25 ms·

De-AMP: Cutting out Google and enhancing privacy

853 points by w0ts0n 4y ago

fellerts 4y ago
I wanted to read the justification for why "AMP harms users' privacy, security and internet experience", but the link ironically points to a Google doc for which access is restricted. Is there an open version of this somewhere?
- jonathansampson 4y ago
  That link is meant to jump to https://brave.com/privacy-updates/18-de-amp/#why-is-amp-harmful https://brave.com/privacy-updates/18-de-amp/#why-is-amp-harm..., just a bit further down the page. Apologies for the confusion
Vladimof 4y ago
I thought that Google finally gave up on AMP... I guess not
ocdtrekkie 4y ago
I'm really impressed to see this, Mozilla should've led here on implementing something like this years ago. This is a pretty big nudge for me to consider Brave as a future browser.
- speeder 4y ago
  Mozilla kicked one of its main creators years ago too, and that guy is the one making Brave... so no surprise ;) Features that should come out on Mozilla will instead come out of Brave...
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    - mikem170 4y ago
      Did his resigning have something to do with him personally donating $1000 in 2008 in support of California's Proposition 8 referendum? (opposing gay marriage) Just checking, you really didn't mention why he resigned.
      - RedComet 4y ago
        To be more clear, it was to do with media frenzy once they found out about it.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
- cphoover 4y ago
  I agree 100%. There are still things about brave that confuse me... like the browser feature that allows giving crypto to content providers... but as someone who loathes AMP... I support this feature.
  - d0gbread 4y ago
    Do you have specific questions about how the crypto features work? They're optional by the way, but I've found them an amazing way to regularly donate to a couple key blogs I follow.
    - cphoover 4y ago
      Yea I guess... How would I set this up? Do I need some sort of wallet? How would a random website author know what to do with this specific cryptocurrency?
  - soundnote 4y ago
    As far as I understand it: Brave sells ads. They get $X normal money from it. The ads are delivered from a local catalog downloaded in bulk (the same way safe browsing blocklists are, for example) and matched on device. If you opt in to see Brave's ad popups, you get a cut from the revenue those popups generate. Brave gives this cut as BAT - they buy the coins from the open market. Brave has a built-in tipping service where you can tip people with BAT. If you do, Brave transfers BAT from your wallet to the tippee (and Brave takes a cut from the transaction). Tippee has BAT that they can sell because there's at least one buyer of BAT on the market: Brave. It seems like a sensible system overall, but my specifics may be wrong.
    - cphoover 4y ago
      This is interesting though I doubt I would ever enable this because I loathe popup advertisements probably more than AMP
- webmobdev 4y ago
  Mozilla is a joke now. They've now converted Firefox into an ad-ware / spyware ( https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/7/22715179/firefox-suggest-search-ads-browser https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/7/22715179/firefox-suggest-... ) because the current geniuses leading Mozilla have decided that apart from the 5+ million users of uBlock Origin, every other Firefox users loves ads and wants them! They've earned 100's of millions of dollars from Firefox, and still claim that they don't have the resources to refactor the browser, modularise it and innovate it. I have always suspected that the current Brave CEO Brendan Eich was a victim of a malicious campaign intended to get him removed from Mozilla (which he co-founded, and later become a CEO of), because he would have been more vocal against Google in Mozilla, and wouldn't have been happy to let the Firefox codebase stagnate while everyone in Mozilla was content with the millions of dollars they were getting from Google. (His religious beliefs / political ideology was just an excuse and just made him an easy target). Edit: I am not endorsing Brave browser either, as there are some questionable privacy issues with it.
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    What's a joke is claiming that paid suggestion search results "have converted Firefox into an ad-ware / spyware [sic]" I'm not a fan of them adding this and switching it on, but it's easily disabled... > Click on the hamburger menu and then select Settings > Click on Privacy and Security in the sidebar and scroll to Address Bar — Firefox Suggest > Select or deselect the checkbox for contextual suggestions to turn the feature on or off > Select or deselect the checkbox for “occasional sponsored suggestions”
    - kreeben 4y ago
      >> I'm not a fan of them adding this Excuse me sir but you definitely sound like a fan. The really real joke is claiming that proclaiming that Mozilla is a joke is some sort of a joke. Out-of-the-box I would definitely classify Firefox as ad-ware/spy-ware.
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        Does that make Brave adware as well, since it ships with a suite of features fundamentally designed to serve you ads of their own creation?
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  I'm not sure why you would be impressed by something that has been possible in Firefox and Chrome for many years with a de-amp extension (though I would recommend a more general-purpose URL-de-cruftifier, such as ClearURLs, which will also remove most tracking bits from URLs.) Google removed ClearURLs from the chrome add-ons store because (I wish I were making it up) the extension's description was too detailed: https://www.ghacks.net/2021/03/25/the-curious-case-of-clearurls-removal-from-the-google-chrome-webstore/ https://www.ghacks.net/2021/03/25/the-curious-case-of-clearu... Brave implementing this, while nice, is basically a nothingburger.
  - jonathansampson 4y ago
    I think you demonstrated in your own post why this is such a big deal. Extensions can certainly deliver this type of functionality in large part, but you have to [run an extension]. You need to ran an extension process (with its additional overhead). You need to make sure Google doesn't swoop-in with breaking changes between manifest versions. Then you have to make sure the extension is permitted in the Web Store, and not removed over something as silly as a detailed description. By delivering this functionality natively, Brave offers a more reliable and efficient solution to the problem of AMP.
    - richardwhiuk 4y ago
      You have to run Brave, which is a considerable overhead.
      - jonathansampson 4y ago
        Running a browser is better than running a browser in addition to several extensions for functionality that could be integrated natively, resulting in less overhead. But yes, you will need to use a browser to browse the Web
        smoldesu 4y ago
        I don't trust Brave's implementation in the first place. You have a direct conflict of interest with protecting user privacy since you also make money off of the ads you serve users (because of how you skim BAT revenue). Furthermore, your scummy behavior of holding site operators ad revenue hostage is pretty disgusting, and doesn't provide much of a moral compass for us to base your actions off of. I'd trust stock Chromium before I'd install Brave on any of my machines.
skybrian 4y ago
