11 ms·
Google AMP Can Go To Hell (2018)
- peteretep 6y agoI agree. What concrete steps can I — and other technical people like me — take to help hasten its demise?
- rkagerer 6y agoLast paragraph in the article has a few suggestions: Or you could fight back. You could tell them to stuff it, and find ways to undermine their dominance. Use a different search engine, and convince your friends and family to do the same. Write to your elected officials and ask them to investigate Google’s monopoly. Stop using the Chrome browser. Ditch your Android phone. Turn off Google’s tracking of your every move. And, for goodness sake, disable AMP on your website.
- jimmydorry 6y agoSo I read this as being a fight that only the web publishers can wage then. A minuscule fraction of people are going to write to officials and change their browser / search engine. Even far less of that fraction are going to throw away an expensive flagship phone (And what are they going to buy? Apple? That's sure to go down well amongst the hackernews crowd).
- amelius 6y agoWell if there were one big website aimed at developers that was out of reach of Google, that could be a start. Imagine a service like stackoverflow, except it's (suddenly) not accessible through Google Search and Google Chrome. That could trigger a lot of developers to move away from Google.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mkj 6y agoUse Firefox instead of Chrome, then Google have less control over web trends.
- rapnie 6y agoGoogle's big argument for AMP is that web pages are big, bloated messes of large javascript chunks an unoptimized images, etc. And indeed they are. Single pages that weigh 10-20 MB are quite common. There is a trend to go back to simplicity and lightweight, elegant sites consisting of mostly plain html, some css and with just a sprinkle of JS in them. These sites are oftentimes faster than AMP versions. There is a broad toolset of static site generators to choose from, and still have sites that look & feel like a SPA. Other than that in many cases you don't even need the frameworks and tools, and could hand-craft in a text editor.
- manquer 6y agoIf that was the case , they should show fast light pages even without amp higher , amp is not only to make pages faster and lighter . If preference was anything fast then I would agree with you, instead of just amp
- rapnie 6y agoThe argument Google uses to shove AMP down our throat would not exist anymore. If the page is light, w3c-compliant, accessible and has good SEO and still Google says "turn this into less-light, less-simple AMP for our convenience and your page-ranking" then it would strengthen an anti-trust against them.
- dmitriid 6y agoThat's exactly what Google is doing: you can't get into the carousel at the top of the search unless your page is AMP.
- senectus1 6y agoI had to read read that quote 3 times before i got what was being said and by who...
- lalos 6y agoWhat's going to happen to all the url's if Google ever decides to announce they are getting rid of AMP? So annoying that you copy the link and it grabs some google url, so it's a matter of time the internet gets littered with those redirecting urls.
- baddox 6y agoIt shouldn’t be true that copying the link grabs a Google URL, right? At least in Safari, it copies the real website’s URL.
- lalos 6y agoIn my experience the url bar sometimes keeps the google url or if I click the share button thru their website ui and then copy that one to clipboard it sometimes grabs the google one. Not exactly sure but I've seen this in a couple of newspaper sites on the mobile experience. I'm always going out of my way of looking up the non-amp domain via other means.
- tedunangst 6y agoOn iPhone, if I search for "Webb space telescope" and switch to news tab, look for the ars technica link, and tap it, I navigate to this url (which I copy and pasted here). https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/science/2020/07/nasa-now-targeting-halloween-2021-for-launch-of-james-webb-telescope/%3famp=1 https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/science/2020/07...
- baddox 6y agoI did the same on my iPhone but searched for “AMP website” then clicked the first result with the lightning bolt and copied this URL: https://amp.dev/about/websites/ https://amp.dev/about/websites/
- tbgvi 6y agoThis sounds like at least one rationale for an anti-trust case.
- hkt 6y agoAt least. It'd be splendid if antitrust cases happened more often, Google must be due a dozen at least. Also: Gmail's spam filters are one especially egregious abuse of power. Email is another technology Google hates and which deserves to survive without Google hamstringing it
- atom058 6y agoEmail spam filters seem non-functional right now. Before I added a "allow all" filter to Google, the majority of email got sent to spam. Microsoft isn't better in this regard though: they don't have an "allow all" filter possibility, and will delete spam emails after two weeks. I've gotten invoices, personal email, and job offers deleted this way.
- catalogia 6y agoI agree that Amp can go to hell, but I'm very unsympathetic to these particular complaints: > “The canonical page allows users to view and add comments, but the AMP article does not. This is often considered missing content by users.” > “The canonical URL allows users to share content directly to diverse social media platforms. This feature is missing on the AMP page.” > “The canonical page contains a media carousel that is missing or broken in the AMP version of the page.” As far as I'm concerned, all that stuff is trash. I use ublock origin cosmetic filters to remove all that crap on every news site I read.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 6y agoExactly. "Canonical" content should be what the user wants to read, not what marketing hacks want to stuff the website with
- ec109685 6y agoPlease add [2018] to the title.
