7 ms·

You can't disable Google AMP

82 points by DAddYE 10y ago

makecheck 10y ago
This AMP "feature" caused me to switch my entire search engine on mobile. In other words, you have to disable it by not using Google.
- colinbartlett 10y ago
  Great idea. To which search engine did you switch?
  - enzanki_ars 10y ago
    I use DuckDuckGo [1] instead of Google. The search results are nearly identical and the bangs [2] are very handy. [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/ [2]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
    - jessriedel 10y ago
      For what it's worth, you can get this same functionality in desktop chrome in slightly fewer keystrokes using the custom search engines. Doesn't work on mobile, or at a public machine though.
a012 10y ago
My SO is a non-tech user and she hates the AMP bar so much that's fixed and covers significant screen space (on iphone 6) and it reverts to google search page when she clicks X button because she thought it'll hide that bar.
- snowwrestler 10y ago
  Going by this ticket, it seems it was not supposed to be a fixed element.
snowwrestler 10y ago
To be clear, this is referring to the client side--that is, from the perspective of mobile web searchers, you can't ask Google to hide AMP results from the results page. To my knowledge, publishers still have to opt into participating in Google AMP, and I assume they can opt out? That was my fear in reading the headline--that publisher participation in AMP is irrevocable, which would be bad.
- saurik 10y ago
  If you stop doing AMP, won't all of the non-canonical/duplicated/evil amp.google.com URLs users have now shared and linked to your content going to break, meaning that once you go AMP you are effectively trapped?
  - snowwrestler 10y ago
    Good question. I don't know. Or maybe, once Google has a hosted copy of an AMP page, it will never remove it.
colinbartlett 10y ago
AMP is absolutely infuriating. I constantly share links via iOS extensions, for example Slack, and AMP gives me this ridiculous google.com link. I've thought about building an adblock style blocking mechanism for these links. But it seems I'd end up blocking an increasingly large percentage of the search results.
- detaro 10y ago
  Instead of blocking them you could automatically redirect them to the non-AMP version, which is linked with rel="canonical".
- ninkendo 10y ago
  No joke, it became enough of an issue for me that I ended up switching to DuckDuckGo on mobile. It's been around 3 months now. Google really really really needs to fix amp links.
  - mort96 10y ago
    I switched to iOS this christmas. One of the first things I did was try to google something, get infuriated by the crappy AMP user experience, get even more infuriated there was no way to disable it anywhere, and switch to DDG.
lovich 10y ago
Like the other commenters here, I really disliked amp for a variety of reason such as the bar on top and the inability to easily link the main version of the page. However, I'be come to feel that we've brought this on ourselves as Web developers by making every website incredibly bloated and only possible to use on high speed connections. I've spent the past month in thailand on a much slower connection and the only sites I can reliably use currently are text sites like hacker news and amp pages. I can have a site like reddit even take 30-40 seconds to load and more complicated sites like cnn will load part of the page and then silently fail on me. AMP is not a great solution, but it is at least _a_ solution, when the industry was not taking steps to fix the problem themselves
- vmarsy 10y ago
  > the only sites I can reliably use currently are text sites like hacker news and amp pages. I can have a site like reddit even take 30-40 seconds to load. What about reddit's AMP pages [1]? [1] https://redditblog.com/2016/09/20/amp-and-reactredux/ https://redditblog.com/2016/09/20/amp-and-reactredux/
  - lovich 10y ago
    It's sending me to the mobile site, didn't even know they had amp pages, I might be better served by requesting the desktop version but my point still stands about sites just not loading
  - technion 10y ago
    That blog reads as contradictory. It talks about building a SPA, and rendering on the client side using JavaScript. It also talks about being AMP compliant. Those goals cannot coexist.
    - systoll 10y ago
      I believe they mean something like https://github.com/choumx/amp-pwa https://github.com/choumx/amp-pwa. AMP pages, which link to (and preload) a react-based SPA, which gets its content from AMP pages.
lcw 10y ago