Isn't this going to make mobile performance worse? They should publish performance numbers.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  Responsible engineers will prioritize privacy over absolute performance. Nevertheless, investigations into Google's conduct have already discovered internal admission that AMP would actually slow down the web. "Google falsely told publishers that adopting AMP would enhance load times, but Google employees knew that AMP only improves the [redacted] and AMP pages can actually [redacted] [redacted] [redacted]. In other words, the ostensible benefits of faster load times for cached AMP version of webpages were not true for publishers that designed their web pages for speed. Some publishers did not adopt AMP because they knew their pages actually loaded faster than AMP pages." "Google also [redacted] of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one second delays in order to give Google AMP a [redacted] [redacted] slows down header bidding, which Google uses to turn around and denigrate header bidding for being too slow." And of course, the reason they did all this: "Google also designed AMP to force publishers to route rival exchange bids through Google’s ad server so that Google could continue to peek at rivals’ bids and trade on inside information. Third, Google designed AMP so that users loading AMP pages would make direct communication with Google servers, rather than publishers’ servers. This enabled Google’s access to publishers’ inside and non-public user data. AMP pages also limit the number of ads on a page, the types of ads publishers can sell, as well as enriched content that publishers can have on their pages." https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/images/admin/2020/Press/20201216%20COMPLAINT_REDACTED.pdf https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...
  - ec109685 4y ago
    If Google's servers pre-cache the contents of the article, the experience is instant when you click on a link, so the idea that it's slower to read a Google Amp Link on a Google Search Result compared to clicking out to a separate website is false. If a publisher simply uses Google Amp on their own site to display websites, then it can be slower. They slowed the non-AMP ads because they didn't want loading them to interfere with the content the user was interested in reading.
rafaelturk 4y ago
Kudos! While reading this announcement I've learned upcoming AMP 2.x. Impressive that Google still pusing for AMP and as mentioned is even worse.
londons_explore 4y ago
Braves business is built on Google Chromes source code... Google has 500+ staff working on that codebase. When they finally annoy Google and they decide to rewrite the license for future versions, will Brave be able to keep up?
- classified 4y ago
  Yep, biting the hand that feeds will only work for so long.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Aye, the DOJ won't look favorably on anti-competitive practices.
- inglor 4y ago
  Google has open sourced only as much as they had too for using Webkit's GPL codebase and have been notorious in close-sourcing bits when they are able (like the DevTools WebAssembly debugging tools and a ton of other stuff). So the fact Chromium is (mostly) open source (Chrome is most certainly not) is certainly not charity or the goodness of their hearts. It is the work of idealistic individuals like Lars Knoll who gave us this among other things like Qt. This is also true for a lot of other Google projects like Android.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    Having spent a lot of time working on the codebase... Far more is opensource than Google needed to make open, and the development model is far more open than androids. In the chromium codebase, there are even some modules where the key technical decision-makers aren't Google employees.
  - magicalist 4y ago
    > Google has open sourced only as much as they had too for using Webkit's GPL codebase This isn't remotely true. Most of Chromium code is BSD-3-Clause. > have been notorious in close-sourcing bits when they are able (like the DevTools WebAssembly debugging tools I'm not a fan of that either, but to be fair it's a Chrome extension[1], not part of Chrome. > and a ton of other stuff). Like what? The trend has generally been the other way. Flash was removed, PDFium was released. Video codecs? But they've always been that way. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cc%20%20-devtools-support-dwa/pdcpmagijalfljmkmjngeonclgbbannb https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cc%20%20-devtools-...
perihelions 4y ago
How does AMP interact with Brave's advertising monetization, BAT?
- jonathansampson 4y ago
  Great question. Brave's advertising is presently done on the New Tab Page, via Sponsored Images. No AMP impact there. Users who opt-in to Brave's Ad Notifications will occasionally (frequency thresholds are governed by the user) see a native notification displayed outside of the browser. No apparent AMP impact there either. Where AMP could impact things is for the publisher. Publishers are able to verify their domains/properties, and receive BAT contributions from Brave users visiting their content. If that publisher is having their content served through Google's domain, that would impact their ability to receive support from visitors.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
anticristi 4y ago
I wonder that the EU commission hasn't used GDPR or some anti-conpetition law to ban AMP in the EU.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  GDPR enforcement is severely lacking unfortunately. None of the record-breaking “4% of global turnover” fines have materialized even for malicious actors that definitely deserve it.
lern_too_spel 4y ago
- bigp3t3 4y ago
  Nobody complained about Google's RSS monopolizing because the search engine doesn't provide RSS URLs in the top results, unlike they do for AMP links, at least nearly as frequently. RSS is also far from a similar case study to AMP in how web content is delivered. RSS optional, AMP was a lazy web dev's means to presenting pages over mobile without having to think about layout. At least that's what if felt like to me as a web user.
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    And how is showing AMP in top results monopolizing the web? Bing does the same thing. A social news aggregator could do the same thing if it thinks people could read the article and go back to scrolling the feed faster. AMP loads instantly. There is nothing lazy about supporting it. Just like RSS, it requires extra work for the publisher to get the user the instant-loading behavior they desire.
- jonathansampson 4y ago
  I think you read too quickly, or skipped over a few key parts. Yes, AMP can cause some pages/content to load more slowly. This was stated in the write-up, and supported a link to Google's own DOJ disclosures. In that source we read that Google knew that some publishers avoided AMP because their own pages were shown to load more quickly without it, especially considering 1-second throttling on Google's part for non-AMP pages, aimed to give AMP a "nice comparative boost".
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    I think you didn't read that report at all. The nice comparative boost was for ads. AMP pages loaded from an aggregator are rendered before you click on them, and the DOJ disclosures did not dispute that this would cause them to load faster for users as it obviously would.
freediver 4y ago
I haven't noticed that many AMP pages recently. Is it still a thing and what kind of sites use them?
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  Google no longer marks AMP pages in its results, but Bing does.
  - jarrro 4y ago
    Wow that's new. Was this announced somewhere or just introduced silently?
- perihelions 4y ago
  - "what kind of sites use them?" Here's a good sample set (AMP posts on Reddit, sorted (roughly) by popularity): https://old.reddit.com/user/AmputatorBot/?sort=top&t=week https://old.reddit.com/user/AmputatorBot/?sort=top&t=week
  - p1peridine 4y ago
    "AmputatorBot" lol
