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As a mobile user, I fucking hate it. I hate that every fucking google search result on mobile web has its stupid little icon I hate that there is no way for m

As a mobile user, I fucking hate it. I hate that every fucking google search result on mobile web has its stupid little icon I hate that there is no way for me to disable it as a user I hate that it has muddied the waters in what the url bar means I hate that it has trained users to not question fake url bars. I hate that cloudflare so thoroughly jumped on its dick I hate that we invented a way to fake the address in the url bar just for this stupid fucking feature. I hate that we now have a system where somebody can share a page url with a friend, and that friend can view it on t he same device model using the same browser with the same settings, and will get a different page because one was viewing an amp page but shared it's real url. I hate that every fucking amp page is lower featured in some way, and almost never works in desktop mode. And most of all, I hate that it leads to everybody offloading shit onto google's servers. AMP is not fast because it's served from google's CDN. That's a lie, It has always been a lie, and it will always be a lie. AMP is fast because it's incompatible with 99% of the bullshit client cpu heavy tracking and ad libraries, so they don't get included inside AMP pages. We could have just had that, without all this stupid bullshit CDN redirection/misdirection bullshit. And you know what, You want me to get off my hate train? Get google and all of the other search providers using it to solve complaint #2. That's really all it would take to get most of the hate to go away.

