Regular readers know I have been a vocal critic of AMP even when I was serving on its advisory committee. Nowadays, well, I can't remember when I last saw an AMP page (yay Firefox!) and I've never had a client ask me to develop an AMP site.

Last year, I had a long chat with David about my thoughts on AMP. I'm grateful that he left out some of my more splenetic comments - but I'm rather pleased that the sentiment I expressed came through. Although I would have spelt the word as "coloured" 😉

The best thing you can do to speed up your web browsing isn't to use AMP; it is to install an ad blocker. Personally, I recommend uBlock Origin which works on desktop browsers and Firefox for Android.

Buried in amongst all the hullabaloo from whinging ungrateful brats thoughtful comments from people with justifiable concerns, was this snippet from a Reddit employee:

An Improved Web Experience - Reddit

Long time readers will remember that I resigned from the Google AMP Advisory Committee having been a long time critic of the project.

AMP was an interesting idea (what if we made HTML fast again?!) and brought forth some interesting technologies (like Signed Exchanges) - but it ended up being a re-invented WAP⁰ which routed everything through a single point of failure.

I genuinely hate to see projects fail - but I can't help but hope this is the start of more people realising that giving unfettered control to an abusive monopoly like Google isn't a good decision.

I have loved working with the AC. They are a team of brilliant individuals who are all committed to trying to make AMP better, and I'm sorry to leave them. I've been a member of the AC for a little over two years and now is the time to step away and let a wider variety of people work on the committee.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I am starting an MSc in January so I'm trying to cut back on my extracurricular activities.

The stated goal of the AMP AC is to "make AMP a great web citizen."

I am concerned that - despite the hard work of the AC - Google has limited interest in that goal.

When I joined, I wondered whether I could make a difference. I hope that I have been a critical friend. The AC has encouraged AMP to think more about user needs - rather than Google's needs. And changes to the search carousel were also a concern of the committee which have been partly addressed.

Google's thesis is that the mobile-web is dying and people prefer to use apps - therefore making the web faster and more app-like will retain users. Google don't publish data about this, so I can't directly criticise their motives. But I do not think AMP, in its current implementation, helps make the web better.

I remain convinced that AMP is poorly implemented, hostile to the interests of both users and publishers, and a proprietary & unnecessary incursion into the open web.

I am glad that I tried to make it better, but I'm sad to have failed.

So, I decided to join the AC (Advisory Committee) for AMP. I don't want them surrounded with sycophants and yes-men. A few weeks ago, a bunch of the AC met in London for our first physical meeting after several exploratory video calls.

These are my impressions and highlights of the meeting. You should also read the official minutes to get a more rounded view of the issues.

I am not representing my employer while working on the AC. I do not get paid for being a member - although our host (Akamai) provided refreshments, and another member paid for lunch. These views are mine and mine alone. I will be respecting the Chatham House Rule.

AMP isn't loved by publishers

We heard, several times, that publishers don't like AMP. They feel forced to use it because otherwise they don't get into Google's news carousel - right at the top of the search results.

Some people felt aggrieved that all the hard work they'd done to speed up their sites was for nothing. They felt that they had a competitive advantage against slower publishers. That was destroyed by AMP.

My recommendation is that Google stop requiring that organisations use Google's proprietary mark-up in order to benefit from Google's promotion.

AMP is not accessible

There has not been a thorough accessibility review of AMP. Many of the components are not accessible.

This is legally and morally troubling. AMP need to do much better at testing accessibility. I also think that their validator should refuse to pass a page if it doesn't meet a threshold of automatic accessibility testing.

No user research

AMP claims to be doing the best for the user. But they have published no user research about what users want, how they interact with components, or what they have difficulty with. The launch of AMP Email highlights this. It is impossible for a publisher to use without understanding the user needs it attempts to solve.

I don't want AMP to publish videos of users, or other identifiable information. We need to see the same sort of publication as you'd deliver to your CEO.

Without user research support, there's no acceptable route to creating new AMP components.

AMP spreads fake news

When you visit an AMP page, your URL bar shows google.com/amp/.... - that has led to lots of extremely dubious content being shared by people who think they're looking at an "authoritative" Google Page.

Removing the URL bar is not the answer. Users need to be able to see who is actually responsible for publishing the content they are reading. Obfuscating it damages the web ecosystem.

Perhaps Signed Exchanges are the answer?