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  They pop up on reddit fairly frequently. Lot of news sites push them, hard...when people get a share link, especially on mobile, they end up with an amp link. Lot of subreddits have automod rules that delete amp links, and there are bots that look for amp links and reply to the comment with a de-amp'd link.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Commercial blogsites that post often, and specifically focus on 'new' stories that people are searching for online. Think websites that do news, celebrity gossip, music, games and movies.
nomilk 4y ago
My main gripe with AMP may seem pedantic or even petty, but it's the way it messes with the URL. Copying and sharing or saving a URL is fundamental to web, and AMP makes me have to mess around to get that standard URL. It's about as small as first world problems get, but it's annoying all the same.
- freedomben 4y ago
  This bothers me greatly too and is my biggest gripe. I understand it's hard to build something like amp without that, but I think it will have unfortunate reverberations for many years to come. Especially if at some point Google pulls the plug on Amp. Will all those amp links suddenly die?
- folkrav 4y ago
  Doesn't sound petty to me.
- gruturo 4y ago
  It's neither pedantic nor petty - I find it so annoying too. It's like a car wash operator placing an unwanted sticker on my windshield.
- BuckRogers 4y ago
  It's about as small as first world problems get, but it's annoying all the same. This logic needs to stop. We may as all well live in mud huts. Then we can have "real problems". You can presume privilege is your problem, or, we can continue to strive for better conditions always as a culture. Low standards will lead you exactly where you belong, your mud hut.
- lupire 4y ago
  Even without AMP, Chrome is dedicated to hiding URLs from users.
- seelmobile 4y ago
  [Google employee, opinions are my own] This was 'fixed' by Signed Exchanges[0] which sites can implement. This is (imho) a cool new web tech that got drowned out in the AMP noise. [0] https://web.dev/signed-exchanges/ https://web.dev/signed-exchanges/
shadowgovt 4y ago
Honestly, this is win-win and I applaud Brave for taking on this engineering task. - Users who are concerned about AMP can use Brave to bypass Google's infrastructure - Users for whom AMP is a benefit can continue to use it - Everybody wins
- s17n 4y ago
  Totally agree! (And I'm usually in these threads just to defend AMP)
- stiray 4y ago
  Really? What happens when google no longer indexes non amp pages as most of the web pages are on amp? Just a thought teaser. As it looks like there is not much people seeing further from their noses.
  - RedComet 4y ago
    Brave has a search engine for that.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    > What happens when google no longer indexes non amp pages as most of the web pages are on amp? Your thought experiment is equivalent to "What happens when Google no longer indexes the open web," and I think the answer is "Bing takes Google's place."
gruturo 4y ago
Kudos to Brave - they're a sometimes weird actor, but some of their initiatives are commendable, and they often do what Mozilla should have, but didn't. I rarely end up in AMP pages on my mobile, but when it happens I immediately feel like I stepped on a turd, and promptly backtrack / close the tab before it hijacks my back button, half the screen, standard controls (including doing something weird to scrolling) and other unpleasantries like banners whose "x" somehow overlaps my browser's bars, and are therefore out of reach (and said browser bars somehow do NOT autohide when scrolling, unlike on normal pages) Getting AMP results from Google search has been one of the drivers leading me to switch to DDG, so congrats Google, one less customer.
- agilob 4y ago
  Brave is doing for us all the things Mozilla promised
  - dralley 4y ago
    And a lot of other shaddy things that Mozilla has never done, like the affiliate link hijacking (which yes, was supposedly a "bug" but you have to admit that it's an awfully convenient "bug"), and setting up crypto wallets for content creators without solicitation and then collecting money on their behalf.
    - jonathansampson 4y ago
      Heads up: I work at Brave. As such, I encourage you to check my claims, verify my sources, and don't take anything I say for granted. Always happy to provide more context as needed :) Firefox literally sends your keystrokes to Google, right out of the box. Brave, however, was found to be the most private popular browser by reputable researchers: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf. Brave [never] hijacked links either. Affiliate Links were offered among suggested sites for relevant search input. So if you searched "Binance," the browser would offer (among other suggestions), an affiliate link for the site. Users could then choose to browse to the property with the affiliate link, and in so doing support the development of Brave. No impact to privacy or security at all. The mistake here was with input handling. Built to handle search input, this feature also mistakenly handled fully-qualified domains. While we intended the app to offer affiliate links (when relevant) to something like "what is binance?", it was also offering them for "binance.us". The latter case was corrected quickly (and the feature itself was disabled out of the box). More about that on our blog: https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/. To your second point, about setting up crypto wallets and soliciting donations on behalf of non-participating publishers, you're mistaken there as well. To prime the support-system in Brave (called Brave Payments at the time), we staked Brave users with tokens, inviting them to direct those tokens to creators they would like to support. More clearly, Brave gave Brave users say over where Brave ought to direct its own tokens. Unfortunately, our UI/UX wasn't very clear about which creators were verified, and which were not (we followed the Twitter approach, marking verified creators with a checkmark, but doing nothing for others). This resulted in some confusion at the end of 2018, where users were directing Brave's tokens to non-participating creators (most notably Tom Scott). We received considerably helpful feedback about how the system could be improved (both from a UI/UX side, and operationally). Frankly, I don't think I've ever seen our team work so hard, and churn out such a monumental update in so little time. We had made massive changes within 48 hours IIRC. Creators were explicitly marked as verified or unverified in all cases, the BAT that Brave stakes with users would remain in the local wallet until it could be received by a verified creator. And BAT that sat pending for 90 days would be unlocked again for the user to direct elsewhere. Tom Scott was kind enough to review our changes, and explicitly gave us his approval soon-thereafter. What is now 'Brave Rewards' wouldn't be doing so well today were it not for Tom and so many other incredible users helping us find the best path forward. More about that on our blog: https://brave.com/rewards-update/ https://brave.com/rewards-update/
silicon2401 4y ago
For some reason, I got this idea at some point that brave has a built in crypto miner as its form of monetization. Can anyone confirm if that's true or not? A browser cutting out amp sounds like exactly the kind of browser I want Edit: not sure why I got downvoted. I'm asking a genuine question because I'm always looking for google alternatives, and firefox has been disappointing lately.
- jaywalk 4y ago
  They do have a weird crypto thing (not a miner, as far as I know) but it's easy to disable and forget about.
- PaulBGD_ 4y ago
  They’re monetized by selling ads in exchange for BAT, plus they probably hold plenty of BAT which they can sell over time as they continue to increase its value.
