AMPlified. — Ethan Marcotte

Why Safari does not need any protection from Chromium – Niels Leenheer

Safari is very opinionated about which features they will support and which they won’t. And that is fine for their browser. But I don’t want the Safari team to choose for all browsers on the iOS platform.

A terrific piece from Niels pushing back on the ridiculous assertion that Apple’s ban on rival rendering engines in iOS is somehow a noble battle against a monopoly (rather than the abuse of monopoly power it actually is). If there were any truth to the idea that Apple’s browser ban is the only thing stopping everyone from switching to Chrome, then nobody would be using Safari on MacOS where users are free to choose whichever rendering engine they want.

The Safari team is capable enough not to let their browser become irrelevant. And Apple has enough money to support the Safari team to take on other browsers. It does not need some artificial App Store rule to protect it from the competition.

WebKit-only proponents are worried about losing control and Google becoming too powerful. And they feel preventing Google from controlling the web is more important than giving more power to users. They believe they are protecting users against themselves. But that is misguided.

Users need to be in control because if you take power away from users, you are creating the future you want to prevent, where one company sets the rules for everybody else. It is just somebody else who is pulling the strings.

Ignore AMP · Jens Oliver Meiert

It started using the magic spell of prominent results page display to get authors to use it. Nothing is left of the original lure of raising awareness for web performance, and nothing convincing is there to confirm it was, indeed, a usable “web component framework.”

Google AMP - A 70% drop in our conversion rate. - Rockstar Coders

Google hijacking and hosting your AMP pages (in order to pre-render them) is pretty terrible for user experience and security:

I’m trying to establish my company as a legitimate business that can be trusted by a stranger to build software for them. Having google.com reeks of a phishing scam or fly by night operation that couldn’t afford their own domain.

How Fast Is Amp Really? - TimKadlec.com

An excellent, thorough, even-handed analysis of AMP’s performance from Tim. The AMP format doesn’t make that much of a difference, the AMP cache does speed things up (as would any CDN), but it’s the pre-rendering that really delivers the performance boost …as long as you give up your URLs.

But right now, the incentives being placed on AMP content seem to be accomplishing exactly what you would think: they’re incentivizing AMP, not performance.

Campaign. — Ethan Marcotte

Ethan is understandably dubious about Google’s recent announcement regarding the relaxation of the AMP’s iron fist.

Because it’s great to hear the AMP team make some overtures toward a more open web—and personally, I’d like to thank them sincerely for doing so. But if we’re swapping one set of Google-owned criteria for another set of slightly more permissive Google-owned criteria, I’m not sure how much will have changed.