I'm glad they fixed this. It has been driving me insane. I also wonder in general when they have canonical links set up what the statistics will look like on interactions with them. I understand what AMP is trying to achieve with site performances, and its great for some mediums specifically the simple reading of news, but it's dummying down the internet. Personally I hope that people get bored of the AMP experience and click to the more feature rich website experience(that obviously don't have terrible site performance).
Lazare 10y ago
As a user, I've found AMP results to be invariable an excellent user experience on mobile. I will always click an AMP link over a non-AMP link, when on mobile, because I know the AMP link will load quickly and be usable, and the odds are good the non-AMP link will not. Apparently this is a minority view around here. :)
- Fricken 10y ago
  Amp loads fast. News pages are so bogged down with extraneous bullshit these days it feels like internet speeds are moving backwards. Also, I'm getting access to the Financial Times through Amp, I've never been able to read it before.
- mdasen 10y ago
  It totally is a great experience. The page loads fast without too much crap. But it's also sad that something not-quite-open is taking over an important part of the web. AMP is this Google-wrapped version of a part of the web that tries to keep you in Google's land rather than allowing you to browse the site you visited. As a user, I like clicking on AMP links. But in a certain way, it's like eating candy. I know it's not good for the web and openness over the long term. But in the short term, it's just so nice.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    And this is why I dislike AMP. Instead of doing the right thing and rewarding good sites, Google instead is using the opportunity to push everyone into their ecosystem. The better solution is to encourages sites to think about their design and reward them accordingly.
  - ctack 10y ago
    I find the idea of the largest search engine repackaging others content without even hitting the content owner's site to be frankly rude. These sites pander to be ranked and get hits and then Google turns around and pulls this.
    - 10y ago
plorkyeran 10y ago
AMP was the thing that finally got me to stop using Google on my phone. Quite the accomplishment. Perhaps AMP would improve my browsing experience if it actually worked, but I've only ever gotten a blank page when clicking on an AMP link.
sheeshkebab 10y ago
The top bar in google AMP results is super annoying (and hidden url's are cherry on that, making it difficult to share url's correctly). That said rendering speed of AMP is quite noticeably faster than navigating to the actual site - or at least for more popular tech oriented news type sites. Hard to say what's better - but I say to hell with AMP and just let us see raw websites.
biot 10y ago
The place to complain about AMP isn't Google... it's the sites that AMP-enable their content. If enough people tell publishers "I've stopped reading your site because of AMP" maybe they'll take notice.
- flukus 10y ago
  How many supported AMP because the wanted to? Google has way to much control over the modern web, they're approaching abusive monopoly status.
- tdkl 10y ago
  The sites who enable AMP are strong-armed/baited by Google, because they rank AMP sites differently. This is just the beginning guys. It shows the BS business Google Search has become. Either comply to Google Internet™ or get lost. If Google collapsed tomorrow, nothing of value will be lost and I'm awaiting eagerly for that day to come.
seanwilson 10y ago
I can understand how the aspect of the control Google has over AMP isn't ideal but you can't deny AMP sites are a great user experience on mobile. Pages tend to load for me in less than 0.5 seconds even on my mobile connection. For other sites, pages can take 10 to 30 seconds to load, have pop-ups, image loading causes the page the jump up/down etc. Making sites with small download sizes and quick rendering is a very involved process. Google have made a tool and set of guidelines that force developers to use current best practices in a way you're just not going to get by hoping all developers everywhere do it themselves. It's also a much easier sell to management (i.e. "Is our site AMP compatible?") compared to trying to push for each individual best practice to be followed which can individually only have a small benefit.
- ebola1717 10y ago
  I would agree, but most of the time I click on an AMP link, it spins and doesn't load. I think it's usually reddit links, but still, that's not okay.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  The problem that AMP is trying to solve is definitely real. But pushing sites to add another layer on their system is the wrong way to do it, IMO. Why don't they just start rewarding systems that load fast, instead of pushing people into another google system?
  - seanwilson 10y ago