- jonathansampson 4y ago
  No miner; in fact we were the first browser (to my knowledge) to block crypto-miners back in 2017/18 when they began appearing on the Web (and being delivered via third-party ad networks). Brave does come with Brave Rewards, and optional component which enables users to participate in privacy-preserving advertising (ads are matched locally, on your device). Users who opt-in receive 70% of the associated revenue for ads they see. Rewards are delivered in the form of BAT (and ERC-20 token), which can be kept, or gifted to content creators across the Web as a means of support.
  - silicon2401 4y ago
    Thanks for squashing that rumor. I'll definitely give brave a try with that crypto rumor resolved and the news that brave cuts out amp
    - InCityDreams 4y ago
      I'm a joe blow. Average user. I've been using brave for 3+ years. I try the other browsers fairly regularly. Always come back to brave. Check the brave:// flags (?), and go through every option under settings. I have the crypto off, but - looking more at the brave site (including the many problems), I'm beginning to err.... be convinced(!?).
knodi 4y ago
I fucking hate APM. As firefox iOS user I can't seem to get rid of it.
- pedro2 4y ago
  thankfully it was replaced by ACPI
sydthrowaway 4y ago
Imagine working at Google on AMP The banality of evil
- dafelst 4y ago
  Join Google to change the world as a top tier software engineer, then spend all your time updating protobuf definitions to keep internal tools glued together as Yet Another Widely Used Internal API implements breaking changes. Such a lot of wasted talent.
alanh 4y ago
Recently I came across the AMP website at https://amp.dev/ https://amp.dev/ (after some years since first seeing it). It’s really remarkable how much Google wants to pretend this is an industry standard and not their own little fiefdom. I don’t see the word Google anywhere, not even on the About page.
- user3939382 4y ago
  It kind of reminds me of the OOXML thing where Microsoft hijacked the standards process for its own benefit.
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    OOXML was a standard-after-the-fact, because Microsoft couldn't respond to some Government tenders that required that all data be stored in standardised formats. So... they "standardised" it. Hilariously, OOXML as generated by MS Office is not the standard version by default. The standard version has different XML namespaces and even slightly different capabilities. You can choose this format in Save As, but nobody does.
- lupire 4y ago
  The.dev gTLD is Google's; it exists for Google projects to hide their Google relationships. amp.dev does make a tiny out of context mention at the bottom of the page, that Google runs the AMP CDN. But overall it's obvious that the AMP Project trying to hide it's Googleyness by being "Open JS Foundation", which itself is a corporate trade group hijacking the word "Open".
  - mcdonje 4y ago
    Google administers .dev, but it's open. You or I could get a .dev domain and use it for a project that has nothing to do with Google.
  - biztos 4y ago
    TIL what really happened to godoc.org!
misterbishop 4y ago
AMP is probably the single worst thing Google has produced. But as a Pixel 6 user, I think the real solution to bypassing AMP would have to live at the VPN level. Using Firefox Nightly as my primary browser, I don't really get AMP search results. The place I see it is in Google's news feed on the right side of the home screen. Brave wouldn't solve my problem there, and I already trust Firefox more.
- stiray 4y ago
  It is not the worst. It is just "one of them", how to get the monopoly over web content.
  - misterbishop 4y ago
    It is the worst. It offers nothing to anyone, it has a terrible user interface, and it breaks basic features of the world wide web. If AMP is genuinely a way to enhance online user experiences, then make it opt-in, instead of the current no-way-to-opt-out.
- kllrnohj 4y ago
  Ok there's a lot of amp hate here, and a lot of it justified, but when amp first picked up steam as just a regular mobile user it was amazing. I basically filtered searches to only look at those with the amp icon because in the real world in real conditions on mobile connections they legitimately & consistently loaded 10x faster than non-amp pages. And basically never had the dreaded random scroll jumps during loading. Since then networks & phones got faster, a lot faster, and the difference maybe isn't worth the cost anymore. Also I think the amp restrictions have greatly relaxed, making amp just as slow? But "single worst thing"? Hardly. At launch it delivered and big time, the UX experience was night & day.
  - dmw_ng 4y ago
    The main trick behind AMP is simply the ability to load third party content in a hidden IFRAME on the google.com origin securely. Your clicks were instant because they were literally pre-rendered client-side before you clicked, and that's why custom JS is prohibited. SXG and WebBundle basically help map that trick out into the browser's domain, rather than some nasty restrictive JS library. It allows eliminating the whole megabyte-sized supersystem of JS nonsense that makes up the AMP library and having just plain ol' regular HTML/JS, while still netting most of the performance benefits of the old approach. Mobile networks may have improved but the speed of light has not, and so these techniques still have a place in contemporary networking.
nanidin 4y ago
I de-AMP'd by switching my default mobile search to DDG.
- phreack 4y ago
  I felt literally forced to leave Google on mobile by AMP. DDG's results are often worse and I end up having to !g, and it's always a punch in the stomach having to see two screens worth of poorly marked ad-results, SEO spam and AMP - all of those getting worse every month. And even then, their indexing of sites like Stack Overflow, Reddit, and other major players with good content is still miles ahead than DDG when I'm trying to find the solution to a problem.
- mastazi 4y ago
  But AMP can pop up in unexpected places, for example Twitter links on mobile used to be AMP until recently. Just changing search engine will not prevent AMP completely
UberFly 4y ago
If you run Pi-Hole here's the RegEx to add to your blacklist ^(.+\.)?amp\..+\.com$ ^(.+\.)?ampproject\.org$
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dont__panic 4y ago
  Thank you for this. Added to my pi hole. Seems to be working great so far for the occasional AMP links my coworkers send.
gundmc 4y ago
I don't remember coming across many AMP pages recently. Since Google stopped favoring AMP in the search results the other year, it seemed like AMP was dying off. Is this feature even still relevant in 2022?
stakkur 4y ago
This is great. I believe Firefox does this already, and you can do it on Safari via extension/plugin (Amplosion, Overamped).
- nicklaf 4y ago
  Not sure about Firefox cutting out AMP directly. I personally use this extension to do it: https://www.daniel.priv.no/web-extensions/amp2html.html https://www.daniel.priv.no/web-extensions/amp2html.html
tyingq 4y ago
Everything you need to know about AMP is in one very specific section of the spec: "AMP HTML documents MUST...contain a <script async src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script> https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script> tag inside their head tag" [1] Meaning, "Your content must load and run some Google controlled javascript, that does who-knows-what to your content and end users". In the past, that's included injecting a big header that pushes your content down, hijacking swipe events on your page, an [X] button that looked like it would delete the AMP banner header, but instead navigated away from your page back to google, etc. [1] https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/learn/spec/amphtml/ https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/learn/spe...