Signed Exchanges are not the answer

Yet another Google product to solve the mess created by a different Google product! Signed Exchanges are complicated. Basically, a website packages up a page and cryptographically signs it. An entirely different site can then serve the bundle but the browser shows the URL of the original site!

That is, I download a page from Google, but my browser says "example.com".

It looks like Firefox and Safari won't support this. Content Delivery Networks are worried about how much traffic it will take from them. Security experts worry about the holes in the scheme. And publishers fear losing analytics.

It's a clever idea - and possibly really useful for a fully distributed network. But the current implementation looks like Google trying to keep users within its walled garden with no hope of escape.

Browser compatibility

When a user uses Chrome for Android to search Google, they get AMP results. When a user tries the same search in Firefox, they only get regular results. We found the same thing occurring with several other mobile browsers.

Google has effectively said "You have to use our browser on our search engine to get the fastest content written in our langauge."

That strikes me as possibly being anti-competitive and certainly antithetical to the idea of an open and neutral web.

My top recommendations

• Publish all user research
  • Don't allow new components to be created without a clear user story and research to support them.
• Accessibly audit
  • Don't validate pages which can't pass an automated a11y test
• Stop the forced bundling
  • Let users opt-out of seeing AMP pages
  • Don't require AMP for prominent placement
  • Stop discriminating against non-Google browsers
• Reconsider AMP4Email
  • Lots of concerns from smaller email providers
  • Security and archiving concerns
• Work with the ecosystem rather than imposing

Conclusions

The meeting was good natured. While there were some robust discussions, the AC seemed fairly unified that Google had to seriously rework parts of the AMP project.

As I said in the meeting - if it were up to me, I'd go "Well, AMP was an interesting experiment. Now it is time to shut it down and take the lessons learned back through a proper standards process."

I suspect that is unlikely to happen. Google shows no sign of dropping AMP. Mind you, I thought that about Google+ and Inbox, so who knows!

My personal view as advisory committee member - if AMP is to continue then it needs to become a much better citizen of the open web.

I do it too often.

The thing is, that's the easy way out. Much harder is engaging in constructive dialogue, submitting decently detailed issues, and crafting useful pull requests.

So, I'm going to try something new. The AMP Project have asked me to join their Advisory Committee. To be transparent, this is an unremunerated position - they're not paying me, or even giving me any laptop stickers. And, to be clear, I still don't like AMP; I aim to be a critical friend.

But it is probably better to be inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in. Probably.

Can I make more of a difference from the inside? Can anyone? Can we make AMP into a good web citizen? Or is this just their way of blunting my devastating snark⸮

We'll find out. The full details of the Advisory Committee are still being developed - so I encourage you to join.

It is actively dangerous to the web ecosystem, helps disseminate propaganda, and is disliked by many users.

If, like me, you made the mistake of trying out AMP on your website - you're in a tricky position if you try to remove it. Google doesn't like anything leaving its clutches.

After a few weeks of AMP, I decided that it wasn't suitable for me. So I uninstalled the WordPress plugin. That's when the problems started.

When someone searches for my site on mobile, they still get presented with an AMP link:

Which leads to an error page:

No matter, they can click through to the real page, right?

No. The /amp page doesn't exist and causes a 404 error. Google could use the canonical URl to serve the original page - but that's too much like hard work for them.

So, how do you fix this? Thanks to Google's legendary lack of support and pathological aversion to writing clear, updated documentation - it's really hard to find a straight answer.

You would have thought that after a few days of getting AMP errors, Google would take the hint and stop serving the content, right? Sadly no.

There is one scrap of information which might give you some hope:

Use the "update-ping" mechanism to permanently remove content from the Google AMP Cache after the content has been removed from its origin. For example, to purge content formerly served at https://cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/example.com/favicon.ico, send an update ping request to:

https://cdn.ampproject.org/update-ping/i/s/example.com/favicon.ico.

Cached content that no longer exists will eventually get removed from the cache; it's just faster to use "update-ping".

Google's Remove AMP content "documentation"

If I'm reading this right, I have to send a ping for every page on my site.

Something like

https://cdn.ampproject.org/update-ping/c/s/shkspr.mobi/blog/2015/09/i3-electric-car-review/amp

For a few thousand pages. That's... bonkers! And, best of all, it doesn't work.

I chose a page, sent the ping, waited a few hours and... nothing! The AMP links still showed up in Google's results.

What's the solution? At this point you only have two options:

1. Accept Google's benevolent intentions and reinstall AMP.
2. Wait and hope.

I should have learned my lessons from my last interaction with Google. Oh well, fool me once...