    > Why don't they just start rewarding systems that load fast, instead of pushing people into another google system? This system is easy to follow and validate though. Is it AMP compatible or not AMP compatible?
    - CaptSpify 10y ago
      But couldn't they just have a "Here's why we won't rank you higher" check instead?
technion 10y ago
The thing about AMP is that it takes work. You cannot just install an AMP plugin and expect your existing website to suddenly serve AMP. However, with certain CMS's, that's exactly how things are marketed. So what we're seeing is people go off and buy themes or whatever to make their website look the way they want, then they install some plugin and say "done". And then they are taken by surprise when, on mobile, their site either doesn't load at all, or looks nothing like the "premium theme" they paid for. FWIW, I'm glad I moved my blog to AMP. I feel like it loads pretty well instantly on and I feel somewhat future proofed. Would I encourage a less technical user to go through this? Not really. Also, I wish Google would work better with integrating their own tooling. Getting lower scores on Google Pagespeed after enabling AMP because of the AMP CDN configuration is somewhat absurd.
- detaro 10y ago
  The question then of course is: why is the non-AMP version of your blog slower, and could you have improved that with the same effort? Or is it just that people coming there via Google get Googles CDN which is faster?
  - technion 10y ago
    The easy answer is that AMP forces you to do things like always declaring image height and width. And yes I could do that without AMP, but the moment you're not forced to do something, the path of least resistance is to not bother. I certainly never would never have bothered setting up a build process to inline CSS previously.
  - ec109685 10y ago
    AMP preloads the content before you click, which your own web site can't compete with.
    - detaro 10y ago
      from Google results, yes. That's only one specific (but for many admittedly important) situation, and sounds more like "AMP because that's the hoop Google has you jump through to get preloading", not "AMP because it makes the site faster".
greglindahl 10y ago
I've always wanted a browser extension, perhaps built on Decentraleyes[1], which replaces the amp code with code that drops ads and trackers and just shows text and images. For bonus points you could look at httpseverywhere[2] and transform the google.com cached urls back to the originals. Alas, it's rare to find a phone browser that supports extensions. 1: https://github.com/Synzvato/decentraleyes https://github.com/Synzvato/decentraleyes 2: https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere
beezischillin 10y ago
As many other people, I've also had my fair share of issues with AMP. On top of the ethical issues, the thing to finally make me fed up with it was the fact that I couldn't even load 20% of the search results on my iPhone being connected to a 1000/300 landline connection via wifi. Kind of a self-defeating thing that they claim to make the web universally better and then force everyone to use technology that is clearly broken on so many search pages and then actively try and prevent you from using the old, actually working links. Needless to say, I'm currently using DuckDuckGo on all of my mobile devices and am considering switching to it on my computers as well. It baffles me that Google gets away with the things they've been doing recently. I used to be really happy they exist, now I kinda wish they had tougher competition and weren't in many de-facto monopolistic positions. Other than the fact that they barely support anything they offer, be it "free" or paid products, they change and shut down projects almost monthly. They are slowly turning Chrome into a walled garden going so far as to remove your own, manually installed extensions when they don't like what you're using. They ruined hangouts, which was a really great, even standout VOIP platform that offered not only the convenience of being browser-based, but all these plugins that would come in handy while producing content (like volume adjustments on participants and an export feature, for podcasting or D&D) or drawing boards or group YouTube video playback. They messed up mobile search with AMP, in an effort to dominate the web even more. They shut down Panoramio. They promised to fix Android for years and even 6 years after it became mainstream, the experience is noticeably less smooth than the competition, etcetcetc. Using a Google product is only recommended if you're not planning on investing into a long-term future it seems. Unfortunately, however convenient it was to rely on a single platform, for now I think possible solution is to look for alternatives and show our dislike by hitting them where it hurts: their install base.