- nneonneo 6y agoOn the one hand - yeah, AMP can go to hell. It's a massive overreach and, as pointed out, is getting awfully close to an actual attempt to rewrite the Web. On the other hand, we probably wouldn't be in this situation if website owners didn't try to bog down their own websites with tens of MB of sheer garbage. Trimming the fat isn't a priority for website owners, so Google is trying to make it their priority. As long as sites think it's OK to lard up their sites with trackers, video ads, and all manner of nonsense, AMP will continue to be attractive to the end user.
- mulmen 6y agoYour second point comes up every time and you’re right. The bloat is a problem. Also Google can fix this. They can simply add load times and page size to their ranking algorithm. Problem solved. AMP is not the solution.
- MattGaiser 6y agoI am not sure that is much better than AMP in the burden it puts on content generators. AMP at least gives them a helping hand in being faster.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gundmc 6y agoWish granted! https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience.html https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/05/evaluating-page-ex... I don't have an issue with providing amp as a service if it doesn't get treated more favorably than fast non-amp pages.
- zeta0134 6y agoI don't even need it to be part of the ranking algorithm. Google could simply display a number of megabytes as a grey, boring number underneath a page. I think mobile users would be especially appreciative; those of us stuck on metered connections could avoid bloated news articles in favor of leaner sites covering the same story.
- lmm 6y ago> AMP pages are fast to load (so fast to crawl), easy to understand (thanks to mandatory structured data), and devoid of any unwanted clutter or mess (as that breaks the standard). Oh, how horrible it would be if the whole web were fast to load, easy to understand and devoid of unwanted clutter or mess. I hate AMP because it makes my web experience slower and worse - lately it seems like Chrome on android has taken to loading broken "offline" versions of any suggested pages, making me refresh to read anything, and whenever a search takes me to reddit I have to edit the url to get a version that respects my page settings (and, strangely enough, loads a lot faster than the AMP version). But I don't see the chaos of the current web as inherently virtuous; encouraging web pages to load faster and be easier to read is absolutely something Google should be doing, and I'll certainly favour a search engine that prioritises fast, easy-to-read pages over one that doesn't.
- pandem 6y agoMy main annoyance with AMP is reddit because their version is especially shitty if you expect the logged in version. I've found the easiest way to get normal Reddit is to click the upvote button.
- grugagag 6y agoI havent got any amp in a while and thought it went away only to realize that it was because I use Duckduckgo. Its a true relief, Amp is a horrible excuse to accaparate the web. Down with amp and the google supremacy.
- h8hawk 6y agoI've switched to their android app for this. Much faster and better experience.
- Polylactic_acid 6y agoThats the idea. They cripple the web version so you use the app that can spam you with notifications. I use i.reddit.com which loads up a super fast version clearly designed to work well with an iphone 3.
- MattGaiser 6y agoI would like to know what the average user thinks of AMP. We techies are ok with a uncontrolled freewheeling web, but a lot of people have a problem with that and hate that experience.
- causality0 6y agoI'm one of the less-technical and least techno-political, compared to most HN posters. I personally despise AMP for two reasons: the URLs are fugly when I send them to someone and take longer to parse when reading, and AMP hijacks my mobile browser's address bar and prevents me from accessing my tabs until I scroll all the way up the page. It's a thinly-veiled method of forcing me to look at the web page twice before closing it and I wish I could get my hands on the son of a bitch who thought it up.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rydre 6y ago> I wish I could get my hands on the son of a bitch who thought it up. Malte Ubl (@Cramforce) would like to have a word with you.
- tomgp 6y agoMy guess would be that the average user doesn’t know about AMP or have any opinion about it.
- MattGaiser 6y agoPerhaps not a overt opinion, but do they prefer using AMP sites or not? If we sat them down and had them use 5 with AMP and 5 without, which would they prefer?
- feanaro 6y agoThe answer to this should obviously depend on the chosen set of test websites. But even if there are websites where the AMP version would be preferred (and I'm sure there are), that's not the whole story. In order for a user to make an informed decision about their preference, they have to take into account the whole cost -- not just the immediately observable part of it. That includes all future ramifications of an AMP-centric future, many of which would definitely not be good for the user. So while I'm sure there are examples of egregiously bloated websites that would be superficially improved by AMP, I'm not convinced the user comes out with a net benefit.
- superasn 6y agoSome browsers like Kiwi browser on android now give you the setting to redirect AMP websites to their normal URL. This is a very good feature that I always have enabled[1]. More browsers should add this feature to fight this non-sense. I think for FF, Chrome extensions like this must already exist. [1] https://kiwibrowser.com/features/ https://kiwibrowser.com/features/ [2] https://kiwibrowser.com/wp-content/uploads/elementor/thumbs/Features-AMP-oe27675i2rt74nfeiknst6242i0tazqpow6qjdg6ww.png https://kiwibrowser.com/wp-content/uploads/elementor/thumbs/...
