You might have used Google’s new AMP project without even knowing.
It’s a technology that makes mobile page results load very quickly on Google, it displays the content in a more uniform fashion. But there’s a problem.
The content loads off of Google’s own server, not from the website itself.
Everybody is complaining about AMP, and I’m just sitting here wondering if I ever even get to see an AMP page. Are they blocked by things like Ghostery and ad blockers?
Sure there’s been complaints. But the mobile web experience has been terrible. Webpages that never completely load, interstitial that you can’t close, assumptions on screen size, unreadable fonts sizes, text that won’t reflow, overriding user zoom settings, etc.
The worst of course is just overall speed. Tons of javascript, often more than one framework, dependencies that have dependencies, tracking, ads, etc. If you have a high latency mobile network connection and there’s even a small percentage of packet loss the mobile web becomes largely unusable. AMP helps with speed, reducing the bandwidth, and more importantly the number of downloads.
AMP is somewhat like a new version of RSS. Make it easy to get a few paragraphs of pure text as a preview, then click through if you want. Ads are still supported, and users should find them less obtrusive. No ads running around underneath your finger, 4x as big as your screen, taunting you as you try to figure out how to close it.
AMP is gaining support (most recently cloudflare and microsoft run AMP caches). URL sharing services now can remove the amp part for sharing the original URL. AMP has plenty of industry support and contributions to the code, last I looked 225 committers or so.
I think it’s a step in the right direction and makes the mobile web MUCH more usable.
Edited 2017-01-25 00:34 UTC
, etc.
The problem is, when building websites it’s possible to do it right.
It’s just really easy to do it wrong. And it’s not easy to change something you already have.
AMP is a baby/bathwater solution.
So this is precisely the same thing that Opera did with Turbo mode? Except when Opera did it, it was an amazing achievement; as soon as Google do it, ZOMGZ GOOGLE?
I forgot about Opera Turbo, but I’m pretty sure there were detractors at the time and probably still. The actual response to either would still be proportionate.
I just want an easy way to opt out of this.