82 points by DAddYE 10y ago

This AMP "feature" caused me to switch my entire search engine on mobile. In other words, you have to disable it by not using Google.

colinbartlett 10y ago
Great idea. To which search engine did you switch?
- enzanki_ars 10y ago
  I use DuckDuckGo [1] instead of Google. The search results are nearly identical and the bangs [2] are very handy. [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/ [2]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
  - jessriedel 10y ago
    For what it's worth, you can get this same functionality in desktop chrome in slightly fewer keystrokes using the custom search engines. Doesn't work on mobile, or at a public machine though.

a012 10y ago

My SO is a non-tech user and she hates the AMP bar so much that's fixed and covers significant screen space (on iphone 6) and it reverts to google search page when she clicks X button because she thought it'll hide that bar.

snowwrestler 10y ago
Going by this ticket, it seems it was not supposed to be a fixed element.

snowwrestler 10y ago

To be clear, this is referring to the client side--that is, from the perspective of mobile web searchers, you can't ask Google to hide AMP results from the results page. To my knowledge, publishers still have to opt into participating in Google AMP, and I assume they can opt out? That was my fear in reading the headline--that publisher participation in AMP is irrevocable, which would be bad.

saurik 10y ago
If you stop doing AMP, won't all of the non-canonical/duplicated/evil amp.google.com URLs users have now shared and linked to your content going to break, meaning that once you go AMP you are effectively trapped?
- snowwrestler 10y ago
  Good question. I don't know. Or maybe, once Google has a hosted copy of an AMP page, it will never remove it.

colinbartlett 10y ago

AMP is absolutely infuriating. I constantly share links via iOS extensions, for example Slack, and AMP gives me this ridiculous google.com link. I've thought about building an adblock style blocking mechanism for these links. But it seems I'd end up blocking an increasingly large percentage of the search results.

detaro 10y ago
Instead of blocking them you could automatically redirect them to the non-AMP version, which is linked with rel="canonical".
ninkendo 10y ago
No joke, it became enough of an issue for me that I ended up switching to DuckDuckGo on mobile. It's been around 3 months now. Google really really really needs to fix amp links.
- mort96 10y ago
  I switched to iOS this christmas. One of the first things I did was try to google something, get infuriated by the crappy AMP user experience, get even more infuriated there was no way to disable it anywhere, and switch to DDG.

lovich 10y ago

Like the other commenters here, I really disliked amp for a variety of reason such as the bar on top and the inability to easily link the main version of the page. However, I'be come to feel that we've brought this on ourselves as Web developers by making every website incredibly bloated and only possible to use on high speed connections. I've spent the past month in thailand on a much slower connection and the only sites I can reliably use currently are text sites like hacker news and amp pages. I can have a site like reddit even take 30-40 seconds to load and more complicated sites like cnn will load part of the page and then silently fail on me. AMP is not a great solution, but it is at least _a_ solution, when the industry was not taking steps to fix the problem themselves

vmarsy 10y ago
> the only sites I can reliably use currently are text sites like hacker news and amp pages. I can have a site like reddit even take 30-40 seconds to load. What about reddit's AMP pages [1]? [1] https://redditblog.com/2016/09/20/amp-and-reactredux/ https://redditblog.com/2016/09/20/amp-and-reactredux/
- lovich 10y ago
  It's sending me to the mobile site, didn't even know they had amp pages, I might be better served by requesting the desktop version but my point still stands about sites just not loading
- technion 10y ago
  That blog reads as contradictory. It talks about building a SPA, and rendering on the client side using JavaScript. It also talks about being AMP compliant. Those goals cannot coexist.
  - systoll 10y ago
    I believe they mean something like https://github.com/choumx/amp-pwa https://github.com/choumx/amp-pwa. AMP pages, which link to (and preload) a react-based SPA, which gets its content from AMP pages.

lcw 10y ago

I'm glad they fixed this. It has been driving me insane. I also wonder in general when they have canonical links set up what the statistics will look like on interactions with them. I understand what AMP is trying to achieve with site performances, and its great for some mediums specifically the simple reading of news, but it's dummying down the internet. Personally I hope that people get bored of the AMP experience and click to the more feature rich website experience(that obviously don't have terrible site performance).

