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iOS 11 Safari will automatically strip AMP links from shared URLs
- OtterCoder 9y agoThank heavens. Google's efforts to 'improve' the web have been disastrous. Like turning every list of facts into a pointless ramble because Google needs 1000 words of 'rich content'. And Amp being a push to hobble pages by making them into a proprietary cache format instead of encouraging simpler HTML.
- jrs95 9y agoI probably wouldn't have cared much if AMP pages weren't broken or missing content so often, but anything that means less AMP sounds good to me.
- amygdyl 9y agoI cannot help but think that the answer lies in requiring licensing of the major browser brands to special interest groups. There will be no loss of trademark aspect, in law or effect, would Chrome be available in the edition provided by the Royal Institute of Engineers, or Firefox found in a edition created by the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants. US DoD AND PBS all have the place and reason to augment the capability of the FUNCTIONAL UTILITY of Web browsers. Google, Apple, Microsoft and the greater OSS diaspora, should be able to healthily play both the supporting role, and Arbiter of First Resort.
- amygdyl 9y agoI venture a promotional acronym : Google, Apple, Microsoft and Unaligned Technologists. G.A.M.U.T.
- ucaetano 9y ago> would Chrome be available in the edition provided by the Royal Institute of Engineers, or Firefox found in a edition created by the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants You do realize that Chrome and Firefox are open-source, right?
- geocar 9y agoThere exists a free browser that can be built from the Google Chrome source repository, but "Chrome" isn't it. Mozilla has similarly and previously made their branding intentions clear.
- amygdyl 9y agoI picked on the a Royal Charter professional body for my example, because ascent to the ranks of the association is a distinction in any engineering career. I chose my example to convey the substance of a most respected voice in a profession, but there are thousands more. These institutions have budgets and charters to assist their membership. Browsers are perennially in need of support, financing and quality assurance. I venture a dream in which out professional associations and not Google or Microsoft, are the recipient of our browsing data, and a world in which my browser use is assisted by the data that my associates have been winnowing for the answers that generally have been disappearing in my search results, since the early days of a WWW largely populated by academics and domain experts. There is a awful lot which I believe other engineering professionals can contribute to the browser ecosystems and which as a byproduct may free us from the free no charge supply of the meta data that is often the actual result of considerable real work. Consumers too, might be easily induced to pay a modest sum, to have a specific facility in plug in already installed and smoothly running, offered by one of the most respected bodies in the country. Of course none of this is possible without the projects being open source. I am closer than my job title admits, to similar projects. I have also practice intellectual property law, in defence of my company and the rights which we also trade to creative works for clients who have had their work exploited and used commercial by companies beyond their ability to affect. Not now, but I will soon write up my litigation stories for public consumption. I have a awareness of the value placed on professional work and the way it affects often necessarily issues guarded and unwilling correspondents on possession of libraries which are essential to their profession, but must never be made freely available. The chance to be a member organisation with commit rights to the repositories, and the ability to control their own security audit is a very real consideration that might be very important progress indeed, as the meta data from closed libraries is invaluable for the use of search engines generally. The opportunity to use the latest software from a respected institution, who has their own additional security review process, for a token sum, like 5 pounds or 8 dollars, is something that I would like to buy, when I am selling to that sector.
- OtterCoder 9y agoI have no idea at all what purpose that would serve. Care to elaborate?
- amygdyl 9y agoIf budget could be made from only the top thousand professional organisations in the western hemisphere, channeled via branding distribution of the existing browsers, with the vertical profession sharing search meta data among themselves instead of feeding for free Google with invaluable information about how to structure searches without any restrictions on how Google use that data... Funnelling the meta data into the professional association plight instead, - this is a spare time program I want to pitch to get funding during next year, to finance the necessary work on plug in tools for assisting with typical heavy and long searches amid the hundreds of tabs my colleagues will have open... This is a need for tools to exploit the state of such long searches and record and protect from leaking trade secret indicators and the similar - - - these are plug inside which I want to pay for, and many like me, and thousands of professionals who just don't speak online because they are not permitted to risk the company assets by loose speech. The price of 5 dollars or so, would bring millions in revenue to the development team, before very long, because branding is a very desired product for professional institutions and my ideas are received and not novel so much as already popular demand that isn't expressed by communities who just don't speak through HN and the similar. Security of meta data. Reuse of search and general browsing use recycled to make vertical market assisted tools for search and research annotation and collection. Independent funding separated from conflicts of interest. A new revenue stream for the project maintainers. Improved oversight of security. That's the most of the improvements I am seeking.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> Thank heavens. Google's efforts to 'improve' the web have been disastrous. This Apple action is done to honor the AMP teams design of how AMP URLs should be handled, so it's actually, in a sense, part of Google's efforts to improve the web, not a counter to them.
