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AMP for email is bad
- fock 7y agoMaybe one should first ask: Is AMP currently good for anyone but GOOG?
- DaiPlusPlus 7y agoI’ve only personally benefited from AMP in times when I was trying to read the news in very congested LTE situations (e.g. an indoor arena filled with spectators) so keeping the absolute number of requests down and aggressive preloading was helpful. I am seeing far fewer AMP sites today than before though - Google promised higher search results rankings in exchange for a modest amount of work to make websites AMP-compliant - but I guess media publishers see the end-result being more work for less reward, especially if they can’t use their user-tracking scripts. What’s the advantage of doubling pageviews from higher ranking when it means you get less than half the advertising revenue?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- hombre_fatal 7y agoReally? Seems obviously good for everyone on an expensive mobile connection. Just like old-Opera's low bandwidth mode that proxies all requests through their servers. Never heard much bitching about that, btw. Just praise. It's kinda like an internet service that doesn't meter your WhatsApp data (very common here in Mexico): it's obviously useful to people, but it comes at an expensive price in the aggregate. Nobody really cares about the aggregate though.
- toast0 7y agoIf AMP is preloading content on search results pages, it's not good for your expensive connection, since you may not click through.
- BoorishBears 7y agoFor the longest time AMP pages straight up would not load on my iPhone if I was on mobile data. It seems to have resolved itself sometime in the last year, but I still have amp pages occasionally fail to load. Even when they do load, any seconds they save me are murdered when I have to spend an infuriating few seconds trying to get my address bar back. And I love how before, long pressing and copying the url from the faux-address bar amp gives would copy the URL. Now it copies a garbage-ified google URL, for tracking no doubt. Apple should murder AMP on iOS. Don’t let it hide my address bar, show hideous urls, generally make its life difficult, this garbage is to further Google's goals. I’m not even one of these wanna-be Stallmanists complaining about Google domination, that ship has sailed, and I welcome our Alphabetical overlords. But AMP is just a garbage technology that ruins UX and it needs to die.
- ricardobeat 7y agoYou must be confused. AMP doesn’t necessarily save any bandwidth, and it’s not hard to find sites where the amp version is actually heavier.
- echeese 7y agoYeah, it allows Google to preload pages so they load faster - especially on mobile.
- wffurr 7y agoAnd the author completely disregards the elephant in the room. Why do websites slow themselves down with trackers, etc.? It pays to do so. Decrying that without presenting an alternative sustainable monetization model for the web is just pointless yelling.
- michaelmrose 7y agoI could probably make more money robbing a bank today than going to work. Nobody needs to provide an alternative sustainable business model to fuel my desire for sports cars and travel I just need to live with what I can make from legitimate work. Most of the web is either, cheap to run, paid for by other commercial activity, or crap and if it went away tomorrow because people could not pay for it by shoving their crap in your face nobody would care.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- qrbLPHiKpiux 7y agoI have nothing constructive to add to this thread only that I really miss the web of the late 90s.
- wffurr 7y agoThat's one hell of a false analogy you've got there. Essentially the entire web is funded by advertising; you are way off the mark with your assertion.
- theelous3 7y agoMaybe this is selection bias or just plain old regular curmudgery, but I can't stand amp. I have a modern device and fast internet everywhere I go with my phone. I find amp sites to be consistently slower, uglier and less navigable than the request-desktop version of a site. My phone, and most other low-mid to high end phones have the sreeen real estate and processing power to handle and use desktop versions of a site. Retaining a familiar interface across devices leads to faster site usage than any speed gains that might be happening because of amp. Measuring the speed of a website in kb/s alone isn't a good enough metric, and the standardisation attempts of amp are ugly imo.
- superkuh 7y agoAMP is bad for everything. To be clear, this starts by it not being good for anything. Like on the web the form of AMP used by Google and Cloudflare. Starting with google: AMP does not actually make loading any faster. Google just uses it's search monopoly to make it seem so. When you use google search with javascript enabled AMP results are both prioritized in the listing and pre-loaded in the background. This makes up the entire increase in load time you perceive. AMP pages not pre-loaded by google are just as slow to load. At Cloudflare there are other problems. If you're a CF customer and have the option enabled, your AMP page hosted on CF servers will do some nasty stuff. Specifically outgoing links to third party domains will be mirrored onto cloudflare's servers and re-hosted. Presented to anyone clicking off your CF AMP page as the actual site but not. Instead CF gets the hits and you never see it. I've seen the CF bots doing this to my domain. But CF never responds to emails from anyone that isn't a customer. As for AMP for email I don't know the specific downsides besides the obvious corporate centralization and control this gives. But it certainly doesn't have any purpose. And I say this as a guy that only reads email as text and never renders HTML.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago> When you use google search with javascript enabled AMP results are both prioritized in the listing and pre-loaded in the background. Or Bing search or Baidu search or Yahoo! Japan search and so on. The whole point of AMP is that it can be safely preloaded and prerendered, making it faster than any other web page you can create for people coming from a link aggregator. One of the big advantages it has over Facebook Instant Articles or Apple News is that a publisher has to create an AMP page once and then gets to integrate with the multiple link aggregators that support AMP for free. If I want to create my own link aggregator, I don't need a FAANG's clout to get publishers to integrate with me for instant-loading pages — I can use their existing AMP pages.