Lazare 10y ago

As a user, I've found AMP results to be invariable an excellent user experience on mobile. I will always click an AMP link over a non-AMP link, when on mobile, because I know the AMP link will load quickly and be usable, and the odds are good the non-AMP link will not. Apparently this is a minority view around here. :)

Fricken 10y ago
Amp loads fast. News pages are so bogged down with extraneous bullshit these days it feels like internet speeds are moving backwards. Also, I'm getting access to the Financial Times through Amp, I've never been able to read it before.
mdasen 10y ago
It totally is a great experience. The page loads fast without too much crap. But it's also sad that something not-quite-open is taking over an important part of the web. AMP is this Google-wrapped version of a part of the web that tries to keep you in Google's land rather than allowing you to browse the site you visited. As a user, I like clicking on AMP links. But in a certain way, it's like eating candy. I know it's not good for the web and openness over the long term. But in the short term, it's just so nice.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  And this is why I dislike AMP. Instead of doing the right thing and rewarding good sites, Google instead is using the opportunity to push everyone into their ecosystem. The better solution is to encourages sites to think about their design and reward them accordingly.
- ctack 10y ago
  I find the idea of the largest search engine repackaging others content without even hitting the content owner's site to be frankly rude. These sites pander to be ranked and get hits and then Google turns around and pulls this.
  - 10y ago

plorkyeran 10y ago

AMP was the thing that finally got me to stop using Google on my phone. Quite the accomplishment. Perhaps AMP would improve my browsing experience if it actually worked, but I've only ever gotten a blank page when clicking on an AMP link.

sheeshkebab 10y ago

The top bar in google AMP results is super annoying (and hidden url's are cherry on that, making it difficult to share url's correctly). That said rendering speed of AMP is quite noticeably faster than navigating to the actual site - or at least for more popular tech oriented news type sites. Hard to say what's better - but I say to hell with AMP and just let us see raw websites.

biot 10y ago

The place to complain about AMP isn't Google... it's the sites that AMP-enable their content. If enough people tell publishers "I've stopped reading your site because of AMP" maybe they'll take notice.

flukus 10y ago
How many supported AMP because the wanted to? Google has way to much control over the modern web, they're approaching abusive monopoly status.
tdkl 10y ago
The sites who enable AMP are strong-armed/baited by Google, because they rank AMP sites differently. This is just the beginning guys. It shows the BS business Google Search has become. Either comply to Google Internet™ or get lost. If Google collapsed tomorrow, nothing of value will be lost and I'm awaiting eagerly for that day to come.

seanwilson 10y ago

I can understand how the aspect of the control Google has over AMP isn't ideal but you can't deny AMP sites are a great user experience on mobile. Pages tend to load for me in less than 0.5 seconds even on my mobile connection. For other sites, pages can take 10 to 30 seconds to load, have pop-ups, image loading causes the page the jump up/down etc. Making sites with small download sizes and quick rendering is a very involved process. Google have made a tool and set of guidelines that force developers to use current best practices in a way you're just not going to get by hoping all developers everywhere do it themselves. It's also a much easier sell to management (i.e. "Is our site AMP compatible?") compared to trying to push for each individual best practice to be followed which can individually only have a small benefit.