- MBCook 9y agoIt's also done to DECRAPIFY the links that people try and share with their friends, providing a non-crappy user experience. In this case that HAPPENS to align with what Google wants. Of course google could've decided not to screw up the web in the first place… but we're obviously way past that.
- Sylos 9y agoRight, but they're not here to improve the web. If anything, these efforts are just to delay getting the next billion-dollar fee.
- geocar 9y agoOr because Google paid them. Google already pays over a billion dollars a year to Apple. I find Apple making AMP suck less for pay, to be much more likely than the Apple developers doing it because they think this is good for the web.
- Sargos 9y agoA lot of people are going to "cheer" this move but this is yet another anti-web move that Apple has made without regard to standards or how it will affect other areas of tech. Apple has a clear record of flouting standardized technologies in Safari like breaking iframe sizing in iOS mobile and not supporting many common APIs and is very opaque about whether or not they even view the web as a first class citizen. The code I work on almost has as many Safari hacks as we have IE hacks. If Apple would stick to just making great hardware and products and follow the standards like other vendors do then I feel like the whole tech world would be better off. Edit: Apparently I need to spell out in more detail my arguments because if read at surface level people only focus on AMP. This isn't about AMP. This is about sharing a link to something you are viewing. You are currently viewing the AMP page and that might look a certain way or even contain a certain type of graph that looks a certain way because it's static and fast to load. If you click Share and send this to a friend they will receive an entirely different page that might look different than what you were seeing. I don't think it's a good thing that we can no longer trust sharing a page with someone else. Now the ultimate destination is being edited behind the scenes without you knowing. It's a slippery slope that, like other things Apple has done, have possibly bad consequences in the future. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions after all.
- cylo 9y agoI don't understand how you see AMP pages representing a standard web? AMP represents the complete opposite of web standards and anything to remove it from the web leaves us all better off.
- Sargos 9y agoNot AMP per se but just how Apple make sweeping changes by fiat without soliciting feedback that affect how standard technologies are used throughout the web. This is just another move they've made that will force whole industries to adapt for no reason other than Apple wanted to do it.
- throwaway2048 9y ago
- SubiculumCode 9y agoI detest AMP and everything it stands for. I'd like to see this in Firefox.
- hobarrera 9y agoWhat do you mean on Firefox? As far as I understood, you could only land on AMP pages if using google's search app or alike -- am I missing something?
- kuschku 9y agoGoogle redirects most outgoing links from Google search in the browser to their AMP cache version instead.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ucaetano 9y ago"AMP's policy states that platforms should share the canonical URL of an article whenever technically possible"
- ethnic_throw 9y agoIt's not clear why Google relies on demanding browsers change to provide the experience the users expect.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoApparently their matket position gives them this ability.
- sandov 9y agoNo, thanks. I prefer to know what site I'm actually visiting.
- mratzloff 9y agoAccelerated Mobile Pages, for those who are curious. https://www.ampproject.org https://www.ampproject.org
- mrmondo 9y agoI absolutely support this move, I've been trying to rid myself of AMP since it was released and this at least stops me from having to clean up URLs when sharing them.
- ucaetano 9y ago"TL of AMP here. Just wanted to clarify that we specifically requested Apple (and other browser vendors) to do this. AMP's policy states that platforms should share the canonical URL of an article whenever technically possible." Apple is just following AMP's request.
- MBCook 9y agoWhy are you posting the exact same comment as a response to so many others?
- ucaetano 9y agoWell, informing people? I actually do this in a lot of threads. Is that bad?
- MBCook 9y agoI don't know, it doesn't seem useful to me. Especially since the thing you're quoting is currently the #1 comment.
- ucaetano 9y agoValid point. I deleted some of them in less relevant threads.
- epistasis 9y agoIt seems fairly irrelevant, and not so informative. How does your quotation relate to the original commenters statement?
