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2B Pages On Web Now Use Google's AMP, Pages Now Load Twice As Fast (venturebeat.com)

Posted by msmash on from the making-web-faster dept.

At its developer conference I/O 2017 this week, Google also shared an update on its fast-loading Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). The company says that over 900,000 domains on the web have enabled AMP, and over two billion pages now load faster because of it. Taking things forward, Google says AMP access from Google Search is now twice as fast. From a report: Google first unveiled the open source AMP Project in October 2015. Since then, the company has been working hard to add new features and push AMP across not just its own products, but the larger web. Google Search only launched AMP support out of developer preview in September 2016. Eight months later, Google has already cut the time it takes to render content in half. The company explains that this is possible due to several key optimizations made to the Google AMP Cache. These include server-side rendering of AMP components and reducing bandwidth usage from images by 50 percent without affecting the perceived quality. Also helpful was the Brotli compression algorithm, which made it possible to reduce document size by an additional 10 percent in supported browsers (even Edge uses it). Google open-sourced Brotli in September 2015 and considers it a successor to the Zopfli algorithm.

60 comments

  1. No Thanks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    AMP? No thanks. I already have APK and his hosts files in my life speedifing all my intertubes. Zoom zoom zoom!

  2. Twice as fast? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I think you mean "half as slow".

    1. Re:Twice as fast? by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      1) Use Brandybrand(TM)
      2) ...
      3) Twice as fast!

      Who knows what we signed away, but I feel so much more Branded now.

  3. Great by Opportunist · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Twice the spam and half as much time to notice that there is zero content but the top 10 will BLOW YOUR MIND!

    I'd gladly wait again to actually get what I am looking for instead of having to click through 20 pages of rubbish only to find out in the end that I got tricked into going to a page that offers anything but what I wanted.

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    1. Re:Great by LordWabbit2 · · Score: 1

      WTF are you talking about? With or without AMP you are going to get that shit, stop going to the fucking sites if it bugs you. It's like going to a porn site and then complaining about all the porn.

      --
      There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
    2. Re:Great by omnichad · · Score: 1

      So far I've noticed that sites using AMP have fewer as and less clutter.

      The only problem I've come across is no easy way to get to the real source URL if I want to see the full page or view comments. Google is trying to erect a walled garden here where is unwanted.

    3. Re:Great by sabri · · Score: 1

      With or without AMP you are going to get that shit

      Not true. My adblock is not nearly as effective on AMP accelerated pages. AMP should stand for Ad & Malware Pushing.

      --
      I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
    4. Re: Great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      On Android just hold down the title bar and it's copied into the clipboard

    5. Re: Great by omnichad · · Score: 1

      Good for me if I can remember it, but it's hardly discoverable - bad UI design.

    6. Re: Great by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 1

      Solution: improve your ad blocker.

      Seriously, if AMP really makes it that easy to sidestep your ad blocker, then web admins everywhere would use similar technique with or without AMP.

      So with that in mind, it's basically obligatory to improve the ad blocker.

  4. Negative effect on SEO by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Say bye-bye to brand/domain authority

    1. Re:Negative effect on SEO by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Unfortunate that Google is controlling it, but SEO is a scam and always has been. Good riddance.

  5. Google Sponsored by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The Register posts this today, and now Slashdot has the rebuttal.
    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider_google_amp_bad_bad_bad/

    1. Re:Google Sponsored by sexconker · · Score: 1

      I'm not going to bother visiting your link, but that's because I already agree with it. AMP is trash and is incredibly frustrating from an end-user's point of view.

  6. Pretty much same improvement as a good ad blocker by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Seems like an ad blocker should be able to bring similar improvements these days ...

    In fact, if we could get ad blockers to also eliminate links that include strings like this, we'd be even FASTER.

    You'll never believe what happens next

    number 7 will melt your heart

    you'll plotz when you see #3

  7. An alternative view from The Register by cs96and · · Score: 5, Informative
    Kill Google AMP before it KILLS the web

    https://www.theregister.co.uk/...

