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Have you ever visited a news site without AMP enabled? It's literally impossible to use. Popups flying all over the place, unwanted advertising videos loading,

Have you ever visited a news site without AMP enabled? It's literally impossible to use. Popups flying all over the place, unwanted advertising videos loading, megabytes of tracking JS loaded etc. AMP is forcing publishers to make sites people can actually use.

Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
Yes? The Guardian, all the time? And... it's fine?
JohnFen 7y ago
> Have you ever visited a news site without AMP enabled? Yes, but I don't have any of those issues. A decent web browser fixes those problems.
nwallin 7y ago
Use an ad blocker. Boom, problem solved.
laurent123456 7y ago
I use duckduckgo with Firefox so I never see any AMP website and it works fine. Firefox allows you to have an ad-blocker though so it makes a difference. It's all about choice, but if you want to use a Google search engine with a Google browser then indeed you probably have to browse the web the Google way.
kristopolous 7y ago
Yes. A news site, any news site, around 2014 would just smash my phone, making it completely unusable. The page load would just be completely unpredictable. You start reading something and then it would fly down 2 pages and then up half a page because some asset container would load but then change its ideas of how much space it would need. Then you'd touch to scroll to continue reading and it would register as a tap and open up the ad. Then the js hell would make the phone unusable, it felt like the people that wrote late 90s windows malware went into the business of making local news websites. it was complete and utter trash.
ninkendo 7y ago
Sure, I visit non-AMP sites all the time, and here's what happens: Reader mode comes up and shuts everything else down. I have it on by default, it's great. It blows AMP the hell out of the water and it's the only thing that makes the "unwashed" web (ie. anything that matches common search terms) tolerable.
buboard 7y ago
Can you name such a site that is impossible to use? I 'm quite sure it sees so few visitors that it doesn't care for disappointing them. And if they re bloated as hell - why would they care about amp anyway?
dredmorbius 7y ago
My alternative is generally to load the site in https://outline.com https://outline.com As with the former Readability, or Pocket, this offers a simplified page view. On Firefox or Safari, use Reader Mode. (Ironically, Chrome has a Reader mode which is 1) automatically enable, 2) not disablable, and 3) is uniformly styled horribly. I believe there are now browsers and/or extensions which enable Reader View by default, or at least on specified domains/sites. I've got a modicum of sympathy for Google here. Yes, the Web is a problem, and HTML's fast-and-loose attitude "be generous in what you accept, conservative in what you emit" has turned out to be a long-term liability. Allowing Google and Google alone to play both sides of the deal in specifying and benefitting from the standards, is a flagrantly glaring conflict of interest (and very likely antitrust violatio). But the underlying stated concerns are real. And absent some entity with the ability to tell website publishers "no, your cavalier so-called HTML Does Not Play Here", the descent into further levels of markup and Javascript hell will continue. I've found the most useful process for re-rendering sane HTML from most websites is to dump to plain text first (w3m or lynx, if they'll handle the site, copy/paste if not), and then re-add whatever minimal markup is actually required (usually via Markdown), then generate clean HTML. Actual content payload is often only a few single-digit percent, and often far less, of the page's markdown. And that's excluding additional asset loads (CSS, JS), let alone image and media files. Again: until there's a cost to publishers for pulling this crap, we're going to see more of it.
- efreak 7y ago
  I believe you can disable Chrome's reader mode in flags. I know you can force it to show up on all pages, as that's how I have it set up on my tablet (I use Firefox and Brave primarily, with Chrome or Bromite as a fallback)
  - efreak 7y ago
    Also, you might be interested in brow.sh, as it should provide easily readable, clean HTML that only contains visible elements. It should be better than dumping pages from links, as it supports scripting.

Doctor_Fegg 7y ago

Yes? The Guardian, all the time? And... it's fine?

JohnFen 7y ago

> Have you ever visited a news site without AMP enabled? Yes, but I don't have any of those issues. A decent web browser fixes those problems.

nwallin 7y ago

Use an ad blocker. Boom, problem solved.

laurent123456 7y ago

I use duckduckgo with Firefox so I never see any AMP website and it works fine. Firefox allows you to have an ad-blocker though so it makes a difference. It's all about choice, but if you want to use a Google search engine with a Google browser then indeed you probably have to browse the web the Google way.

kristopolous 7y ago

Yes. A news site, any news site, around 2014 would just smash my phone, making it completely unusable. The page load would just be completely unpredictable. You start reading something and then it would fly down 2 pages and then up half a page because some asset container would load but then change its ideas of how much space it would need. Then you'd touch to scroll to continue reading and it would register as a tap and open up the ad. Then the js hell would make the phone unusable, it felt like the people that wrote late 90s windows malware went into the business of making local news websites. it was complete and utter trash.

ninkendo 7y ago

Sure, I visit non-AMP sites all the time, and here's what happens: Reader mode comes up and shuts everything else down. I have it on by default, it's great. It blows AMP the hell out of the water and it's the only thing that makes the "unwashed" web (ie. anything that matches common search terms) tolerable.

buboard 7y ago

Can you name such a site that is impossible to use? I 'm quite sure it sees so few visitors that it doesn't care for disappointing them. And if they re bloated as hell - why would they care about amp anyway?

dredmorbius 7y ago

My alternative is generally to load the site in https://outline.com https://outline.com As with the former Readability, or Pocket, this offers a simplified page view. On Firefox or Safari, use Reader Mode. (Ironically, Chrome has a Reader mode which is 1) automatically enable, 2) not disablable, and 3) is uniformly styled horribly. I believe there are now browsers and/or extensions which enable Reader View by default, or at least on specified domains/sites. I've got a modicum of sympathy for Google here. Yes, the Web is a problem, and HTML's fast-and-loose attitude "be generous in what you accept, conservative in what you emit" has turned out to be a long-term liability. Allowing Google and Google alone to play both sides of the deal in specifying and benefitting from the standards, is a flagrantly glaring conflict of interest (and very likely antitrust violatio). But the underlying stated concerns are real. And absent some entity with the ability to tell website publishers "no, your cavalier so-called HTML Does Not Play Here", the descent into further levels of markup and Javascript hell will continue. I've found the most useful process for re-rendering sane HTML from most websites is to dump to plain text first (w3m or lynx, if they'll handle the site, copy/paste if not), and then re-add whatever minimal markup is actually required (usually via Markdown), then generate clean HTML. Actual content payload is often only a few single-digit percent, and often far less, of the page's markdown. And that's excluding additional asset loads (CSS, JS), let alone image and media files. Again: until there's a cost to publishers for pulling this crap, we're going to see more of it.

efreak 7y ago
I believe you can disable Chrome's reader mode in flags. I know you can force it to show up on all pages, as that's how I have it set up on my tablet (I use Firefox and Brave primarily, with Chrome or Bromite as a fallback)
- efreak 7y ago
  Also, you might be interested in brow.sh, as it should provide easily readable, clean HTML that only contains visible elements. It should be better than dumping pages from links, as it supports scripting.