- pcora 9y agoYes! Yes! 100 times yes! Thank you Apple!! I hate that amp crap! It's the main reason for moving to ddg.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- recursive 9y agoI don't know much about the implementation details of AMP. But my perspective as an end user is that it's pretty great. Non-amp pages tend to take multiple seconds to get interactive, and then the content jumps around as images and ads and fonts load. AMP tends to be usable in under half a second.
- slackingoff2017 9y agoMostly because Google serves the page from their own servers and starts loading it before you even click a search result. It's great for Google search and bad for everyone else.
- recursive 9y agoThen I guess "everyone else" should find a way to make a usable mobile content website without AMP, because apparently that's a nearly unsolvable problem. It's hard to be anti-AMP when the user experience is that much better with AMP.
- JoshMnem 9y agoAMP is terrible for the open WWW and not necessarily any faster. "Pinboard founder Maciej Cegłowski already recreated the Google AMP demo page without the Google AMP JavaScript and, unsurprisingly, it's faster than Google's version." https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider_google_amp_bad_bad_bad/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider...
- TulliusCicero 9y ago"Look, my tests prove that your lived experience is wrong." Yes, it's possible to create fast mobile pages without AMP. So if that's true, why does AMP make such a big difference to so many consumers? The bottom line is that the theoretical possibility of fast non-AMP pages is meaningless to consumers if few content providers actually act on that possibility. What matters is what happens in the real world.
- tannhaeuser 9y agoHopefully Apple fighting AMP makes it a non-starter going forward now since it isn't reaching lucrative iOS users.
- dragonwriter 9y agoYou get better placement for using it (and not just with Google), so if Apple were to redirects their users to your regular site, why wouldn't you still use it?
- e1ven 9y agoAFAIK, you do NOT get better placement for using AMP. You get better placement for having a fast site, which you can do easily without AMP.
- cramforce 9y agoThis change was requested by the AMP team.
- jacquesm 9y agoThis is not Apple fighting AMP.
- ucaetano 9y ago"AMP's policy states that platforms should share the canonical URL of an article whenever technically possible" Apple is just following AMP's policy.
- millstone 9y agoI hope the next step is a way to strip AMP links from all URLs, backfilling the "Disable AMP" setting that Google ought to have provided. AMP has always worked poorly on iOS: it has different scrolling, it breaks reader mode, and it breaks status bar autohide and jump-to-top. Perhaps Apple would be less hostile to AMP if the implementation were better.
- ashark 9y agoIt also breaks "back" IIRC. They expect you to use the "x" on the page to navigate back, not.. you know, the back button built into the browser. That and the scrolling are what got me to switch my iphone to DDG.
- droopybuns 9y agoIt also breaks saving URLs in evernote mobile! Down with AMP!
- PerryCox 9y agoNot breaking the back button should be #1 on every webpages priority list. If you break my back button I can almost guarantee I will stop using your site because in my mind the only sites that do that are spam/scams.
- zeitg3ist 9y agoThis is a general Google trend it seems. Google Images does it too: if you scroll left after viewing an image, you get the previous result instead of the page you were on. Really frustrating.
- nneonneo 9y agoGoogle blogs do this as well, showing you the "previous" blog post when you swipe left. Again, massive usability issue. I don't understand why Google has to break these well-established UI conventions.
- 9y ago
- yegle 9y agoIt might be simply because Safari respect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_link_element https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_link_element <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/23/politics/trumps-ire-at-aides-advice/index.html"> EDIT: correct HTML element <link rel="canonical">
- itg 9y agoLater down he mentions it is specific for AMP. https://twitter.com/jan4843/status/900416144955363328 https://twitter.com/jan4843/status/900416144955363328
- themacguffinman 9y agoThe tweet you linked seems to be asking a question, and I don't see any replies on the twitter website. Can you link directly to the reply?
- derimagia 9y agohttps://twitter.com/viticci/status/900418370025246721 https://twitter.com/viticci/status/900418370025246721
- LeicaLatte 9y agoDon't think Apple will accept any amount of billions from Google to let AMP pass through.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- russjr08 9y agoThe AMP team asked them to do this.
- Angostura 9y agoI wish it had an option to simply strip AMP in all circumstances. I quite often copy & paste URLs into e-mails, for example. It's irksome to have to request the desktop version just to get the proper domain and URL.