    1. Re:An alternative view from The Register by mujadaddy · · Score: 2

      Yeah, this article fleshes out my feelings pretty well; I've commented previously almost this exact sentiment:

      Google AMP is only good for one party: Google.

      And if you require a little more context,

      What it is, is a way for Google to obfuscate your website, usurp your content and remove any lingering notions of personal credibility from the web. Google AMP is a Google project designed such that you must restrict your layout options, forgo sending visitors to your website and accept whatever analytics data Google is willing to share. (Emphasis added)

      I'd like to say there's a reckoning coming, but that's wishful thinking with the direction the 'net has gone.

      --
      Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
      "Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
    2. Re:An alternative view from The Register by GuB-42 · · Score: 1

      I don't understand what it so bad about AMP?
      It looks like just another framework. In the end it is just a HTML document with a big .js blob that does stuff. Still standards-compliant. You are free to use it or not, or pick the parts that are interesting to you.
      You may be required to follow some rules in order to use Google's proxy service but you are not forced to use it.

      Seeing how things go on the web, AMP will soon be deprecated. Perhaps with something that support gigabyte-sized minimalist pages better.

    3. Re:An alternative view from The Register by sexconker · · Score: 4, Informative

      I don't understand what it so bad about AMP?
      It looks like just another framework. In the end it is just a HTML document with a big .js blob that does stuff. Still standards-compliant. You are free to use it or not, or pick the parts that are interesting to you.
      You may be required to follow some rules in order to use Google's proxy service but you are not forced to use it.

      Seeing how things go on the web, AMP will soon be deprecated. Perhaps with something that support gigabyte-sized minimalist pages better.

      It's a subset of HTML, plus new shit Google threw in (so not standards compliant) and a big ol' feed back to Google.
      Ultimately, a user sees "AMP" content as a fucking compressed image hosted by Google and devoid of any reference to the original source. When a user wants to interact with it, there's a delay as the page is actually loaded and rendered (as opposed to the shitty jpg), and Google gets all the info of what users do on that page, not the actual author. I believe Google did recently update Chrome on Android to allow people to go to the actual source when viewing an AMP page, but no user is going to bother.

      If you have a webpage, and you AMPify it, Google will prefer to show the AMP version in search listings.
      When a user stumbles upon it, they'll see a jpg served by Google. If they try to interact with it, Google serves up your AMP page directly. Users don't see the source URL unless they jump through hoops, and you don't see visitors unless you plug in to Google's shitty reporting. Of course, Google gets more data. Lots more.

    4. Re:An alternative view from The Register by omnichad · · Score: 2

      You're putting your content inside their walled garden and losing autonomy. The bandwidth savings is only a side effect at best.

    5. Re: An alternative view from The Register by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Definite "autonomy" and how it's lost exactly.

    6. Re: An alternative view from The Register by omnichad · · Score: 1

      They're not on your site. They can't click to get to other pages of your site. The only visible navigation takes them back to Google. You have no control over your own web site when displayed via AMP.

    7. Re:An alternative view from The Register by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Google's AMP proxy is not presenting a picture of the site... it's presenting a cached copy of the site. The AMP format restricts the site's HTML usage such that they can get away with that, by forcing the use of absolute URLs (or base href), inline CSS, etc.

    8. Re: An alternative view from The Register by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 1

      You can use the AMP framework without involving Google.

    9. Re: An alternative view from The Register by omnichad · · Score: 1

      The AMP framework hands the content over to Google to cache. They don't send visitors to your site from the SERP. You're effectively involving Google whether you want to or not.

  8. anti trust by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    between AMP, Ad Sense, and Chrome native ad blocking, how is google going to avoid MS style anti trust?

    1. Re: anti trust by billybiro · · Score: 1

      Same way any big org avoids it. "Lobby" the government with $$$

    2. Re:anti trust by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      The same was as MS, they make sure to make enough off of their rules violations to exceed the future cost of penalties.

  9. If you're a developer and you implemented AMP... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    You are a cancer on the www.