- sametmax 7y agoYou could do that with regular HTML. Google crawling everything would easily let them know if a page is light and easy to preload, giving and incentive to web dev to make it so, instead of creating a lock in solution.
- tholman 7y agoThere are absolutely no standards at all when trying to code emails, it takes hours trying to make something that remotely resembles the same thing on every engine (Microsoft outlook rendering emails with their ms word engine, google doing all sorts of different things on desktops vs phones) - and hours more of testing and tweaking css and markup hacks to make them readable. Although this is another puzzle piece to scatter the landscape, I can’t say I’m against someone actually trying to lock some standards down on the email platform. The counter is that we don’t need all the css and pizzazz in emails, but we’ve come too far to realistically go back on that.
- vanadium 7y ago"Imagine you're building a site with one foot in 1999 and another foot in 2016, but instead of 4-5 browsers you have around 20 highly-idiosyncratic browsers past and present to deal with." That's pretty much how I introduce people to email development, and AMP for email isn't going to solve for that in any meaningful way.
- swiley 7y agoIt’s a pain because no one wants it! Emails are for text, if you have something to say you can write it out.
- javagram 7y agoExcept that html email is used because it works a lot better (i.e. people DO want it) Try sending your marketing campaign as plain text and then try sending it as carefully crafted HTML mail. Unless your target is a specific small segment of users who love text/plain, HTML will do better and make you more money.
- simias 7y agoI don't know what's the name of this phenomenon but it reminds me of bass-boosted stereos and over-saturated TV screens. Objectively, from a signal processing theory standpoint, it's not superior to a properly calibrated monitor. But subjectively it seems that we collectively like it when dynamics get crushed to loony-tunes levels. I feel like HTML email is the same way. People think they want it, but in my experience it's an absolutely abysmal experience. Ever been forwarded one of these corporate-type emails where people reply all over the place, each using their own convention of color and typesetting and emphasis markers, with bits of "rich text" signatures and images littered throughout? That's a bloody terrible experience. Not that plain text email can't be messy, but it's really a situation where less is more. People have to be a little more careful with what they're doing instead of saying "I'll just write this in neon pink and they'll get it". As for marketing campaigns then yes, I grant you that you can make much more compelling content with more advanced technology but as far as I'm concerned that's cancer so I don't really care about that. I don't really get why anybody would opt into receiving what's effectively spam into their mailbox although maybe I'm wrong about that.
- XCSme 7y agoHope AMP dies soon.
- craftyguy 7y agoEmail providers that only allow access to your emails using their special clients (instead of, e.g. imap) are also bad for email.
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoI think theoretically you can use AMP email through an IMAP client, if that IMAP client supports AMP. But support for it is probably going to be pretty scarce, particularly in the open source world.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago> But support for it is probably going to be pretty scarce, particularly in the open source world. Wouldn't be too sure about that. Even if the more recognizable names all boycott amp4mail, somebody somewhere is bound to decide implementing it as a client or a plugin to a client is a fun/useful project, and will do it. Or Google itself may do it just to push AMP some more.
- joshuamorton 7y agoYou're correct. There's nothing about amp4email that requires a Gmail account. I'm actually pretty sure that if you use an imap client it whatever, you could view amp email from some site without ever communicating with a third party.
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoIt would still need to talk to your email provider's AMP cache, presumably, though, unlike a normal email which you download once and then do not need to reach out to the server for again.
- joshuamorton 7y agoI don't think there's a need for an amp cache with amp4email. The privacy concerns that make an amp cache necessary don't apply in the same way, only the security concerns that require a safe html subset. So an imap client could cache the amp js locally, and render dynamic content by querying the sender directly. I could be wrong though, but I believe that works.