memo_ree 7y ago
> AMP is fast because it's incompatible with 99% of the bullshit client cpu heavy tracking and ad libraries, so they don't get included inside AMP pages. > We could have just had that, without all this stupid bullshit CDN redirection/misdirection bullshit. I agree the world could have faster pages without AMP. What would that take though? Would it take web developers across the world pushing back against including megabytes of extra JavaScript for ads/tracking, at all the companies who are currently using AMP?
- rhizome 7y ago
  Seems to be a theme with me this week but I'll suggest it anyway: sites could run their own advertising.
- hw 7y ago
  Isn't that up to the developers themselves - whether they want to shoot themselves in the foot by slowing down their site by including lots of JS? Who is Google to determine how the Internet should be run? Shoving AMP down people's throat - because Google can as it owns majority browser and search market share - is akin to large governments in the world pushing their weight around and sticking their noses in other countries' issues. I cringe everytime I visit a page that's AMP enabled, and usually bounce or just get on a desktop. Sure, promote a 'faster' web, but if it's at the expense of a horrible experience, why?
  - izacus 7y ago
    No, it's akin to large governments swooping in and regulating industries when they start hurting people en masse. Web developers weren't professional enough to make the web fast. AMP isn't the right solution, but the community itself was incapable of policing itself so it was just a question of time before it happened. Before that, people were massively moving to the apps because the web got too slow and unusable on mobile.
    - lwansbrough 7y ago
      Who elected Google to act on our behalf? Free market takes care of slow sites. Either they’re too slow to use or they’re not.
      - joshuamorton 7y ago
        And they did. Google, a member of the free market, found that slow sites were negatively impacting them. So it took action.
      - cameronbrown 7y ago
        Last time I checked, Google is part of the free market, no? This is exactly how free markets work. And if it turns out AMP is really bad for the web, then the reverse will happen too at some point.
    - hw 7y ago
- izacus 7y ago
  Considering the severe downvotes for your question: Nothing. It didn't make a difference when Google announced penalties for slow loading sites and nothing would make a difference now. Hence why web developers of HN are so angry at AMP - it bans them from building sites filled with 20MB of JavaScript bloat. If you read through HN history, you'll see hundreds of comments belittling anytone that complained about webpage size and slow loading - usually defending it with a "noone has time to optimize things and build without these huge libraries" argument.
  - lwansbrough 7y ago
    So penalize sites for load time / bloat. Simple as.
  - geekone 7y ago
    >If you read through HN history, you'll see hundreds of comments belittling anytone that complained about webpage size and slow loading - usually defending it with a "noone has time to optimize things and build without these huge libraries" argument. Any examples? My limited reading experience here has been the opposite.
    - dang 7y ago
      Nearly all such generalizations about HN are quite wrong; this one seems particularly off. I think it's because comments we don't like make a much stronger expression than comments we do, so they weigh more heavily in forming our impression. This also explains why people arrive at such contradictory generalizations: it's because they like different things.
- lwansbrough 7y ago
  Why is this Google’s problem to solve? And why, if it is somehow Google’s problem to solve (which would mean it’s any search provider’s problem to solve) does it require the site to adopt Google technology? Why not just penalize slow/bloated sites?
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  If Google want to contribute, downrank sites that bloat, or track, or are littered with all the other crap that ruins the experience. Which would of course include a lot of what Google does. So they "solve the problem" by not solving the problem.
cheeze 7y ago
You seem really angry about this...
- jabgrabdthrow 7y ago
  Everybody can tell, it seems like he really tried to emphasize that part.
- mcphage 7y ago
  Those seem some pretty heavy criticisms, why wouldn’t that merit anger?
- jacquesm 7y ago
  They're far from alone in that.
- MrStonedOne 7y ago
  Then you haven't read my username.
memo_ree 7y ago
> I hate that there is no way for me to disable it as a user Yeah, seems like you should be able to. Just curious, where would you want that option to appear, and how would you want to see the search experience change as a result?
- sixstringtheory 7y ago
  My first guess is to only make it available in the first place to people using search while signed in. Could even sell it as a way to get the “faster” web by signing in. At least that way there’s a choice. Making it default for everyone and then forcing people to sign in to opt out would be counterproductive from a privacy standpoint. Could also just provide the original link right next to the AMP link in search results and let users decide.
- aasasd 7y ago
  Even regardless of me being pro-AMP or anti-AMP, I'm not sure what you're trying to get at here. - Google has settings for search and a page for these settings. For example, I have sometime in the past went to that page and set my preferences there. And now they're taken into account when I use Google's search. Like settings are wont to do, y'know. - We already know how search without AMP works.
- hw 7y ago
  I think you're approaching it from the wrong POV. First of all, the option needs to be on the site owner/developer side on whether to adopt AMP or not - and not have the decision of not adopting AMP adversely affect search ranking. As a user, I should just see whatever the site lets me see. If they decide AMP is best for user experience, I would no doubt get it. If they decide to show a responsive mobile friendly site because it works best, then show me that.
ummonk 7y ago
Cloudflare seems to have provided a service that fixes a lot of the issues you mentioned, so I'm not sure why you're mad at Cloudflare for making the best of this bad situation.
MrP 7y ago
I use duckduckgo on Firefox and I don't see any AMP pages. Give them a go.
- loktarogar 7y ago
  DuckDuckGo users are going to be a minority for a long time.
  - MrP 7y ago
    Minority or not, if you use DDG, you will not see an AMP page. What do you want, to search for stuff or to feel that you're supporting the winning team or something?
    - loktarogar 7y ago
      You're putting intent in my words that isn't there. It's a fact. There's no quick path to victory until mass tech community adoption rubs off onto regular folks; it hasn't hit that first milestone yet. It won't win in the short term, which is where AMP adoption is
- nicolaslem 7y ago
  I use Google on Firefox and I never saw an AMP page. Each time I see a topic on HN about AMP I feel like I live in a nice parallel universe.
dfabulich 7y ago
> AMP is not fast because it's served from google's CDN. That's a lie, It has always been a lie, and it will always be a lie. AMP is fast because it's incompatible with 99% of the bullshit client cpu heavy tracking and ad libraries, so they don't get included inside AMP pages. AMP is fast because of prefetching. That's not a "lie." You can measure this. When you click an AMP link, the page is already downloaded. Prefetched pages load faster than https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ But prefetching has a problem: when you visit a website, they can fingerprint you and track you. Prefetching from random websites in search results violates your privacy. The only way to fix the privacy issues with prefetching is for the search engine (not just Google--Bing, too) to serve the prefetched page from their own CDN.
- blub 7y ago
  "The only way to fix the privacy issues with prefetching is for the search engine (not just Google--Bing, too) to serve the prefetched page from their own CDN." Except Google is probably the biggest threat to privacy on the planet. You're not "fixing" the privacy issues, you're making things worse.
  - TheSoftwareGuy 7y ago
    It’s not making things any worse. Google already knows what your searched for and they already know what you clicked on, even without AMP. They probably know what you did on that webpage too because they’re probably using google analytics. I don’t like google google either, especially because of their history on privacy issues, but they’re not getting much additional info from this. Just a stronger foothold on the web
- TheSoftwareGuy 7y ago
  But wouldn’t that mean that your search results are going to contain much more data than necessary? Sending you’re results and prefetched versions of all the websites linked therein?
- bduerst 7y ago
  Link prefetching and rendering isn't unique to AMP - it was even added by W3C to be part of the HTML5 standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_prefetching#Prefetching_in_HTML5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_prefetching#Prefetching_i... Even Internet Explorer will prefetch and render pages.