- hackerfromthefu 4y ago
  Evil
- bduerst 4y ago
  The Amp javascript can be self-hosted [1] away from Amp's servers, there's even a framework demonstrating how to do it [2]. The only difference is that it doesn't pass Amp validator, which is necessary for the Bing search result icon. Developers have requested the feature for the Amp validator to include self hosting but it hasn't been added yet (or have any plans to AFAIK). [1] https://gist.github.com/mdmower/b56e94f0dc36beafb825b0c5e31fceef https://gist.github.com/mdmower/b56e94f0dc36beafb825b0c5e31f... [2] https://github.com/mdmower/amp-self-host-demo https://github.com/mdmower/amp-self-host-demo
  - tyingq 4y ago
    Interesting, though I am citing the AMP spec, and it does say MUST. I'm curious if Google would put a self-hosted AMP page, for example, in their carousel. I think it probably can't.
    - bduerst 4y ago
      It's been exactly a year since Google announced they are no longer prioritizing AMP content in the carousel, or as SEO in general, so they probably would put self-hosted AMP there (if it passed the SEO bar): >Besides algorithm changes, there will be several user-facing changes. For starters, the Top Stories carousel in Search will no longer be limited to AMP content. The Google News website and mobile apps will similarly surface more non-AMP content. Lastly, the AMP lightning bolt icon will no longer be used to badge eligible content: https://9to5google.com/2021/04/19/google-search-page-experience/ https://9to5google.com/2021/04/19/google-search-page-experie...
fidrelity 4y ago
As someone who myself relies on Google's SEO traffic I'm a bit hesitant to say this (but luckily I'm small enough that Google doesn't care about me at all): AMP is terrible for everyone except Google themselves. It's a plain abuse of their quasi monopoly and I support everything that fights AMP. Another reason why I'm happy to use Brave both on desktop and especially on mobile.
disadvantage 4y ago
It's easy to slag AMP because it's Google, and privacy-aware people really don't like Google and denounce all their actions without even thinking. But on the other hand: what if AMP is actually a good thing? Like if it speeds up the web and addresses web obesity, why not embrace it?
- jonathansampson 4y ago
  Please see the "Why is AMP Harmful?" section :) https://brave.com/privacy-updates/18-de-amp/#why-is-amp-harmful https://brave.com/privacy-updates/18-de-amp/#why-is-amp-harm...
- robonerd 4y ago
  So what if it saves me a few milliseconds of load time and megabyte or two of RAM? Maybe that has some value a shitty mobile connection, but such marginal gains are not worth conceding even more control of the web to Google. I'd rather websites take 10 minutes to load than have Google MITM my life.
- dogleash 4y ago
  Yes, that's the carrot. Now look for the stick. >what if AMP is actually a good thing? People said this when AMP was first announced too. Good for people with lives comfortable enough to be so off-guard that this didn't set off any alarm bells; but businesses are not your friends. Thankfully with the benefit of time and hindsight the Texas Attorney General has documented some of the catches for us: https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/images/admin/2020/Press/20201216%20COMPLAINT_REDACTED.pdf https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...
codalan 4y ago
Right on. Hopefully this feature is added to Vivaldi Mobile, too.
encryptluks2 4y ago
Isn't it publishers deciding if they want to make an AMP page or not? Also, there is no way to make sure publishers aren't harvesting your data. So if a publisher cares about privacy, how about they just don't make an AMP page? Seems like common sense and most other people here are complaining over nothing. I don't see people here complaining about Cloudflare proxying half the Internet.
- soundnote 4y ago
  Yes. But when AMP came out Google gave preferential treatment to amp pages. And if you're in the news business, when Google says "jump" you do so.
BuckRogers 4y ago
While I moved to Edge after 19 years on Firefox and I'm happy with it, for me it's clear that Brave is the new Firefox.
DHPersonal 4y ago
If you’re in iOS then there’s an extension available to redirect to non-AMP versions of sites. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amplosion-redirect-amp-links/id1585734696 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amplosion-redirect-amp-links/i...
- nerdjon 4y ago
  Another recommendation for Amplosion! When I found out about this a few months ago this was the quickest purchase I have made on the App Store in a long time. I despise AMP and how Google has infected the internet with it. Told all my friends about it, even offered to pay for it for them if they wished. Anything to help AMP die.
- rubyist5eva 4y ago
  Yes! I love it, easily worth the few bucks and works seamlessly.
- captn3m0 4y ago
  Note that iOS Browser extensions only work for Safari, and not other browsers such as Firefox or Chrome.
- karlzt 4y ago
  That's mentioned in the article.
  - DHPersonal 4y ago
    Well now I feel foolish. I looked for the name of the app in the article and didn’t follow the “literally pay” link in the paragraph.
sharken 4y ago
Main reason to use AMP links is access to content that is otherwise restricted. But I dislike AMP to the extent that I hope more browsers will implement this De-AMP feature. Brave is also fighting another fight with Google, this time with the Brave for Android browser, where Google has decided that all users want to have Tab Groups. The latest status is that users of the Brave browser for Android still can't get the old Cascade Layout back yet. More on https://community.brave.com/t/add-tab-cascade-layout-back-to-android/358153/90 https://community.brave.com/t/add-tab-cascade-layout-back-to...
- soundnote 4y ago
  As a complete tab group addict, I really don't understand not liking them, but options are options. Reading about it on github, seems like the old tab list was a 7000 line removal from Chromium proper.
mdoms 4y ago
I didn't realise AMP still exists. It definitely seems to be less relevant today, I hardly ever find myself on AMP pages anymore. I assumed Google had killed it.
rubyist5eva 4y ago
Switched to Brave a few weeks ago after getting fed up with Mozilla, not sure how I feel about using yet-another-chromium browser but it’s fine so far. Posts like this help ease my mind a bit at least.
matth3 4y ago
I've seen AMP pages really fail for retail sites. I followed this link yesterday and ended up on an AMP page with no way to purchase the item or continue on within the site. No idea if that's the site's fault or Google's but it must be costing them customers. https://www.google.com/amp/s/woodworkersworkshop.co.uk/amp/veritas-low-angle-smoothing-plane-with-o1-blade/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/woodworkersworkshop.co.uk/amp/v...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tentacleuno 4y ago
> Second, AMP is bad for security. By design, AMP confuses users about what site they’re interacting with. Users think they’re interacting with the publisher, when in actuality the user is still within Google’s control. User-respecting browsers defend the site as the security and privacy boundary on the web, and systems like AMP intentionally confuse this boundary. They've actually been pushing to confuse that boundary even more since 2019, with their Signed Exchanges specification[0][1]. In essence, when you (unintentionally) visit an AMP page from Google Search, the URL typically starts with google.com/amp/websiteyouwantedtogoto.com. Signed Exchanges is essentially a way to drop the "google.com/amp/" bit, as demonstrated by one of the animations on [0]. Even Cloudflare supported this and rolled it out on their free tier[2]. [0]: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/04/instant-loading-amp-pages-from-your-own https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/04/instant-lo... [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/16/18402628/google-amp-url-problem-signed-exchange-original-chrome-cloudflare https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/16/18402628/google-amp-url-p... [2]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-amp-real-url/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-amp-real-url/