- x3haloed 7y agoI can't belive the neckbeard level in here. "I do all my web browsing with curl and vim. Nobody needs AMP!" Listen -- AMP is merely a set of guidelines and a framework to help developers make media-rich web content load fast. You can obviously achieve the same results without AMP, just like you can write a SPA without a framework. Duh. AMP is not "bad" or "good". Get over yourselves and your moral peacocking and get back to measuring things objectively. Everyone who upvoted this crap needs to consider why. Is it because AMP fails to accomplish its goals? Or is it because you share a sentiment with the author -- that "Google and AMP are ruining lives and, even worse, the web, the holy web, and that they must be stopped in the name of the holy Linus, who set us free from the proprietary code, and... Where was I?" "God, you're the worst DM." "Yes. Yes I am."
- detaro 7y ago> Listen -- AMP is merely a set of guidelines and a framework to help developers make media-rich web content load fast. You can obviously achieve the same results without AMP, just like you can write a SPA without a framework. Duh. Basically all criticism of AMP is about the fact that this is not true. If Google said "we prioritize fast pages, here's some guidelines and code on how to do that", that'd be fine. But they've tied features to using exactly their framework and nothing else. Like AMP, but don't want to show 8 seconds of empty page to users without JS, or want to remove any of the other weird issues it had at times? Too bad, changing that code means it is not valid AMP anymore. Want to self-host the AMP source code? Too bad, not valid AMP anymore.
- SquareWheel 7y ago>don't want to show 8 seconds of empty page to users without JS That's incorrect. AMP pages support noscript.
- joshuamorton 7y agoSpecifically, if you disable JavaScript entirely, they load cleanly (via the no script tag). If you block just the amp js endpoint, they have a fallback for slow confections that waits a few seconds before rendering to avoid page redraws. This is the 8-second thing.
- gcb0 7y agolol. anyone have to read past the headline to know it's bad?!?! everyone forgot the only purpose of amp? to give in to google so that you can get not-banished from their search results. why would anyone apply a pernicious SEO technique to email? what's next? an article on why rat poison on bread is a bad idea?
- radarsat1 7y agoI really wish the email standard was markdown instead of HTML. I only ever switch from text-only when I need to embed an image, and otherwise occasionally italics or whatever is useful. This could be taken care of with a basic markdown-like language, and avoid getting full HTML advertisements, etc. I really, really don't need your newsletter to be properly formatted in my mailbox, just send a link, I'll open it in the browser if I want to.
- koolba 7y agoOr how about just disallowing all remote content. Sure marketers wouldn’t be able to track “opens” anymore but I don’t care and I doubt the average person would want that either if they were educated on how it all works.
- captn3m0 7y agoIf Google really wanted to make the web fast, they would add native support for text/markdown mimetype in Chrome and ask publishers to just create .md files instead.
- andrewshadura 7y agotext/markdown is a bad idea because it's not backwards compatible. It should be text/plain; markup=markdown, since Markdown is perfectly readable without any software support. See https://blog.freron.com/2011/thoughts-on-writing-emails-using-markdown/ https://blog.freron.com/2011/thoughts-on-writing-emails-usin... for more thoughts on this topic.
- stephenr 7y agobackwards compatible with what? In my experience anything served as `text/*` that isn’t more specifically handled (eg `text/html`) will be rendered as text/plain because the type is still `text`. Edit: rendered, not tendered
- captn3m0 7y agoThanks for the link. I get that this would help with emails, but pushing markdown into text/plain wouldn't be helpful for web content on browsers. The web already has Content Negotiation to let older clients prefer html or plain text content.
- tpetry 7y agoAMP for email is targeting a completely different topic than the issues listed here and in the article. And i am shocked everybody is simply not seeing them with their amp4web hate. Amp for email is completely different than amp for web and is a very good solution: 1. Coding emails is really really hard. Every client is rendering emails differently, and Outlook is a beast with every version rendering differently. Amp for email is standardizing a subset of email and css every client should support so email building will be easier. 2. Email is completely different than the web. You cant do more than basic html like displaying text and pictures. Embedding videos? Slideshows for products? Interactivity like forms? Display realtime information? EVERYTHING IS NOT POSSIBLE! But it will be with amp4email. You will get features in emails compared to the web so they will get usefully again. And i am afraid nobody is seeing this and only hating amp4web‘s hiding if the real urls etc.
- ori_b 7y ago> You cant do more than basic html like displaying text and pictures. Embedding videos? Slideshows for products? Interactivity like forms? Display realtime information? EVERYTHING IS NOT POSSIBLE! But it will be with amp4email. Alright, you've convinced me: AMP for email needs to be killed.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago> Embedding videos? Let me open this email... oh noes, it's autoplay video. > Slideshows for products? Yes, more marketing garbage! > Interactivity like forms? Your password is about to expire, change it below or some garbage that will only make shit more insecure. > Display realtime information Blow me.