memo_ree 7y ago

> AMP is fast because it's incompatible with 99% of the bullshit client cpu heavy tracking and ad libraries, so they don't get included inside AMP pages. > We could have just had that, without all this stupid bullshit CDN redirection/misdirection bullshit. I agree the world could have faster pages without AMP. What would that take though? Would it take web developers across the world pushing back against including megabytes of extra JavaScript for ads/tracking, at all the companies who are currently using AMP?

rhizome 7y ago
Seems to be a theme with me this week but I'll suggest it anyway: sites could run their own advertising.
hw 7y ago
Isn't that up to the developers themselves - whether they want to shoot themselves in the foot by slowing down their site by including lots of JS? Who is Google to determine how the Internet should be run? Shoving AMP down people's throat - because Google can as it owns majority browser and search market share - is akin to large governments in the world pushing their weight around and sticking their noses in other countries' issues. I cringe everytime I visit a page that's AMP enabled, and usually bounce or just get on a desktop. Sure, promote a 'faster' web, but if it's at the expense of a horrible experience, why?
- izacus 7y ago
  No, it's akin to large governments swooping in and regulating industries when they start hurting people en masse. Web developers weren't professional enough to make the web fast. AMP isn't the right solution, but the community itself was incapable of policing itself so it was just a question of time before it happened. Before that, people were massively moving to the apps because the web got too slow and unusable on mobile.
  - lwansbrough 7y ago
    Who elected Google to act on our behalf? Free market takes care of slow sites. Either they’re too slow to use or they’re not.
    - joshuamorton 7y ago
      And they did. Google, a member of the free market, found that slow sites were negatively impacting them. So it took action.
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      Last time I checked, Google is part of the free market, no? This is exactly how free markets work. And if it turns out AMP is really bad for the web, then the reverse will happen too at some point.
  - hw 7y ago
izacus 7y ago
Considering the severe downvotes for your question: Nothing. It didn't make a difference when Google announced penalties for slow loading sites and nothing would make a difference now. Hence why web developers of HN are so angry at AMP - it bans them from building sites filled with 20MB of JavaScript bloat. If you read through HN history, you'll see hundreds of comments belittling anytone that complained about webpage size and slow loading - usually defending it with a "noone has time to optimize things and build without these huge libraries" argument.
- lwansbrough 7y ago
  So penalize sites for load time / bloat. Simple as.
- geekone 7y ago
  >If you read through HN history, you'll see hundreds of comments belittling anytone that complained about webpage size and slow loading - usually defending it with a "noone has time to optimize things and build without these huge libraries" argument. Any examples? My limited reading experience here has been the opposite.
  - dang 7y ago
    Nearly all such generalizations about HN are quite wrong; this one seems particularly off. I think it's because comments we don't like make a much stronger expression than comments we do, so they weigh more heavily in forming our impression. This also explains why people arrive at such contradictory generalizations: it's because they like different things.
lwansbrough 7y ago
Why is this Google’s problem to solve? And why, if it is somehow Google’s problem to solve (which would mean it’s any search provider’s problem to solve) does it require the site to adopt Google technology? Why not just penalize slow/bloated sites?
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
If Google want to contribute, downrank sites that bloat, or track, or are littered with all the other crap that ruins the experience. Which would of course include a lot of what Google does. So they "solve the problem" by not solving the problem.

cheeze 7y ago

You seem really angry about this...

