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Should Webmasters Resist Google's Push For AMP Pages? (polemicdigital.com)
"Have you heard of Google AMP? That stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, and it's a way of making webpages so that they load faster and display more efficiently on mobile devices. Oh, and it puts your website under Google's control."
That's Mac Observer co-founder Bryan Chaffin, linking to an "interesting reading" titled "Google AMP Can Go To Hell." AMP allows Google to basically take over hosting the web as well. The Google AMP Cache will serve AMP pages instead of a website's own hosting environment, and also allow Google to perform their own optimisations to further enhance user experience. As a side benefit, it also allows Google full control over content monetisation. No more rogue ad networks, no more malicious ads, all monetisation approved and regulated by Google. If anything happens that falls outside of the AMP standard's restrictions, the page in question simply becomes AMP-invalid and is ejected from the AMP cache -- and subsequently from Google's results. At that point the page might as well not exist any more....
The easy thing to do is to simply obey. Do what Google says. Accept their proclamations and jump when they tell you to. Or you could fight back. You could tell them to stuff it, and find ways to undermine their dominance. Use a different search engine, and convince your friends and family to do the same. Write to your elected officials and ask them to investigate Google's monopoly. Stop using the Chrome browser. Ditch your Android phone. Turn off Google's tracking of your every move. And, for goodness sake, disable AMP on your website.
Don't feed the monster -- fight it.
Here's how web developer Macieg Ceeglowski put it in 2015. "Out of an abundance of love for the mobile web, Google has volunteered to run the infrastructure, especially the user tracking parts of it." But are these assessments too harsh? Leave your own thoughts in the comment.
Should webmasters resist Google's push for AMP pages?
That's Mac Observer co-founder Bryan Chaffin, linking to an "interesting reading" titled "Google AMP Can Go To Hell." AMP allows Google to basically take over hosting the web as well. The Google AMP Cache will serve AMP pages instead of a website's own hosting environment, and also allow Google to perform their own optimisations to further enhance user experience. As a side benefit, it also allows Google full control over content monetisation. No more rogue ad networks, no more malicious ads, all monetisation approved and regulated by Google. If anything happens that falls outside of the AMP standard's restrictions, the page in question simply becomes AMP-invalid and is ejected from the AMP cache -- and subsequently from Google's results. At that point the page might as well not exist any more....
The easy thing to do is to simply obey. Do what Google says. Accept their proclamations and jump when they tell you to. Or you could fight back. You could tell them to stuff it, and find ways to undermine their dominance. Use a different search engine, and convince your friends and family to do the same. Write to your elected officials and ask them to investigate Google's monopoly. Stop using the Chrome browser. Ditch your Android phone. Turn off Google's tracking of your every move. And, for goodness sake, disable AMP on your website.
Don't feed the monster -- fight it.
Here's how web developer Macieg Ceeglowski put it in 2015. "Out of an abundance of love for the mobile web, Google has volunteered to run the infrastructure, especially the user tracking parts of it." But are these assessments too harsh? Leave your own thoughts in the comment.
Should webmasters resist Google's push for AMP pages?
And their font servers. And Google Analytics. And their "free" dns. Fuck Google tracking everything everyone does online.
Don't know about you guys but 99% of the time on my phone I'm using the desktop version of a page. I hate mobile site design with its tons of empty space and enormous fonts.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Betteridge be damned.
#DeleteChrome
Something should be done about this. Anyone ask Google what their thoughts are?
AFAICT, most web properties which would even consider using AMP in the first place have never seen a JavaScript tracking framework they didn't like. Oh, LardScript Analytics? Yes, sign me up! I realize that you can't just deliver my 2k of actual content, you need to brand and stuff with headers and footers and links to follow, but do you really need 20MB spread across 350 resources to do it? Get that down to something reasonable like 50k of dynamic stuff and a couple 100k of highly-cacheable stuff, and AMP would be pointless.
https://danluu.com/web-bloat/
Google already has enough of a stranglehold over the web.
And don't go with the Facebook Instant Articles or Apple News either.
While AMP is, ostensibly, an open-source project, the fact that it's leadership is in the hands of these corporate advertising giants should give anyone with a lick of sense pause.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
AMP just seems like WAP reborn to me, only hosted at Google. Makes it easier for them to parse, but nobody actually wanted it. Should be any easy one to refuse.
Should webmasters "resist Google's push for AMP pages"? Webmasters should really just write mobile websites that don't suck ass, but that's apparently just not something they'll do of their own volition. Most of my mobile browsing is just reading some headlines to kill time, and it's amazing how bad news websites in particular are--laggy scrolling, pop-overs, teleporting ads, teleporting paragraphs, etc. When AMP came out, that shit disappeared from anything I Googled practically overnight--any time I've clicked (tapped, I guess) through to an AMP page, it's loaded quickly, scrolling has worked, and nothing teleports.
Are there privacy implications? Of course, but they're rather marginal for someone already using Google's search engine, e-mail, news reader, chat programs, and browser. Is AMP necessary to write a good mobile website? Of course not, but writing a good mobile website is just not something a paste-eating webmaster will do unless someone grabs him by the ad dollars, forces him into a padded cell, and takes away so much markup he couldn't possibly fuck up what's left.
TL;DR AMP exists because webmasters are universally incompetent. If you chucklefucks weren't utter failures, AMP would never have happened.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Dictators do not work for industry or countries.
They used to, sometimes. But modern dictators ain't what they used to be. ;-)
In the Roman Republic (emphasize Republic, after the kings, before the emperors) the dictator had a temporary appointment and absolute authority limited to the territory in crisis, for example a region with active warfare. An interesting story:
Rome was invaded. The Senate appointed a man named Cincinnatus dictator for six months. On his first day he appointed a military commander and ordered all able bodied males in Rome to report for military service. The next day they marched to meet the enemy. He outmaneuvered the enemy and put them in a very bad position, they begged for mercy. The deal was to execute the top three enemy leaders and grant amnesty to the bulk of the enemy army. Cincinnatus then disbanded his Roman army and resigned the dictatorship. He was dictator for about two weeks and then returned to his farm outside of Rome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The last straw for me was when I realized how many pages were breaking BECAUSE Google was silently redirecting to AMP versions of pages. Google forces all users that it thinks are on iOS or Android to their AMP variants even though there are TONs of bugs on iOS that Google is not fixing.
The nonAMP version of the AMP website works better than the AMP version... Check out how AMP breaks scroll-to-top taps on iOS by stuffing everything in extra iframes. Try scrolling around while zoomed in on iOS ... Googleâ(TM)s JavaScript that tries to progressively load content will inevitably screw up and stop you from scrolling far. https://www.google.com/amp/s/w...
AMP has two parts. One is a set of very sensible rules for doing good websites. The second is a way for Google to take control of the web.
So what you should do is simple. Make a website that is compatible with AMP. Then remove all Google stuff. You will end up with a website that is independent and fast. And when you are at it, apply the same principles to your destop website.