- stephen_g 9y agoYeah, I'm also seeing a lot of AMP links accidentally shared on Twitter too. I just want a global 'don't ever show me AMP pages' setting, as well as to be able to turn it off in Google search results.
- breatheoften 9y agoHurray!!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bhhaskin 9y agoGood on Apple for standing up to Google. This is great for an open web.
- cramforce 9y agoThis change was requested by the AMP team.
- matt4077 9y agoPeople in this thread seem to be overreacting like my immune system on strawberries.... Apple isn't taking up the good fight against AMP. They're simply removing it from URLs when those are shared via the build-in "share" functionality. 99% of interactions with AMP pages will see no impact. It seems like it should be uncontroversial that it is preferable to use the canonical non-AMP URI when sharing, so as to invoke content-negotiation between that page and the devise of whoever clicks on the shared link.
- MBCook 9y agoI don't think anyone here thinks it's controversial to share the original URL instead of the AMP one. I don't think there's anyone here who is mad that Apple is doing this. We are all mad that this is necessary in the first place. Apple is modifying their OS to fix something that Google shoved on people without any option to disable it or thought to the secondary effects of its existence.
- sergiotapia 9y agoI love Apple the most when they throw their weight around for the benefit of the end user. It's pretty clear that Google's main concern is ads ads ads. Apple already has my money, they focus 110% on making my life easier and their products fantastic. Go Apple!
- komali2 9y agoI mean, it's not like Apple is totally un-money-motivated here. It's pretty clear that they expect users to buy a new phone every 2 years.
- guitarbill 9y agoI think you have it backwards. Users want to buy a new phone every 2 years. A 5s still works fine, but most people don't want a 5s.
- komali2 9y agoI was referring to the fact that ios updates significantly slow down phones that aren't front-line, and I would argue that the reason users want a new phone is that + extensive marketing by apple.
- tuxracer 9y agoBeing forced to instead load some (almost universally awful) publisher site w/ 72 MB of JavaScript & CSS, absurdly intrusive ads popping up as you try to read, etc.... is an improved experience?
- sergiotapia 9y agoYou don't see anything wrong with Google MITM everybody who uses their phone? It's terrible for the open web. The tradeoff is users loading the real pages that _may_ be heavy, but it's worth it.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
- yakz 9y agoIf your content is valuable, why would you convert it into a Google format, upload it to Google servers, and allow them to serve it wrapped in a Google page? Google should appreciate the ad revenue from linking to your valuable content. Don't give Google more control over your content.
- emilfihlman 9y agoAMP is horrible and should just be buried.
- revmoo 9y agoGood.
- cramforce 9y agoTL of AMP here. Just wanted to clarify that we specifically requested Apple (and other browser vendors) to do this. AMP's policy states that platforms should share the canonical URL of an article whenever technically possible. This browser change makes it technically possible in Safari. We cannot wait for other vendors to implement. It appears Safari implemented a special case. We'd prefer a more generic solution where browsers would share the canonical link by default, but this works for us.
- jacquesm 9y ago> We'd prefer a more generic solution where browsers would share the canonical link by default, but this works for us. We had that solution it was called 'the web'. I'd prefer a more generic solution too: get rid of AMP. It really isn't about what 'works for you' it is about what is good for Google versus what is good for the web.
- endgame 9y agoHear, hear. If you want to incentivise not delivering multi-megabyte "experiences" to people, I could see a case for feeding page weight into the ranking algorithm. Then people would be less inclined to have tag managers loading tag managers loading a zillion random js trackers. I have personally saved at least one decent laptop from landfill by installing uBlock Origin on it, and making the web usable again.
- jacquesm 9y agoConnection count multiplied by number of bytes transferred. That would get rid of the cruft on the web in a heartbeat. Every SEO consultant would suddenly have an actual job, playing code golf on CSS and HTML to deliver the content in the minimum number of bytes possible.
- StavrosK 9y agoThis penalizes data-heavy websites, though, no? For example, I can see how a photojournalism piece with lots of photos would be ranked to hell, whereas a content-free text piece would be ranked very highly.
- chipotle_coyote 9y agoJust to make sure I'm following this myself: this isn't about disabling AMP, it's about making sure that URLs that you send to other applications or the clipboard from Safari will be the true URLs of the original web page, not AMP URLs. Right? That's the only way I can read "strip AMP links from shared URLs," but a lot of comments here are piling on to AMP itself. Which I understand (I don't like it for a lot of the reasons already brought up here, both in terms of philosophy and usability), but I don't think that's what we're actually talking about.
