Google No Longer Requires AMP, But the Replacement Might Be Worse

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Google stopped prioritizing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) format in its Top News carousel last month. This means website owners no longer need to publish an extra set of pages written in the AMP format. Instead sites need to meet what Google calls 'Core Web Vitals.' This sounds like great news. As a long-time critic of Google AMP, I wish I could say that Google AMP is over and done with, but I'm not convinced. As I wrote years ago when it launched, Google's AMP is bad -- bad in a potentially web-destroying way. It's bad for how the web is built, it's bad for publishers of credible online content, and it's bad for consumers of that content. Google AMP is only good for one party: Google. Unfortunately, the same can be said of Core Web Vitals.

Before I get into why AMP's replacement might be worse, it would help to back up and define what AMP is, because things have changed since it launched. AMP is now an open-source web component framework developed by the AMP Open Source Project. See Google anywhere in that sentence? No, no you don't. Google has distanced itself from AMP considerably over the years, but it hasn't given up control. Google AMP began with the stated goal of speeding up the web. The logic behind AMP goes like this: web developers suck at making fast websites, let's strip out all the stuff people don't need and cache it on our super-fast servers. That sounds good. It's not hard to see how well-meaning people would get behind that idea. The problem is that being fast isn't what makes the web great. It's part of it, but it's not the most important part.

Now AMP is no longer required of publishers, those of us shouting about how this is bad can just shut up now, right? Unfortunately, there are problems with AMP's replacement as well. And those problems go right back to what was wrong with AMP in the first place: Google is in charge of it. As web developer Ethan Marcotte points out: 'While the shift to Core Web Vitals is a step in the right direction, it also means that Google alone determines what a 'great page experience' means.' Currently it means your page should mostly load in 2.5 seconds. That's not a very high bar to be honest, but it is still a bar and the web does not do bars. Worse, that requirement might change tomorrow. Marcotte makes it clear that he thinks deprioritizing AMP in favor of Core Web Vitals is a very good thing, but I'm not so sure that's true. Neither, it seems, is Marcotte, who goes on to note that Google has 'taken its proprietary document format, and swapped it out for a proprietary set of performance statistics that has even less external oversight.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.