- BrendanEich 4y ago
  ICYMI, https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1516492008700796929 https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1516492008700796929
  - freyr 4y ago
    Does Brave Search not rank slow and bloated sites lower for mobile users? If you do introduce such signals into your search ranking in the future, should we assume you have bad intent?
    - BrendanEich 4y ago
      We do not downrank based on perf tests, but if we did, your bogus tu quoque would need us also to be Google-sized monopoly or market superpower pushing our own AMP analogue that assimilates such “better performing” content into our servers, the better to surveil, control, and monetize. As we don’t propose any such AMP-analogue, and we don’t perf-rank, your selective “you might do it too!” response falls flat.
a5aAqU 4y ago
For Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/
fleddr 4y ago
Google's AMP has to be one of the best examples of how manipulative Google has become towards developers, users, the world. AMP is presented as "the web on a diet", and AMP's speed advantage supposedly achieved by its clever and enforced constraints. Protecting us irresponsible web developers from coding slow pages. Sounds believable, sounds good. Problem is, that's not at all the reason AMP is fast. It's fast because as you scroll through Google's search results on mobile, AMP pages are preloaded as you scroll by them. Then you click one and its instantly there, because it was preloaded. Which is something Google does not do for non-AMP pages, for "privacy reasons". Which is quite rich when you force users of a publication to consume it via Google in the case of an AMP page. Anyway, this is why an AMP page has a 3-5s head-start compared to any other non-AMP page. As more and more people notice the blatant lie that is AMP "performance", here comes the next manipulative tactic. They show some vulnerability. "OK OK, maybe this wasn't the proper 'standard' way to do it, but we were in a rush to solve the performance crisis". The performance "crisis" for which there seems little internal Google consensus, as every single fucking of their own products violate best practices or actively contribute to it (Google tag manager), yet never get a ranking penalty, but I digress. This next part is a stroke of genius. What really happened here is that Google failed to fully trick the user. They want the user to believe they are on domain.abc whilst in reality they are on google.com. They tried all kinds of hacky glitchy methods to conceal reality but could never make it water tight. So by admitting to some error and promising to improve their game, they'll now use the standardized approach: signed exchanges. Good guy Google "listened" to criticism by now implementing a standard that allows them to FULLY trick the user, as it's built right into the browser. So they'll be back. So whenever Google tries to sell something as good (speed, web standards), know how full of deceit they are. The other tactic is "open source", as if that means anything. You know what the real disappointment is though? The complete lack of regulation. How on earth can a company that is a monopolist in search, browsers, analytics AND advertising do an obvious power grab like this in the open and just fully get away with it, not a care in the world? We need modernized digital regulation, drastically.
- travisgriggs 4y ago
  > Google's AMP has to be one of the best examples of how manipulative Google has become towards developers, users, the world. It's a publicly traded company (which makes rich people richer AND funds our retirement plans). It's simply optimizing its feedback loops. Any publicly traded company gets more and more evil as it extracts more and more value. To change this, we'll have to recognize how ubiquitous of a utility for all walks of life the internet has become. And begin thinking about certain aspects of it in the same way we do other public utilities.
halotrope 4y ago
On a slight tangent: I am a very happy user of “Amplosion” on iOS. Gets rid of this god-awful AMP bullshit for good. Did not see any AMP “enhanced” page for two years now. https://apps.apple.com/de/app/amplosion-redirect-amp-links/id1585734696?l=en https://apps.apple.com/de/app/amplosion-redirect-amp-links/i...
- karlzt 4y ago
  That's mentioned in the article.
igetspam 4y ago
As a loyal Firefox user... I may be switching browsers. I'm mostly happy with Firefox but not entirely. I used brave years ago but wanted to support an open web by supporting competitive software. I've been looking at brave more recently because the web doesn't care and Firefox has made some questionable decisions lately (like pocket and suggested results from sponsors and the turning red ad... which is a good movie but a terrible move by Firefox). I use brave on my phone and I'm pretty happy with it and I hate amp links. This is a compelling change for me.
- Zetaphor 4y ago
  Friendly reminder that Brave is just "Red Chrome". It only continues to exist as long as Google deems Chromium based browsers a viable means of eliminating worries of antitrust legislation, as only Google employees make direct code contributions. The same argument can also be made for Firefox since a sizeable portion of their funding comes from Google, but at least they're developing a separate rendering engine. That is more conducive to a "open web" built on "competitive software" than everyone using Blink and the standards being driven by Googles whimsy.
- aero-glide2 4y ago
  I too switched from firefox to brave. https://gist.github.com/supersonic71/96277273dab6422bb913629679b54657 https://gist.github.com/supersonic71/96277273dab6422bb913629... Follow steps 1,4 and 5 to turn off the annoying stuff in Brave.
- miked85 4y ago
  There is a FF extension to redirect AMP pages: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/
NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
AMP is just the 2022 version of iFrames.
Trias11 4y ago
Brave is my default browser.
itshossein 4y ago
I’m not a fan of Google, and you might hate to hear this: Sometimes here in Iran AMP is a lifesaver for us. Almost every single useful website/service is banned here due to government’s mass censorship (unbelievably, including tech news websites, some wikis, some regular Linux repos, tweeter, FB, YouTube, and even DuckDuckGo!) and AMPs might help you visiting a webpage in case your VPN doesn’t work properly. PS: Google services are not filtered here.
- chakrihacker 4y ago
  Try using startpage then
jarrro 4y ago
Out of curiosity: Is AMP behavior consistent across countries? I remember previously that when I was visiting an AMP link (example: https://www.google.com/amp/s/woodworkersworkshop.co.uk/amp/veritas-low-angle-smoothing-plane-with-o1-blade/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/woodworkersworkshop.co.uk/amp/v...) it was taking me to google.com and displaying a bar on top of the page. Right now google's servers return HTTP 302 redirection and redirect me to the actual page. I'm located in Switzerland. Did something change recently?
- wonderbore 4y ago
  I'm in Indonesia and it's also redirecting me. Is it possible that the website disabled AMP so Google just quits?
  - jarrro 4y ago
    You might be right! I'll try with other AMP pages...