jabgrabdthrow 7y ago
Everybody can tell, it seems like he really tried to emphasize that part.
mcphage 7y ago
Those seem some pretty heavy criticisms, why wouldn’t that merit anger?
jacquesm 7y ago
They're far from alone in that.
MrStonedOne 7y ago
Then you haven't read my username.

memo_ree 7y ago

> I hate that there is no way for me to disable it as a user Yeah, seems like you should be able to. Just curious, where would you want that option to appear, and how would you want to see the search experience change as a result?

sixstringtheory 7y ago
My first guess is to only make it available in the first place to people using search while signed in. Could even sell it as a way to get the “faster” web by signing in. At least that way there’s a choice. Making it default for everyone and then forcing people to sign in to opt out would be counterproductive from a privacy standpoint. Could also just provide the original link right next to the AMP link in search results and let users decide.
aasasd 7y ago
Even regardless of me being pro-AMP or anti-AMP, I'm not sure what you're trying to get at here. - Google has settings for search and a page for these settings. For example, I have sometime in the past went to that page and set my preferences there. And now they're taken into account when I use Google's search. Like settings are wont to do, y'know. - We already know how search without AMP works.
hw 7y ago
I think you're approaching it from the wrong POV. First of all, the option needs to be on the site owner/developer side on whether to adopt AMP or not - and not have the decision of not adopting AMP adversely affect search ranking. As a user, I should just see whatever the site lets me see. If they decide AMP is best for user experience, I would no doubt get it. If they decide to show a responsive mobile friendly site because it works best, then show me that.

ummonk 7y ago

Cloudflare seems to have provided a service that fixes a lot of the issues you mentioned, so I'm not sure why you're mad at Cloudflare for making the best of this bad situation.

MrP 7y ago

I use duckduckgo on Firefox and I don't see any AMP pages. Give them a go.

loktarogar 7y ago
DuckDuckGo users are going to be a minority for a long time.
- MrP 7y ago
  Minority or not, if you use DDG, you will not see an AMP page. What do you want, to search for stuff or to feel that you're supporting the winning team or something?
  - loktarogar 7y ago
    You're putting intent in my words that isn't there. It's a fact. There's no quick path to victory until mass tech community adoption rubs off onto regular folks; it hasn't hit that first milestone yet. It won't win in the short term, which is where AMP adoption is
nicolaslem 7y ago
I use Google on Firefox and I never saw an AMP page. Each time I see a topic on HN about AMP I feel like I live in a nice parallel universe.

dfabulich 7y ago

> AMP is not fast because it's served from google's CDN. That's a lie, It has always been a lie, and it will always be a lie. AMP is fast because it's incompatible with 99% of the bullshit client cpu heavy tracking and ad libraries, so they don't get included inside AMP pages. AMP is fast because of prefetching. That's not a "lie." You can measure this. When you click an AMP link, the page is already downloaded. Prefetched pages load faster than https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ But prefetching has a problem: when you visit a website, they can fingerprint you and track you. Prefetching from random websites in search results violates your privacy. The only way to fix the privacy issues with prefetching is for the search engine (not just Google--Bing, too) to serve the prefetched page from their own CDN.

blub 7y ago
"The only way to fix the privacy issues with prefetching is for the search engine (not just Google--Bing, too) to serve the prefetched page from their own CDN." Except Google is probably the biggest threat to privacy on the planet. You're not "fixing" the privacy issues, you're making things worse.
- TheSoftwareGuy 7y ago
  It’s not making things any worse. Google already knows what your searched for and they already know what you clicked on, even without AMP. They probably know what you did on that webpage too because they’re probably using google analytics. I don’t like google google either, especially because of their history on privacy issues, but they’re not getting much additional info from this. Just a stronger foothold on the web
TheSoftwareGuy 7y ago
But wouldn’t that mean that your search results are going to contain much more data than necessary? Sending you’re results and prefetched versions of all the websites linked therein?
bduerst 7y ago
Link prefetching and rendering isn't unique to AMP - it was even added by W3C to be part of the HTML5 standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_prefetching#Prefetching_in_HTML5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_prefetching#Prefetching_i... Even Internet Explorer will prefetch and render pages.