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AMP still makes no sense. On iOS, Android and Windows it’s completely broken and friction increasing to grab a link to send to a friend in another medium. Not

AMP still makes no sense. On iOS, Android and Windows it’s completely broken and friction increasing to grab a link to send to a friend in another medium. Not only that but it seems the page slightly degrades sometimes. For what? A theoretical page load time improvement? Maybe that’s naive but we already have “request desktop mode” to allow for bifurcated experiences. Why do we need a third thats seemingly even worse? Total “get off my lawn” complaint but how do you turn the damn AMP off? :)

mattacular 6y ago
It's a lot of effort to maintain AMP pages for all your site content alongside the standard pages over time. That's why they tend to degrade.
- texasbigdata 6y ago
  Seems like a ShowHN opportunity: upgrade your AMP code (ugh) automatically when you update your regular web facing presence. Call it antitrust.ly! :)
- 1f60c 6y ago
  This is by design. They want your canonical web page to be AMP.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  Reminds me of the old-fashioned "m.<domain>" sites we used to have to maintain for mobile browsing; often using wonderful tech like WML. That sucked.
  - mattacular 6y ago
    Yes, it is effectively like operating an "adaptive" site alongside your (probably) responsive main site
alangibson 6y ago
AMP is the most transparent land grab Google has pulled. It's technically unjustifiable, is arguably value destroying, and as a bonus you can't disable it. It only makes sense in terms of trying to lock marketers and publishers into a Google-led ecosystem.
- treis 6y ago
  The concept of AMP makes a lot of sense. It does speed up browsing and prevents sites from being terrible. The prloblem is that the implementation isn't great and it's Google driven. But the concept is sound.
  - alangibson 6y ago
    If by 'the concept' you mean 'be faster', then yea. But that's not much of an endorsement of AMP.
    - kristopolous 6y ago
      I don't know if you remember the mobile news web around 2015 or so. Content would furiously jump around as the page was overcome by advalanches, videos on autoplay would pop up in all the corners, as you scrolled, the page would often break at paragraphs as even more videos would load, secretly sliding in the content like some infestation. If you tried to highlight text to copy, you'd see interstitial popups of yet again more ads and then discover your clipboard was populated with ad after ad. Then when you copied the URL, it was full of fingerprints and UID hashes from all these providers so it was hundreds of excess bytes, usually leaking personal information. You'd have to chop it off or just give up and share the extra tracking garbage at the end of the url And this was essentially all of the local news sites. They were indistinguishable from the click here to download virus typosquatting sites. It was horrific. Often loading an article would lock up and crash the browser, it was totally completely unusable. This was the post-flash web that we all desperately wanted, here ya go! I really don't like amp, but it has fixed that problem so effectively that you have to remind people in detail that it actually once existed.
justinph 6y ago
> how do you turn the damn AMP off? Use DuckDuckGo.
- innocenat 6y ago
  For a lot of us DDG isn't a viable alternative --- the quality just isn't there. (No, I am no talking about English or other European language result -- Japanese, Thai, etc. are all terrible)
smichel17 6y ago
Disable JavaScript (eg, with uMatrix)
eqtn 6y ago
Disable chrome and make firefox nightly your default browser. Amp links gets redirected to correct urls. Works for left side news feed too.
- julianlam 6y ago
  I desperately want to use Firefox nightly or beta... But the mobile experience is a disaster. They were on track to roll it out to Firefox stable, but I guess now that the team's gone, I won't have that forced down my throat...
Lammy 6y ago
> For what? A theoretical page load time improvement? For better ranking in the dominant search engine, so you make more money from your participation in the dominant advertising network.
sanju2306 6y ago
Kiwi browser removes amp from google results.
ehsankia 6y ago
> and Windows "Accelerated Mobile Pages" should not be showing up on desktop at all. If they do, that's poor coding by the website itself. Just like how you often get stuck on website's mobile version when browsing on desktop. > it’s completely broken That's a pretty big statement, could you specify in which way it is "completely broken"? > friction increasing to grab a link This has been mostly fixed, I haven't had an issue in the past year. On Chrome and Firefox I believe, it works natively, and in other browsers I believe it adds an extra bar at the top to grab the link. > Not only that but it seems the page slightly degrades sometimes. Quite the opposite, in my experience it's often a far simpler and focused page with less crap. The only slight disadvantage is that comment sections on articles are often disabled, but they are usually a click away. It makes sense anyways to not load those by default on mobile. > A theoretical page load time improvement? It's definitely not theoretical. It's also a way to bundle websites allowing easier edge caching which helps tremendously. > we already have “request desktop mode” Partly because the majority of websites never gave a shit about optimizing their mobile experience without an incentive. > seemingly even worse? I truly believe this is a case of "assigning downsides you notice to AMP, but upsides being mostly invisible". You wouldn't have anyone to assign it to when you see a mobile page on desktop, but if it's an AMP page, then you have someone to get angry at. Another example would be how a spam protection could be blocking 99% of the spam, but if a couple bad content get through, you'll think the spam protection is doing absolutely nothing and it sucks, because you don't get to see the 99% of work it's actually doing.
- texasbigdata 6y ago
  These are all unbelievably resoanable and fair comments. Particularly #2. Since it’s been a few days, just to respond to only the easiest point, copying a link to the non-AMP website so socially share takes 3 to 4 incremental clicks on mobile, so that’s what I meant by that. But reflecting you’re spot on, since I can’t quantify the benefit AMP has had on the internet it’s hard to claim the negatives are so eggregious. Thx for that perspective.