  10. Not faster for me by RDW · · Score: 1

    I use Opera on my Android phone. Apart from having its own (optional) 'acceleration' using Opera's own servers, it's one of the few mainstream browsers on Android that does text reflow (word wrapping) when I zoom in to enlarge the text (most other browsers use WebKit, which no longer supports this). But following a link from a Google search, I get the AMP version of the page, which totally breaks text reflow. I need a couple more taps to get the original version of the page from Google's link bar, which takes much longer than if I'd been served the real page in the first place.

    1. Re:Not faster for me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Didn't Opera switch to WebKit about two or three years ago? How old is the browser you are using.

  11. My recent browser is huge and slow. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    My big problem with the recent browser is that does boot and load too
    slow due to hundreds of megabytes in disk and memory.

    I don't know what is the shitpile of programmed code of this browser.

    5 years ago, it was tens of MBs instead hundreds of MBs of today.

    1. Re:My recent browser is huge and slow. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sorry, but if you want all the tracking and premium targeted advertising experiences you get with the modern web, you have to suffer through loading 200 javascript sources. The best things in life aren't free, you know.

  12. Everybody wants all the content for themselves by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Facebook wants to show the news without the users ever leaving Facebook. Archive.org ignores robots.txt and just hosts everything. Google moves search engine results to their own servers with AMP. Take your grubby fingers off my content, you slimy aggregators! Come up with something yourself if you need more stuff to glue eyeballs to your sites!

  13. Headline parsing error by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    It took me forever to try to figure out what the headline was saying. Is that 2B some mistake for "28"? No, that doesn't seem like a very big number. Is there a website that I don't know about called "2B pages on the web"? A google search only comes up with this article. What the hell could 2B mean?

    TWO BILLION!!!! Why is that so hard to type?

    1. Re:Headline parsing error by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I thought it was referring to articles written with a 2B pencil.

    2. Re:Headline parsing error by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I saw 2B in the headline and thought god damn this Nier Automata stuff is going too far. Google, now powered by actual androids! ... androids with swords and booty for days.

    3. Re:Headline parsing error by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Especially on a tech site; we could simply use 2E9, one more character and all ambiguity is resolved.

  14. ERROR: Headline too long by tepples · · Score: 1

    Headlines are limited in length. Abbreviating "2 Billion" to "2B" saves seven characters that can be used elsewhere. Otherwise, the headline gets chopped off:

    2B Pages On Web Now Use Google's AMP, Pages Now Load Twice As Fast
    2 Billion Pages On Web Now Use Google's AMP, Pages Now Load Twice

    It's the same reason Slashdot users use "M$" in comment subjects: to save seven characters off "Microsoft" while recalling Microsoft's history as a publisher of BASIC interpreters.

    10 M$ = "Microsoft"
    20 PRINT M$;" introduces Edge"

  15. 2B or 28? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I honestly read the title as "28 Pages on Web Now Use Google AMP."

    1. Re:2B or 28? by omnichad · · Score: 1

      2B or not 2B, that isn't really the question.

  16. How ironic. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I've only ever had problems with Google webpages.
    Remember when Gmail used to be SUPER FAST ULTRA HYPER LOADING deluxe?
    On a similar machine today, it is sluggish as fuck. (even with the SAME browser, I tested that too)

    But why is it slower?
    Enclosures. DEEP enclosures more importantly.
    Enclosing your code behind layers of wrapper functions is considered the hot new meme of web development today.
    Problem is, EVERY SINGLE JS engine sucks hard at working with this sort of JS.
    Deep enclosure layers add considerable overhead to JS. Every layer you go deeper, the overhead increases.
    This is why libraries like jQuery and such were all slow, because their code was hidden behind generic accessors, which were all wrapped up in deep enclosures and inheritance to boot, talk about slow on top of slow.
    Put simply, JavaScript is incapable of delivering this sort of use-case properly.
    Worse yet, for some reason people think this actually makes it easier to work with. I... fuck knows what sort of broken brains they have, any time I look at such heavily wrapped JS, it looks terrible. JS is trivial to understand, shit wrapped behind 20 different wrapper languages looks like text vomit. It's as bad as those retards that do all kinds of code-olympics to avoid using GOTO or [insert the new hot hate-meme of the decade]. (I think people hated IF last decade, not sure what this decade of retard-children hate)