ebola1717 10y ago
I would agree, but most of the time I click on an AMP link, it spins and doesn't load. I think it's usually reddit links, but still, that's not okay.
CaptSpify 10y ago
The problem that AMP is trying to solve is definitely real. But pushing sites to add another layer on their system is the wrong way to do it, IMO. Why don't they just start rewarding systems that load fast, instead of pushing people into another google system?
- seanwilson 10y ago
  > Why don't they just start rewarding systems that load fast, instead of pushing people into another google system? This system is easy to follow and validate though. Is it AMP compatible or not AMP compatible?
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    But couldn't they just have a "Here's why we won't rank you higher" check instead?

technion 10y ago

The thing about AMP is that it takes work. You cannot just install an AMP plugin and expect your existing website to suddenly serve AMP. However, with certain CMS's, that's exactly how things are marketed. So what we're seeing is people go off and buy themes or whatever to make their website look the way they want, then they install some plugin and say "done". And then they are taken by surprise when, on mobile, their site either doesn't load at all, or looks nothing like the "premium theme" they paid for. FWIW, I'm glad I moved my blog to AMP. I feel like it loads pretty well instantly on and I feel somewhat future proofed. Would I encourage a less technical user to go through this? Not really. Also, I wish Google would work better with integrating their own tooling. Getting lower scores on Google Pagespeed after enabling AMP because of the AMP CDN configuration is somewhat absurd.

detaro 10y ago
The question then of course is: why is the non-AMP version of your blog slower, and could you have improved that with the same effort? Or is it just that people coming there via Google get Googles CDN which is faster?
- technion 10y ago
  The easy answer is that AMP forces you to do things like always declaring image height and width. And yes I could do that without AMP, but the moment you're not forced to do something, the path of least resistance is to not bother. I certainly never would never have bothered setting up a build process to inline CSS previously.
- ec109685 10y ago
  AMP preloads the content before you click, which your own web site can't compete with.
  - detaro 10y ago
    from Google results, yes. That's only one specific (but for many admittedly important) situation, and sounds more like "AMP because that's the hoop Google has you jump through to get preloading", not "AMP because it makes the site faster".

greglindahl 10y ago

I've always wanted a browser extension, perhaps built on Decentraleyes[1], which replaces the amp code with code that drops ads and trackers and just shows text and images. For bonus points you could look at httpseverywhere[2] and transform the google.com cached urls back to the originals. Alas, it's rare to find a phone browser that supports extensions. 1: https://github.com/Synzvato/decentraleyes https://github.com/Synzvato/decentraleyes 2: https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere

beezischillin 10y ago

As many other people, I've also had my fair share of issues with AMP. On top of the ethical issues, the thing to finally make me fed up with it was the fact that I couldn't even load 20% of the search results on my iPhone being connected to a 1000/300 landline connection via wifi. Kind of a self-defeating thing that they claim to make the web universally better and then force everyone to use technology that is clearly broken on so many search pages and then actively try and prevent you from using the old, actually working links. Needless to say, I'm currently using DuckDuckGo on all of my mobile devices and am considering switching to it on my computers as well. It baffles me that Google gets away with the things they've been doing recently. I used to be really happy they exist, now I kinda wish they had tougher competition and weren't in many de-facto monopolistic positions. Other than the fact that they barely support anything they offer, be it "free" or paid products, they change and shut down projects almost monthly. They are slowly turning Chrome into a walled garden going so far as to remove your own, manually installed extensions when they don't like what you're using. They ruined hangouts, which was a really great, even standout VOIP platform that offered not only the convenience of being browser-based, but all these plugins that would come in handy while producing content (like volume adjustments on participants and an export feature, for podcasting or D&D) or drawing boards or group YouTube video playback. They messed up mobile search with AMP, in an effort to dominate the web even more. They shut down Panoramio. They promised to fix Android for years and even 6 years after it became mainstream, the experience is noticeably less smooth than the competition, etcetcetc. Using a Google product is only recommended if you're not planning on investing into a long-term future it seems. Unfortunately, however convenient it was to rely on a single platform, for now I think possible solution is to look for alternatives and show our dislike by hitting them where it hurts: their install base.