i...
HN discussion made some news about scrolling changes made due to AMP's bug reports: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/05/22/scrolling-changes-comin...
Plain HTML+CSS is hard to do?
Google has gone to an exceptional effort to make things not work like they do by default. That it's even more effort to now get basic UX back shows just how misguided the entire team is.
So feel free to call it names and bring up feelings, but what I care about is the actual objective experience I'm getting.
> I see no reason to find out, because I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.
The person was basically saying "I don't feel like checking how good AMP is, I'm just going to blindly dismiss it"
These days, I actively avoid AMP links on Android. It's such a hideously buggy, functionality-disabling system on my phone that it's not worth loading those pages at any speed.
Only if that doesn't work pleasantly, then you get to complain about the browser not doing its job properly. (this remark aimed at some other replies in this subthread)
It's probably not hard at all, it's just that Google's priorities are currently at "fuck you" especially if you try to avoid being tracked.
As a developer and a content creator? I absolutely hate it. Not only is my content hosted outside of my control but they give them a visual weighting in Google search results. So now, if I want my content to have the best chance to be seen, I have to use AMP.
I wish they would have just made AMP a framework or build system that out spit out optimized web pages. Instead they force us to use their CDN which also has multiple trust issues.
Better they completely faked dns/cert in some wat and presented me copied content from their amp cache. I don’t check sources anyway.
email works and doesn't need fixing. It (nearly) transports more messages every day than is countable and just works. SNR - now that needs fixing and a good start would be enforcing plain text.
Marketers want to make money, and right now stuffing emails with images in favor of proper layout is the only easy way to do it.
Of course google also wants all of your email googling its way through their servers.
That's a feature, not a bug.
There is already a Gmail placement for AdWords ok the GDN. However for the most part, if I as a marketer send emails to my customers, I can be more or less certain they will get delivered if my deliverability is high.
What I see Google doing here is gradually exerting control until they tell brands "hey, you know those messages you used to send to customers for basically free? Now you need to pay a dynamic price we control in order to get any "organic" reach."
And just like that they will have turned one of the most valuable, scalable and cost effective marketing channels into another large revenue stream for themselves that gives them even more leverage over marketers.
Kinds of genius when you think about it.
That's already happened with GMail, hasn't it? The filters for Promotion, Social, and of course Spam already control what/where users see (and it'd be trivial for Google to charge a fee here based off visibility of Promotion-categorized messages).
It's still in a linear and usually legible way, of course, and I think it's arguably user-friendly if imperfect. Doing what facebook does with feed/status updates with email would be absolutely ludicrous, it would make GMail a ghost town overnight.
I don't think introducing ads into the feed is as ludicrous as you say from a business standpoint. If done properly, I could see Google avoiding a mass exodus while simultaneously opening up more inventory for them. In some ways, I see Inbox as a test towards this vision.
My broader concern is a fundamental shift in the ownership of a customer/user relationship and the cost of reaching them. In today's world, you pay a fixed price for your ESP, and then some CPM rate for volume typically. Your costs are known, often negligible, and entirely under your control. Likewise, as long as you follow best email practices and nurture healthy relationships with those on your email lists, you have an expectation that your email will land in their inbox if they want to receive it.
That is similar to what FB had back in the day when someone Liked your brand page. If you posted, they would see it assuming they scrolled through their feed enough.
My fear is that Google will change that dynamic such that you cannot be guarantee to reach your audience (even if you have great deliverability) without entering into an auction and paying a constantly changing price that presumably will always increase as they maintain control as the new gatekeeper of that customer communication.
That is by design. Email is not an image viewer nor is it an HTML browser. It is a plain text medium.
It's an exaggerated version of the image-heavy email newsletters - these are obviously nice for the marketer, but the messages that I want to receive are not like that, they don't need this feature, it's only useful for those who want to steal my attention.
If marketers really need it, perhaps it could be a useful way to automatically forward any messages using this technology to spam.
Somehow I expect that GMail's search box will get a "usesAMP:yes" or "content:AMP" filter or something. It has a lot of filter keywords like this[0], undoubtedly they'll add it.
You can easily add a filter rule to automatically mark all messages matching a filter as "spam".
If enough people do that, they might get the message. (and probably just remove the search filter option, sigh)
[0] come to think of it, GMail's search is a delight exactly because almost still kind of works like how Google Web Search used to work back when it was still good, a mere decade ago ...
Also, technology companies have a real problem assigning appropriate value to maintenance tasks that just keep things stable and usable. I’ve had infrastructure responsibilities over the years and the hardest thing about it was that nobody really knows or cares how much trouble you put into having things work flawlessly for months or years on end. It was important to find lots of visible tasks to go along with the invisible ones. I guess you end up with things like 40 Google chat clients and “hey let’s screw with E-mail” when there isn’t enough promotion-worthy work left to do in those areas.
Anyway, I prefer my email to remain immutable after initial transmission. I don't need another Snapbookthingie...