mattacular 6y ago

It's a lot of effort to maintain AMP pages for all your site content alongside the standard pages over time. That's why they tend to degrade.

texasbigdata 6y ago
Seems like a ShowHN opportunity: upgrade your AMP code (ugh) automatically when you update your regular web facing presence. Call it antitrust.ly! :)
1f60c 6y ago
This is by design. They want your canonical web page to be AMP.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Reminds me of the old-fashioned "m.<domain>" sites we used to have to maintain for mobile browsing; often using wonderful tech like WML. That sucked.
- mattacular 6y ago
  Yes, it is effectively like operating an "adaptive" site alongside your (probably) responsive main site

alangibson 6y ago

AMP is the most transparent land grab Google has pulled. It's technically unjustifiable, is arguably value destroying, and as a bonus you can't disable it. It only makes sense in terms of trying to lock marketers and publishers into a Google-led ecosystem.

treis 6y ago
The concept of AMP makes a lot of sense. It does speed up browsing and prevents sites from being terrible. The prloblem is that the implementation isn't great and it's Google driven. But the concept is sound.
- alangibson 6y ago
  If by 'the concept' you mean 'be faster', then yea. But that's not much of an endorsement of AMP.
  - kristopolous 6y ago
    I don't know if you remember the mobile news web around 2015 or so. Content would furiously jump around as the page was overcome by advalanches, videos on autoplay would pop up in all the corners, as you scrolled, the page would often break at paragraphs as even more videos would load, secretly sliding in the content like some infestation. If you tried to highlight text to copy, you'd see interstitial popups of yet again more ads and then discover your clipboard was populated with ad after ad. Then when you copied the URL, it was full of fingerprints and UID hashes from all these providers so it was hundreds of excess bytes, usually leaking personal information. You'd have to chop it off or just give up and share the extra tracking garbage at the end of the url And this was essentially all of the local news sites. They were indistinguishable from the click here to download virus typosquatting sites. It was horrific. Often loading an article would lock up and crash the browser, it was totally completely unusable. This was the post-flash web that we all desperately wanted, here ya go! I really don't like amp, but it has fixed that problem so effectively that you have to remind people in detail that it actually once existed.

justinph 6y ago

> how do you turn the damn AMP off? Use DuckDuckGo.

innocenat 6y ago
For a lot of us DDG isn't a viable alternative --- the quality just isn't there. (No, I am no talking about English or other European language result -- Japanese, Thai, etc. are all terrible)

smichel17 6y ago

Disable JavaScript (eg, with uMatrix)

eqtn 6y ago

Disable chrome and make firefox nightly your default browser. Amp links gets redirected to correct urls. Works for left side news feed too.

julianlam 6y ago
I desperately want to use Firefox nightly or beta... But the mobile experience is a disaster. They were on track to roll it out to Firefox stable, but I guess now that the team's gone, I won't have that forced down my throat...

Lammy 6y ago

> For what? A theoretical page load time improvement? For better ranking in the dominant search engine, so you make more money from your participation in the dominant advertising network.

sanju2306 6y ago

Kiwi browser removes amp from google results.

ehsankia 6y ago

> and Windows "Accelerated Mobile Pages" should not be showing up on desktop at all. If they do, that's poor coding by the website itself. Just like how you often get stuck on website's mobile version when browsing on desktop. > it’s completely broken That's a pretty big statement, could you specify in which way it is "completely broken"? > friction increasing to grab a link This has been mostly fixed, I haven't had an issue in the past year. On Chrome and Firefox I believe, it works natively, and in other browsers I believe it adds an extra bar at the top to grab the link. > Not only that but it seems the page slightly degrades sometimes. Quite the opposite, in my experience it's often a far simpler and focused page with less crap. The only slight disadvantage is that comment sections on articles are often disabled, but they are usually a click away. It makes sense anyways to not load those by default on mobile. > A theoretical page load time improvement? It's definitely not theoretical. It's also a way to bundle websites allowing easier edge caching which helps tremendously. > we already have “request desktop mode” Partly because the majority of websites never gave a shit about optimizing their mobile experience without an incentive. > seemingly even worse? I truly believe this is a case of "assigning downsides you notice to AMP, but upsides being mostly invisible". You wouldn't have anyone to assign it to when you see a mobile page on desktop, but if it's an AMP page, then you have someone to get angry at. Another example would be how a spam protection could be blocking 99% of the spam, but if a couple bad content get through, you'll think the spam protection is doing absolutely nothing and it sucks, because you don't get to see the 99% of work it's actually doing.

texasbigdata 6y ago
These are all unbelievably resoanable and fair comments. Particularly #2. Since it’s been a few days, just to respond to only the easiest point, copying a link to the non-AMP website so socially share takes 3 to 4 incremental clicks on mobile, so that’s what I meant by that. But reflecting you’re spot on, since I can’t quantify the benefit AMP has had on the internet it’s hard to claim the negatives are so eggregious. Thx for that perspective.