- hexo 7y agoExactly. Couldn't have been said better. Kill AMP completely and don't even think about touching email with that.
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoamp4email is far worse and more dangerous than amp4web, and that's why privacy respecting email services are so opposed to it. Tutanota here, and FastMail who posted about it when it was first announced. AMP isn't a subset of HTML, it's it's own proprietary fork of HTML. It's not saying an img tag is okay, it's tell you to use an amp-img tag.
- robin_reala 7y agoAMP in email was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me when it was first announced. I ended up completely closing my paid GApps account and migrating my email over to RunBox instead; I also as much as possible reduced my use of Google properties (basically everything that’s not YouTube) and started blocking all Google cookies outright outside of a container tab for YouTube. If anyone’s interested I wrote up how I chose an alternative email supplier at https://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/ https://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/
- jchw 7y agoEvery thread about AMP on Hacker News goes exactly the same way. It’s annoying, repetitive. But here’s the thing: while I get criticisms about AMP for web, pretty much none of them apply to AMP for email. The author of this article keeps bringing up points about AMP for web as if they have anything to do with AMP for email. AMP for email basically does one thing: it enables interactive emails without allowing arbitrary code. It is standard and other email providers can implement it. You’d think this premise would be popular on HN, but it’s not, all because people are still caught up over the effectively unrelated usage of AMP in Google Search. If you don’t like AMP in Google Search, fine. I find it fairly annoying too, though admittedly once the URL issue is fixed it will probably stop bothering me. Or not at all, since I actually tend to use Duck Duck Go anyways. But can we stop ruining every discussion with this non-sense? It’s tiring, and I don’t even like AMP. It’s gotten to the point where saying something bad about AMP is probably the easiest way to hit HN frontpage with no effort. (Disclosure, I work for Google, not on anything related to AMP. Seriously, I still dislike AMP.)
- TeMPOraL 7y ago> pretty much none of them apply to AMP for email It seems they do, though. Both amp4web and amp4mail are attempts at taking old, established, and perfectly good elements of the Internet, and turning them into something that serves the interests of the adtech industry, at the expense of users. > it enables interactive emails without allowing arbitrary code It also conveniently enables extra advertising and tracking, blends together e-mail with the web, and breaks one of the most fundamental aspects of e-mail: with AMP, your message is no longer self-contained and fixed in time - instead, it becomes ephemeral and under control of the sender. On this basis alone I already do not want it. This view may sound luddite-ish, but the problem here is the same as with the Web at large: more and more capabilities are added, advertised with the vision of more useful future[0], but the vision doesn't materialize. Just like on the web, for all the advances browsers incorporate, you sporadically see them used for something nice (like e.g. NYT visualizations that help you comprehend information in the article), but 99.9% of the time it is used for user-hostile adtech bullshit. -- [0] - "For example, imagine you could complete tasks directly in email. With AMP for Email, you’ll be able to quickly take actions like submit an RSVP to an event, schedule an appointment, or fill out a questionnaire right from the email message." - https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/bringing-power-amp-gmail/ https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/bringing-power-amp-.... That sounds cool, but doesn't necessarily require AMP.
- skapti 7y agoAll sandboxes are bad. Specially from Google or facebook
- jmiserez 7y agoOff topic, but voting on comments should not primarily be used to signal disagreement. "Good" comments (for some definition of "good") can be upvoted even if they argue a viewpoint you disagree with. Otherwise all that remains is an echo chamber.
- dang 7y agoOn HN, downvoting for disagreement has always been fine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20256420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20256420 and marked it off-topic.
- SergeAx 7y agoThe article looks a bit suspicious and FUD to me: first they say "here is five reasons why AMP in Gmail is bad" and then just put out five general essays about how Google is bad. AMP as tech is certainly good for users. Google pushes it a tad too hard and sometimes is at the edge of abusing it, but overall effect on UX is very positive. There's no monopoly here: anyone can take advantage of this tech (and I believe most search engines do). AMP in email is even more innocent: in the end, you already are inside Gmail inbox, what could go wrong from there? Current Gmail actions[1] are very useful, and if AMP could do even better - count me in. [1] https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/overview#gmail_actions https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/overview#gmail_ac... edit: link to Gmail actions
- x3haloed 7y agoExactly. There isn't a cohesive point about why AMP for the email is bad, just a list of 5 negative things. I can come up with a list of 5 negative things about anything.
- Animats 7y agoCould this kill GMail? You can filter Google's ads from email if you're not using GMail. This is a significant negative for using GMail.