    This is why Google Wave died. It was created right at the beginning of this shit meme of everyone enclosing code behind so many wrappers.
    It was hilariously slow because of this.
    And on top of that, it also had a fuckton of event handler abuse everywhere. (another common abuse these days, especially ad trackers that monitor site interaction on TIMERS instead of events)
    Being so slow, people quickly left it. All that was left were shitposters and technophiles that love new things for the sake of things. They DID manage to optimize some of the site by refactoring the shitcode it was, but it was already too late.

    Web development truly is a cancerous place to be today.
    I'm glad I got out.

    1. Re:How ironic. by green1 · · Score: 2

      This is exactly the situation.

      The real issue on the web is unnecessary code. Far too often if you look at the code for a simple paragraph of text, it's thousands of lines long, and most of those lines are there to make the rendering worse. For example, the millions of sites that only let you read text on the middle third of your monitor with huge empty fields on both sides, the ones that won't let you resize things on your mobile phone to make them easier to read, the ones that assume that every person on the planet is using the same identical monitor that the developer used and everyone else can scroll in every direction, and the absolute worst breed on the web, those that think people on mobile phones want a different website than if they were in front of a computer.

      I had an argument with my boss the other day because he wanted me to make a page "responsive" by hardcoding percentages and pixel widths in to every part of the content, I challenged him to find me a device that wasn't displaying the page well as it was with the existing site that had none of that garbage. He couldn't. Not only is it easier to write without all the arbitrary limitations, it works better on more devices, and the page sizes are less than half so bandwidth and load times are both down.

      You don't need thousands of lines of script to display raw text. Pick a font and a colour, then write the text, it's that simple.

      For all the "advances" in the web, the vast majority of the content would benefit by being taken back to before all the fancy additions were added to the standards, and leave all the scripting for content that actually needs it (which is really few and far between)

  17. ... and a partridge in a pear tree! by jtara · · Score: 1

    How much does this really help, though, when the typical site is bloated with:

    • 12 tracker bugs
    • 11 broken image links
    • 10 unused scripts
    • 9 scaled images
    • 8 synchronous Ajax calls
    • 7 redundant tracking scripts
    • 6 ad networks
    • 5 verrrrrrrsions of jQuery!
    • 4 social media scripts
    • 3 UI frameworks
    • 2 Wordpress themes
  18. Do Not Want. by fortfive · · Score: 1

    The interface really stinks, makes it hard to share posts. Speed increase not worth it.

    Most sites have a web optimized version that's plenty fast.

    1. Re:Do Not Want. by omnichad · · Score: 1

      Most sites have a web optimized version

      On the web, some would even view this as mandatory.

  19. Yet another reason to drop Chrome on mobile by junk · · Score: 1

    The horrible UX provided by AMP is the number one reason I started looking at other browsers on mobile. I believe they made changes to make it less horrible but I never once landed on an AMP page and thought, "What a great layout! I'm glad the removed all the visual cues from the site I was trying to visit!" I moved over to Brave. It has some rough edges but it renders things correctly and I don't feel like someone's trying to force their bad personal design decisions on me.

  20. Glad you like it: Does more for less natively by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    100% free & combined w/ script stalling you FLY via APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-7 32/64-bit https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=&bih=&q=%22APK+Hosts+File+Engine%22+and+%22start64%22&btnG=Google+Search&gbv=1/

    Ads/script & malware rob speed/security/privacy

    Hosts add speed (via hardcodes/adblocks), security (vs. bad sites/malware/poisoned dns), reliability (vs. dns down), & anonymity (vs. dns requestlogs/trackers).

    Less power/cpu/ram + IO use vs. DNS/routers/addons/antivirus + less security bugs/complexity & faster vs. addons/routers/remote dns!

    Avoids DNSChangers in routers/IP settings & dns redirects (99.999% of ISP DNS != patched vs. it) + lightens DNS load & resolves faster from local system RAM!