853 points by w0ts0n 4y ago

I wanted to read the justification for why "AMP harms users' privacy, security and internet experience", but the link ironically points to a Google doc for which access is restricted. Is there an open version of this somewhere?

jonathansampson 4y ago
That link is meant to jump to https://brave.com/privacy-updates/18-de-amp/#why-is-amp-harmful https://brave.com/privacy-updates/18-de-amp/#why-is-amp-harm..., just a bit further down the page. Apologies for the confusion

Vladimof 4y ago

I thought that Google finally gave up on AMP... I guess not

ocdtrekkie 4y ago

I'm really impressed to see this, Mozilla should've led here on implementing something like this years ago. This is a pretty big nudge for me to consider Brave as a future browser.

speeder 4y ago
Mozilla kicked one of its main creators years ago too, and that guy is the one making Brave... so no surprise ;) Features that should come out on Mozilla will instead come out of Brave...
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  - mikem170 4y ago
    Did his resigning have something to do with him personally donating $1000 in 2008 in support of California's Proposition 8 referendum? (opposing gay marriage) Just checking, you really didn't mention why he resigned.
    - RedComet 4y ago
      To be more clear, it was to do with media frenzy once they found out about it.
- smoldesu 4y ago
cphoover 4y ago
I agree 100%. There are still things about brave that confuse me... like the browser feature that allows giving crypto to content providers... but as someone who loathes AMP... I support this feature.
- d0gbread 4y ago
  Do you have specific questions about how the crypto features work? They're optional by the way, but I've found them an amazing way to regularly donate to a couple key blogs I follow.
  - cphoover 4y ago
    Yea I guess... How would I set this up? Do I need some sort of wallet? How would a random website author know what to do with this specific cryptocurrency?
- soundnote 4y ago
  As far as I understand it: Brave sells ads. They get $X normal money from it. The ads are delivered from a local catalog downloaded in bulk (the same way safe browsing blocklists are, for example) and matched on device. If you opt in to see Brave's ad popups, you get a cut from the revenue those popups generate. Brave gives this cut as BAT - they buy the coins from the open market. Brave has a built-in tipping service where you can tip people with BAT. If you do, Brave transfers BAT from your wallet to the tippee (and Brave takes a cut from the transaction). Tippee has BAT that they can sell because there's at least one buyer of BAT on the market: Brave. It seems like a sensible system overall, but my specifics may be wrong.
  - cphoover 4y ago
    This is interesting though I doubt I would ever enable this because I loathe popup advertisements probably more than AMP
webmobdev 4y ago
Mozilla is a joke now. They've now converted Firefox into an ad-ware / spyware ( https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/7/22715179/firefox-suggest-search-ads-browser https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/7/22715179/firefox-suggest-... ) because the current geniuses leading Mozilla have decided that apart from the 5+ million users of uBlock Origin, every other Firefox users loves ads and wants them! They've earned 100's of millions of dollars from Firefox, and still claim that they don't have the resources to refactor the browser, modularise it and innovate it. I have always suspected that the current Brave CEO Brendan Eich was a victim of a malicious campaign intended to get him removed from Mozilla (which he co-founded, and later become a CEO of), because he would have been more vocal against Google in Mozilla, and wouldn't have been happy to let the Firefox codebase stagnate while everyone in Mozilla was content with the millions of dollars they were getting from Google. (His religious beliefs / political ideology was just an excuse and just made him an easy target). Edit: I am not endorsing Brave browser either, as there are some questionable privacy issues with it.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  What's a joke is claiming that paid suggestion search results "have converted Firefox into an ad-ware / spyware [sic]" I'm not a fan of them adding this and switching it on, but it's easily disabled... > Click on the hamburger menu and then select Settings > Click on Privacy and Security in the sidebar and scroll to Address Bar — Firefox Suggest > Select or deselect the checkbox for contextual suggestions to turn the feature on or off > Select or deselect the checkbox for “occasional sponsored suggestions”
  - kreeben 4y ago
    >> I'm not a fan of them adding this Excuse me sir but you definitely sound like a fan. The really real joke is claiming that proclaiming that Mozilla is a joke is some sort of a joke. Out-of-the-box I would definitely classify Firefox as ad-ware/spy-ware.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      Does that make Brave adware as well, since it ships with a suite of features fundamentally designed to serve you ads of their own creation?
KennyBlanken 4y ago
I'm not sure why you would be impressed by something that has been possible in Firefox and Chrome for many years with a de-amp extension (though I would recommend a more general-purpose URL-de-cruftifier, such as ClearURLs, which will also remove most tracking bits from URLs.) Google removed ClearURLs from the chrome add-ons store because (I wish I were making it up) the extension's description was too detailed: https://www.ghacks.net/2021/03/25/the-curious-case-of-clearurls-removal-from-the-google-chrome-webstore/ https://www.ghacks.net/2021/03/25/the-curious-case-of-clearu... Brave implementing this, while nice, is basically a nothingburger.