Which reminds me, Google: You already hosed search results with your first... or second, or third, buzzzzzz... big social, dynamic (comments) push, Plus.
And almost nobody liked Buzz, nor the way you tried to shove it down our throats.
Are you really going to take another stab at sabotaging one of your successful products -- this time, Gmail?
You HAD a successful social platform: Reader. And you nuked it.
You want "social" and "changing content"? Bring back Reader.
Buy a clue.
It was probably the single best social thing I’ve ever used. It was unique as it was actually social. Both my teams at work and family/friends used it as a way to comment on news and share stuff of interest. It was also a product of an earlier era where there was excitement over anything Google released.
Google+ tried to capture many of the good parts of reader... but it was too forced.
AMP has gotten me to finally switch to Duck Duck Go. Gmail is too difficult to leave, but AMP for gmail may finally get me over the edge.
Still wish there was an rss reader as good as G. Reader.
But we can't blast you with ads via Reader. What's the point of that?
its pretty easy to parse the content of an rss/atom feed and show targeted ads.
So everything is at cdn.example.com and if I change providers, it's just a dns record change and everything is ready, even if I want to just host my own content.
In theory, the maximum benefit of a CDN only comes if everyone is on 1) the same version or, similar but different, 2) an evergreen version. And the latter is a big red neon sign screaming "DANGER".
It sort of/kind of started with jQuery, and in those days including jQuery was considered somewhat bloaty. I think it was about 18kB minified back then? Today their site says it's 30kB.
Either way that's miniscule compared to having a few pictures on your webpage. Having much more JS than that, honestly seems like true bloat to me, which I don't think CDNs should facilitate anyway (so much untrusted unknown unchecked code doing very, very filthy things).
My point is, it wasn't a very good argument back then either, but it became normal because people did it for other reasons, too.
The main reason people did it, was that it was just so much easier. Just copypaste those 1.5 lines of code in your <HEAD> section to include the latest version of jQuery from Google's CDN, instead of downloading it and putting it somewhere in your source tree and now you've got to keep track that different parts of your codebase written months apart don't accidentally use slightly different versions (because it's ugly, not because it mattered a lot otherwise), etc.
Such convenience!
And if someone asked if it was really a good idea to blindly load 3rd party code and run it in the context of your own domain? Even I told people this sometimes: Well if you can't trust Google serving you secure code, then the web is basically fucked anyway, and we got much bigger problems. Which seemed like a reasonable threat model / security trade off at the time.
And now we're here.
About a week ago Google got caught hosting hostile ads that included cryptocoin miners inefficiently wasting users' electricity for a few bucks (profit insignificant compared to the cost of energy wasted). And apparently Google's offering to blindly host 3rd party JS to all users on the entire Internet everywhere (except the adblockerati), via their fucking ad network, has been expected behaviour for over a year at least and nobody gave a peep when that malfeature appeared.
I still don't know the exact date when or if there even was an announcement when they allowed advertisers "sure do whatever you like to their browsers, run some code, compute stuff, track them in all the ways we haven't dared to deploy publicly, or yet thought of, have at it, you need this, you do you".
So yeah, the web is fucked, we got bigger problems and hell no you can't trust Google any more.
A visitor can decide to not display images to improve performance and this will not break the website, blocking the (often not useful) js on the other hand...
> And if someone asked if it was really a good idea to blindly load 3rd party code and run it in the context of your own domain? Even I told people this sometimes: Well if you can't trust Google serving you secure code,
You overlooked the privacy and personal data issue here. It's a bad idea to rely on anything google because it means that you give away the privacy of your visitor to one of the worst offender no less.
> About a week ago Google got caught hosting hostile ads ...
Google has been delivering malware, spyware and that kind of things for years. It was even considered a major vector of infection (usually someone looked for flash on google and clicked on the first results which happened to be a google ad for an infected flash installer)
Good luck updating a site that used the latest and greatest build tools that are now depricated.
Fun thing: a lot of times I download the Javascript from a CDN because then I don't need build tools because it was already built for me on the CDN...
People focus too much on ship fast.
They get in trouble when the product becomes a success.
If you are an e-commerce site serving hundreds of images worldwide then CDNs make a tonne of sense.
If you just have a simple site or SaaS getting decent traffic, why add a failure point by including your choosen JS with a CDN. No one batts an eyelid when you add ten images to the homepage but somehow a single, much smaller JS file is too much extra load. It doesn't stand up to reason.
FastMail does an excellent job hanging on real standards, and so supporting these Gmail-specific features requires that the standards themselves, support such things.
http://jmap.io/
In the spec, they supercede IMAP folders with “keywords”, which are comparable to labels in Gmail.
“Users may add arbitrary keywords to an email. For compatibility with IMAP, a keyword is a (case-sensitive) string of 1–255 characters in the ASCII subset %x21–%x7e (excludes control chars and space), and MUST NOT include any of these characters: ( ) { ] % * " \”
Even so, unless you have a wide multiplatform selection of JMAP-based apps which work properly with labels, you are better off with folders.