- wmf 9y agoOn HN you aren't allowed to discuss the details of AMP. It's AMP 101 all the time.
- seanp2k2 9y agoThere's a pile-on because now people are having to solve problems that AMP is creating instead of just killing AMP.
- ehsankia 9y agoYeah, the article completely misunderstands what this is about, and so do most people in this thread. I expected more from HN. This is something Chrome has implemented, and they've asked other browser vendors to do too. You want AMP to load the page quickly on your first load, but for sharing, the canonical link is the best to give to people.
- epistasis 9y agoIt's a single twitter thread, not an article. And how do you think it misunderstands what this is about?
- e12e 9y agoYes, the natural extension would be doing a similar translation when you copy url from Google search results - replacing the Google.com/...?URL=whatyouwant.example.com with just whatyouwant.example.com (but maybe safari does that already).
- plasma 9y agoHere's my AMP experience on Reddit: 1) Click the AMP link in Google 2) See half the reddit thread comments, since AMP is a cached older version, I then need to click "View full comments" which gets me to the mobile reddit link I wanted in the first place 3) For some reason, links in AMP reddit dont let you open in a new window -- which I often want to do when reading comments inline and see someone post a link in a comment. Frustrating. AMP cost me more time and effort than having just gone to the non-AMP link directly.
- pls2halp 9y agoIn what way is AMP a good idea for fucking Reddit? A social platform.
- whalesalad 9y agoI guess I am the only person who appreciates AMP. I really love the abbreviated version of things, without all the extra crap that has to load over the wire to render what amounts to a few paragraphs I'd like to read.
- swlkr 9y agoNice, I do this manually right now.
- jtl999 9y agoThank goodness On a related note, anyone know an extension for desktop Chrome that converts AMP pages to non-AMP pages? Or is that not programmatically possible?
- nodamage 9y agoMy understanding is that AMP pages load a cached version of the content inside a nested iframe. Doesn't this break browser extensions/bookmarklets that rely on processing the current HTML on the loaded page? Stuff like Instapaper or Pocket, for example?
- Fej 9y agoAnyone else think that the EU is going to file an antitrust suit against Google over AMP? Seems possible given their lack of hesitance in the past.
- jonluca 9y agoHopefully it'll fix some of the issues with getting redirected on desktops when people share links here/on reddit
- lokedhs 9y agoI only wish there was a way to automatically have those pesky t.co links resolved when sharing. I don't use Twitter, but other people do, and when they share a link to me I'd like to be able to 1) see what I am clicking on, and 2) avoid sending analytics information to Twitter when I do so.
- guelo 9y agoWould be great if it got rid of twitter shortened urls and other similar walled-garden cruft.
- Nuance 9y agoMust've resulted from this: https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/851111291229847552 https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/851111291229847552
- rc_bhg 9y agowtf is Amp?
- makecheck 9y agoHere is how Safari could fix the mobile web in a matter of weeks: 1. If a site downloads more than 100K, halt the page load or display a "too much data" error. 2. If a site takes more than 1 second to render, halt the page load or display a "too long to load" error. Do that for a few days and maybe these absurd sites would lose enough views that they might actually bother to figure out where their data is going. I recently had to browse with "data roaming" at the low low price of $2.05 per MEGAbyte and had to disable pretty much everything on my phone within minutes.
- drawkbox 9y agoAMP reminds me of AOL's web browser back in the day and possibly Facebook today, directing everything through their network and controlling the experience. AOL used to break lots of sites/graphics/scripts which noone would put up with today, AMP just makes you use and run everything through Google or else. This is a move to control more of the web through a walled garden and goes against the distributed nature of the web. The one thing that AMP may be beneficial for is archival purposes, preserving content past when another source may keep it. However, knowing Google products and how they are killed off like George R.R. Martin characters, no hope for that.
- NathanWilliams 9y agoI got so sick of AMP links I switched to Bing as default. Compared to google is sucks, but still better than dealing with AMP pages. When I have to, I use https://encrypted.google.com https://encrypted.google.com which is currently AMP free. I would switch back immediately, if I could disable AMP on my google account.
- daveheq 9y agoHaha. Apple officially thinks Google is a nuisance with news sites, like Adobe with Flash.