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2B Pages On Web Now Use Google's AMP, Pages Now Load Twice As Fast (venturebeat.com) 60

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

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19, 2017 @09:04AM (#54448149)

    I think you mean "half as slow".

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

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

  • Great (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 )

    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.

    • 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.
      • by sabri ( 584428 )

        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.

        • 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.

    • 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.

  • Google Sponsored (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19, 2017 @09:08AM (#54448179)

    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/

    • 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.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    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

  • by cs96and ( 896123 ) on Friday May 19, 2017 @09:24AM (#54448273)
    Kill Google AMP before it KILLS the web

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

    • 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.

    • by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      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.

      • by sexconker ( 1179573 ) on Friday May 19, 2017 @11:56AM (#54449367)

        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.

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

  • by Anonymous Coward

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

  • by Anonymous Coward

    You are a cancer on the www.

  • 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 tak

  • by Anonymous Coward

    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.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    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?

    • 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$;" introdu

  • 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
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 se
  • 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.

  • 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

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