- xster 6y agoIs there some Android/iOS app or a simple web app that de-AMPs URLs? My process for just sharing an article these days is to find the tweet button if they embed one for the article, click through them, pray that it's not to tweet about the publication or the author but for the article itself, then get the normal non-AMP link from the tweet draft to share a normal URL instead of the AMP link.
- coronadisaster 6y agoThere are Firefox addons that do that, I.E.: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/amp2html/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/amp2html/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- stevenjohns 6y agoAMP is fundamentally broken. I've said this before, I'll say it again: companies are not people. Once a company reaches a certain size, the rule is to assume bad faith. Always.
- ttctciyf 6y agoIn the present case, the failure to provide an opt-out speaks volumes. If AMP was a good faith attempt to improve UX, it would have been provided early on. The faceless imposition of AMP is a clear signal of malign intent, IMO.
- enos_feedler 6y agomalign? I think the imposition of AMP was the only solution to a problem with 3 constraints: 1) make web pages fast, without shitty popups on mobile 2) make this happen for large coverage of heavily visited pages 3) make this happen quickly (OKRs are on quarter/annual cadence) Imagine you owned Google Search and you were afraid for your life that everything was moving into native apps because the experience was better. As a search engine, you only control the front door and not the content. What do you do?
- stevenjohns 6y ago...start punishing slow websites by de-ranking them? The same way they have punished poor content in the past? The same method that worked every single time they've done it? You seem to believe that they don't have any other options which is wrong. They have a lot of options at their disposal and they intentionally chose a very hostile one.
- enos_feedler 6y agoit isn't about slow web pages. It is about unwinding a shitty user experience that mobile magnified. How do you punish a shitty UX?
- ttctciyf 6y ago
- axegon_ 6y agoI had never heard about it before reading the article, looked it up, and I agree with the article. This is yet another wretched idea like jsx. Kill it before it lays eggs!
- Madzen__ 6y agoWhat's wrong with jsx?
- topicseed 6y agoJSX seems to work just fine for a whole bunch of people.
- axegon_ 6y agoSo does heroin from the perspective of even more people. That doesn't make it a good idea.
- topicseed 6y agoYou're just getting caught up in a battle of ideological preferences and implementation methodologies. A lot of people disagree, a lot of people agree. Nobody gets hurt, different tools serve different purposes and audiences. We can leave absurd drug parallels out of that conversation.
- tomc1985 6y agoIt seems a little weird that they are asking website operators to add the very same bloated functionality that AMP claims to try to eliminate
- ulfw 6y agoAMP solves problems that existed 10-20 years ago. Not today. Websites load fast enough (when using an ad blocker). Sure that Google doesn't like that.
- unityByFreedom 6y agoAMP messes up data science analytics too. Now we have a mix of the following formats, google.com/amp/s/... amp.domain.com/... domain.com/amp/... domain.com/.../amp I guess it could even be a query parameter although I have not yet seen this. Does anyone know if there is an "AMP url normalizer" library or write-up?
- floatingatoll 6y agoDoes the WebExtensions standard permit us to release extensions that bypass AMP URLs when they are visited by the browser? Could someone please charge me money for that extension on the iOS and macOS App Stores? I'm not expecting this to be maintained for free, I don't want to install a full-blown ad blocker, I just want a single-task de-AMP-er that just de-AMPs. (Yes, I use Firefox, but I want to de-AMP all iOS and macOS webviews, not just the ones that load in Firefox.)
- deergomoo 6y agoSafari 14 will add support for the WebExtensions API but alas, on MacOS only (where presumably you will never see AMP pages anyway). I have idly wondered if it's possible to use Safari content blockers to trick the page into redirecting to the real site by blocking certain JS bundles, but I would assume not.
- floatingatoll 6y agoUgh, good point re macOS.
- fouc 6y agoI never encounter AMP sites because I don't use google search anymore.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dang 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21703345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21703345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17920720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17920720 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- amelius 6y agoSide question: is it still considered "cool" to work at Google? I'm asking since the answer in case of Facebook seems to have shifted.
- suddenexample 6y agoDepends on what you mean by "cool". The compensation is not the highest, but it seems to be the company with the widest variety of high-impact and technologically exciting projects. And I wouldn't say that it's objectively "uncool" to work at Facebook. They have definitely taken a beating in terms of perspectives on their company's morals, but very few people are willing to go without using at least one Facebook product. And they continue to be known as the company that has a pretty good WLB with top tier pay, good career progression, and great benefits, relative to similar-sized companies.
- wayneftw 6y agoJust request the desktop site or use DuckDuckGo. Problem solved. Luckily Google still serves the desktop site to my phone. Twitch won’t do it even if I spoof my user agent because they want you to use their shitty app. So, I just stopped using Twitch on my phone or tablet. Problem solved again.