PC Probe: Is Google losing its grip on the mobile web?
AMP made the mobile web faster, but it also set fast Google’s control of it. James O’Malley investigates whether AMP is on its way out
AMP made the mobile web faster, but it also set fast Google’s control of it. James O’Malley investigates whether AMP is on its way out.
The mobile web can be frustrating. Click a link to that article you’d like to read and you might find the page takes ages to load because of all of the junk. There are cookie consent boxes, auto-playing videos, obnoxious banner adverts and images that resize at random when they finish loading, sending the text you’ve started reading flying off the screen.
In 2015, Facebook and Apple both hit upon similar solutions to this problem. They turned news articles into app-like experiences. Apple launched the Apple News app and Facebook had “Instant Articles” built inside of its main app. Both led to something similar: news articles with all of the gunk stripped away. They loaded up instantly, scrolling was smooth and they made reading more pleasurable.
But not everyone was happy with these innovations: publishers weren’t thrilled that users were able to read the news without seeing the revenue-generating ads on their sites. However, it was Google that had the most to lose if content was locked away from the open web.
“I think there was a fear in that group of publishers, together with folks from Google and other folks in the industry, that the web was kind of running away from them,” said Malte Ubl, a principal engineer at Google.
Consequently, Google decided to play catch-up and led the development of a new open-source standard to keep readers on the web. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) pages are regular web pages that can be loaded in a regular browser, but that are carefully designed to perform much better, marrying the benefits of an app-like experience, while keeping content in the open where Google can still index it.
Stripping out the slow stuff
Under the hood, AMP is based on a simple concept. By restricting the range of things that pages can do, and by having publishers follow the tough rules to the letter, loading times will be quicker and the overall user experience will be less maddening.
“The AMP validator is really the key,” explained Ubl, who was also the inventor of AMP. The validator is the key piece of software, which goes through a page’s HTML code to rigidly enforce the strict rules. “It tells you whether your document is actually an AMP document, and from that follow certain properties that, among other things, imply performance,” Ubl said.
The AMP specification makes use of various tricks to speed up page-load times. For example, the amount of JavaScript on a page, which is typically used to build interactive elements, is restricted to a few core “libraries”, and the height and width of elements on a page must be clearly specified so that the contents of a page don’t jerk around as the page is rendered.
AMP pages even use special HTML tags to control the order in which different elements of a page are loaded. For example, it will prioritise loading page elements that are towards the top of a page, so that the user can begin reading even if further down text and images are still being loaded in.
A benevolent dictatorship?
Despite AMP’s advantages, not everyone is a fan. Last year, open standards activist Terence Eden resigned from
the AMP Advisory Committee in frustration. “You can’t help someone to change if they don’t want to change,” said Eden. “Google was not interested in making positive changes to the web ecosystem, they were only interested in benefiting themselves.”
Eden argues that, despite being technically open source, AMP essentially reinforces Google’s own control over the web. Ironic, given that AMP was ostensibly created to protect the open web.
“AMP attempts to solve a very real problem in a way that mostly benefits Google,” Eden said. “From Google’s point of view, they want an open web where people browse on the Google Chrome browser to Google sites, and use Google tracking to be sold Google adverts so that they can use Google Pay. Everything ties back to keeping people in the Google ecosystem.”
Critics also point out that AMP pages are often actively cached by Google and served to users from Google’s own servers. Although this speeds up load times, this also gives Google the power to insert itself as the middleman between publishers and readers.
Similarly, until recently, Google also used its dominance over search to “encourage” publishers to use AMP by favouring AMP pages in the news carousel at the top of search result pages. As any publisher will tell you, fail to hit the higher reaches of a Google search page and you’ll largely fail to find readers.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” said Eden. “Because it [AMP] only allows a certain subset of JavaScript to run, you are unlikely to get malicious code, or malicious adverts on an AMP page. But that also comes with the drawback that you can’t have anything innovative on there as well.”
He likens the potential of AMP to be a gatekeeper to the oft-made criticisms of Apple. “In the same way that Apple restricts innovation in the App Store, and Apple will quite happily disable apps which users like but Apple doesn’t, Google can also degrade the performance or refuse to serve things that either compete with it or do things that users like but it doesn’t,” said Eden. “Google is curating something, but that means that you have to hope it is a benevolent dictatorship.”
Unsurprisingly, this isn’t a view shared by the AMP team. “It was never our intention to exert control in any way,” explained Ubl, who pointed to the project’s collaborative origins and its noble intentions. “The state of the mobile web was very difficult… It’s hard to remember how bad it actually was at the time.
“So I think [AMP is] definitely a positive development and we’ve then gone and basically taken all these steps to address the sometimes good points that people were making.”
The end of AMP?
Perhaps in light of these sorts of criticisms, Google has announced changes to the way that AMP works. Last year, AMP officially became a full member of the OpenJS Foundation, an industry-wide group that aims to set common technology standards across the web.
“I like to say when a piece of technology is so beloved, and so diverse, having it in that neutral home is a nice place to be,” said Robin Ginn, president of the OpenJS Foundation. Ginn points to how the foundation has numerous layers of governance, which means that, in theory, Google no longer has sole control over the rules.
More significantly, Google last year announced changes to how its search engine would rank pages going forward. Instead of specifically boosting AMP pages in results, Google is promoting “Page Experience” criteria, where pages don’t have to specifically sign up to the AMP framework, but are ranked using similar criteria.
“We learned what’s really important,” said Ubl about determining which signals on a web page are key for denoting speed and a quality browsing experience. Essentially, once Ubl could figure out what to look for, and how to measure it for the entire web, the metrics could be used as a signal to inform the ranking of search results. No “AMP” badge required.
For example, one metric of the new system is a measure of “Cumulative Layout Shift” – how much elements move around the page before they finish loading. Pages also score extra points for being secured with HTTPS, having a mobile-friendly layout and the responsiveness of a site when a user hits a link in an article.
The most important innovation, though, is about figuring out what readers actually care about. “There was always a notion of page-load time, but it was not a user-focused metric,” Ubl explained.
What Ubl instead created was a new metric called “Largest Contentful Paint”. What this means in human terms is that Google will determine the most important part of the page – whether it’s a block of text, an image, or some other form of content – and measure how long it took that to load instead.
Now that Google is essentially judging the entire web by AMP’s standards, AMP itself could soon become redundant. The good news for publishers is that the potential demise of AMP is likely to fill many column inches for some time to come.
The state of the mobile web was very difficult… It’s hard to remember how bad it actually was at the time