EDIT/Am at rate limit: I survived migrating from labels back to folders, and probably wouldn't start using multiple labels again, should they be available, until a point where it's a very common, well-supported standard behavior. No more proprietary nonsense for me.
EDIT: Understandable! Safe travels on the path to owning your data!
- user receives email with a link (text or image) that points to some AMP page
- user clicks on the link
Gmail: - renders the AMP page in-place, replacing email content
Non-gmail clients: - keep whatever "link click" behavior they currently have
This does not render interactive content in email automatically and requires a click, but that click is important because it
- signals the user's desire to interact with the content
- follows current email security expectations, e.g. does not load third party content (other than images) just by viewing the email
As you pointed out, that violates user's expectations about what security vulnerabilities they are initiating when they open an email. Indeed, even lay users may sense that it just feels "wrong" for an email to act dynamically without anything being clicked.
I direct a lot of things to email like social notifications just so everything comes to one place. I end up doing a lot of bounces off to various sites to "respond" with a Like, +1, Retweet, etc.
But like, an interactive email should be a whitelisted opt-in behavior. "Hey, I want my Twitter notifs to be interactive so I can reply and retweet without leaving my email, so let me enable the Twitter app in my email client."
Or are these ”engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences.” more limited than the current web applications? If so, what are their limitations?
Also, I guess all clicks in those experiences will go through Google’s servers.
And therein lies the motivation. Why would all these Gmail users want to be clicking on web apps that aren't hosted on and monetized by Google, when they could be doing all these things inside Gmail?
'Click here to download Thunderbird' is what my mind inserts after reading that.
That's the main thing I mind.
Really, the UI of webmail clients suck. The point of computing is automatization; there's shit ton of things that could be better integrated with each other in search, e-mail, calendaring, etc. But for that to be good, you'd have to own that integration. When a third party owns it, you become slave to that third party.
They already do, when I click a link in my GMail (Android) app, and it opens in Firefox (Android), I can sometimes quickly see a Google redirection URL flit by before loading the actual page. They basically did a similar shitty trick to what they did to the Search result pages, pretending to be direct links but inserting a tracking redirect at the onbeforeunclick event or such.
Hey, btw anyone know of a nice Firefox Add-on or something that rewrites/stops the Google Search result links from redirecting at the last moment? I've been meaning to code up something like that myself, but I bet it already exists (and I'm mostly using DDG these days any way).
LO
As a marketer emails are really limited. This opens up possibility of higher engagement and less friction for what you want Gmail customers to do. I work for a loan company - get a rate quote IN YOUR EMAIL! Customer saves time and I just cut 2 steps out of our funnel.
The required coding and browser compatibility scare me a bit though. Nothing to piss off consumers than an email that doesnt work as promised.
My fear is this is where this is heading.
My concern is that as Gmail diverges away from the rest of the email world, if a significant percentage of a business's users still use Gmail, they lose direct ownership of that relationship. The tabs were just the first step. I see AMP as potentially the second.
In what way? AMP is merely a subset of HTML that any mail client can implement.
> definitely a loss of control and leverage for marketers in some ways.
You still have to explain yourself on this point. It adds one more option for marketers in addition to the MIME types already supported. How does this cause marketers to lose control?
However much like the ad ecosystem, if Google can control the entire email experience from inbox to landing page, and marketers become dependent on it, then that allows Google to exert pressure in other areas that benefit it. My bet is that this eventually takes the form of an auction model for ensuring your messages reach the inbox of the users. But this is a very long-term thing, which is why I see AMP as merely a stepping stone (and not necessarily a direct one). Hope that clarifies a bit.
Do you actually like watching advertising, and getting hundreds of spam and impossible-to-unsubscribe marketing emails every day?
If not, why do you think your users will?
There's nothing good in marketing. It doesn't help the ability of users to buy products (if the goal is that the user buys the best product for the lowest price, the best tool for that would be providing more independent comparable reviews, and better price comparison search), and it certainly doesn't help the user get to the content they want (which is not the ad).
The only reason users ever subscribe to marketing content are (a) to figure out when sales are, snd (b) coupons. Actually sell everything at a better price all year round, improve price comparison engines, and you won't need any of that anymore. The net benefit for society is negative.
I think they clearly know that users hate advertising but this is not their concern, more important is if the advertising increase the sales/profit.
You have to see it from their point of view.
I hate advertisement too but if I'm a marketer I would gladly spam users all day long if it works.
Everything exists solely to serve society.
Something that does not provide a benefit for the users, should not be allowed. That simple.
I dont want AMP. In fact, I want emails to go the other way. It already annoys me that email marketers can track whether i have read their email or not.
This is a feature, not a bug.
What is currently stopping you from sending rate quotes in email nowadays? AFAICT, rate quotes are able to be represented via plaintext.