    * Via what u NATIVELY have in the IP stack in FASTER kernelmode!

    APK

    P.S. - Safe https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/e01211ca36aa02e923f20adee0a3c4f5d5187dc65bdf1c997b3da3c2b0745425/analysis/1433430542/

    1. Re: Glad you like it: Does more for less natively by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 1

      Big hosts files are slow.

  21. The thing that replaced useful links by jheath314 · · Score: 1

    My first impression of AMP was "the thing that suddenly replaced usable links with garbage so broken I couldn't even scroll down to the body of the text I wanted to read."

    Thankfully that has been fixed, but talk about a lousy first impression.

    --
    Procrastination Man strikes again!
  22. Fuck amp - I always avoid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If your page is on Amp, I will not visit it.

  23. I've only had negative experiences with AMP by Archarzel · · Score: 1

    Admittedly my android phone is about 2 years old now, and not a top-end model, but AMP has given me nothing but trouble. From images loading unevenly and causing my screen to jump, unresponsive pages, images/videos cut off and unable to resize (and all the full screen buttons being exclusively on the right side doesnt help) There will be occasional problems like this elsewhere of course, but its so constant a problem that I've been actively avoiding AMP links and more than once have gone to a different search engine or attempted to go to the root site and search from there. Tl;dr: still needs a lot of work.

  24. But not Slashdot! by SoftwareArtist · · Score: 1

    Maybe Slashdot could use a bit of this. It's the most amazingly painful site when I load it on my phone. The page appears, and then I have to wait for ten seconds while it keeps jumping around before I can start reading. Every time it finishes loading another ad the whole page reformats. That's the sort of garbage AMP is meant to fix.

    --
    "I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
    1. Re:But not Slashdot! by reboot246 · · Score: 1

      It's worse on a laptop or desktop. Half the damned screen is white. If there are a lot of replies to a post, the sentences are spread over a couple of dozen lines with each line having one or two words. It's nearly impossible to read. Who did this? Find them and kill them.

      My desktop has a 24" monitor, but for slashdot I could very well use a 2" monitor.

  25. AMP could be good by allo · · Score: 1

    Implement it as a simple subset of HTML, a meta-tag and http-header (choose one for your site) to indicate its a amp site. Skip the part with javascript crap, especially skip the part of javascript-crap forced from the google-cdn.
    Now everyone can implement in their browsers, newsreaders, whatever a amp-parser, which can parse AMP-HTML really really fast. Further, simple html WITHOUT javascript, with basic inline css and a limit how big images may be (else the amp-browser stops loading) will have really fast transfer times as well.

    But no, let's make it google crap and fuck the rest of the world.

  26. Slow? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    See subject: On PC's they're faster vs. adblock http://superuser.com/questions/686041/which-leads-to-faster-browsing-an-ad-blocker-or-an-edited-hosts-file/

    APK

    P.S.=> Anecdotal bs from UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous trolls != facts shown above... apk

    1. Re:Slow? by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 1

      APK Hosts File Engine is slow.

  27. APK Hosts File Engine works... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

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    his hosts program is actually pretty good by xenotransplant

    his hosts tool is actually useful for those cases in which one does indeed want to locally block stuff outright while consuming minimum system resources by alexgieg

    (APK's) work, I've flat out said it's good by BronsCon

    I've tried his hosts file generating software. It works by bmo

    I like your host file system by Karmashock

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    * It's recommended & hosted by Malwarebytes' hpHosts!

    APK

    P.S.=> See subject: ... Perfectly every time bugfree & bulletproof ACCURATE TO A FAULT output via multithreaded virusproof self-checking SINGLE .exe (no 3rd party libs beyond NTAPI) uncrashable program protecting hosts beyond Windows' WFP/SFP (that speeds you up & secures you simultaneously (only one that does))... apk

    1. Re:APK Hosts File Engine works... by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 1

      These are plants.

  28. Don't make THAT mistake... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

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    * What do you mean by "plants"?

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    APK

    P.S.=> They're real registered /.'ers (some of whom don't even get along w/ me well but @ least they're honest)... apk