- jonathansampson 4y ago
  I think you demonstrated in your own post why this is such a big deal. Extensions can certainly deliver this type of functionality in large part, but you have to [run an extension]. You need to ran an extension process (with its additional overhead). You need to make sure Google doesn't swoop-in with breaking changes between manifest versions. Then you have to make sure the extension is permitted in the Web Store, and not removed over something as silly as a detailed description. By delivering this functionality natively, Brave offers a more reliable and efficient solution to the problem of AMP.
  - richardwhiuk 4y ago
    You have to run Brave, which is a considerable overhead.
    - jonathansampson 4y ago
      Running a browser is better than running a browser in addition to several extensions for functionality that could be integrated natively, resulting in less overhead. But yes, you will need to use a browser to browse the Web
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        I don't trust Brave's implementation in the first place. You have a direct conflict of interest with protecting user privacy since you also make money off of the ads you serve users (because of how you skim BAT revenue). Furthermore, your scummy behavior of holding site operators ad revenue hostage is pretty disgusting, and doesn't provide much of a moral compass for us to base your actions off of. I'd trust stock Chromium before I'd install Brave on any of my machines.

skybrian 4y ago

Isn't this going to make mobile performance worse? They should publish performance numbers.

ocdtrekkie 4y ago
Responsible engineers will prioritize privacy over absolute performance. Nevertheless, investigations into Google's conduct have already discovered internal admission that AMP would actually slow down the web. "Google falsely told publishers that adopting AMP would enhance load times, but Google employees knew that AMP only improves the [redacted] and AMP pages can actually [redacted] [redacted] [redacted]. In other words, the ostensible benefits of faster load times for cached AMP version of webpages were not true for publishers that designed their web pages for speed. Some publishers did not adopt AMP because they knew their pages actually loaded faster than AMP pages." "Google also [redacted] of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one second delays in order to give Google AMP a [redacted] [redacted] slows down header bidding, which Google uses to turn around and denigrate header bidding for being too slow." And of course, the reason they did all this: "Google also designed AMP to force publishers to route rival exchange bids through Google’s ad server so that Google could continue to peek at rivals’ bids and trade on inside information. Third, Google designed AMP so that users loading AMP pages would make direct communication with Google servers, rather than publishers’ servers. This enabled Google’s access to publishers’ inside and non-public user data. AMP pages also limit the number of ads on a page, the types of ads publishers can sell, as well as enriched content that publishers can have on their pages." https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/images/admin/2020/Press/20201216%20COMPLAINT_REDACTED.pdf https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...
- ec109685 4y ago
  If Google's servers pre-cache the contents of the article, the experience is instant when you click on a link, so the idea that it's slower to read a Google Amp Link on a Google Search Result compared to clicking out to a separate website is false. If a publisher simply uses Google Amp on their own site to display websites, then it can be slower. They slowed the non-AMP ads because they didn't want loading them to interfere with the content the user was interested in reading.

rafaelturk 4y ago

Kudos! While reading this announcement I've learned upcoming AMP 2.x. Impressive that Google still pusing for AMP and as mentioned is even worse.

londons_explore 4y ago

Braves business is built on Google Chromes source code... Google has 500+ staff working on that codebase. When they finally annoy Google and they decide to rewrite the license for future versions, will Brave be able to keep up?

classified 4y ago
Yep, biting the hand that feeds will only work for so long.
- tomrod 4y ago
  Aye, the DOJ won't look favorably on anti-competitive practices.
inglor 4y ago
Google has open sourced only as much as they had too for using Webkit's GPL codebase and have been notorious in close-sourcing bits when they are able (like the DevTools WebAssembly debugging tools and a ton of other stuff). So the fact Chromium is (mostly) open source (Chrome is most certainly not) is certainly not charity or the goodness of their hearts. It is the work of idealistic individuals like Lars Knoll who gave us this among other things like Qt. This is also true for a lot of other Google projects like Android.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  Having spent a lot of time working on the codebase... Far more is opensource than Google needed to make open, and the development model is far more open than androids. In the chromium codebase, there are even some modules where the key technical decision-makers aren't Google employees.
- magicalist 4y ago
  > Google has open sourced only as much as they had too for using Webkit's GPL codebase This isn't remotely true. Most of Chromium code is BSD-3-Clause. > have been notorious in close-sourcing bits when they are able (like the DevTools WebAssembly debugging tools I'm not a fan of that either, but to be fair it's a Chrome extension[1], not part of Chrome. > and a ton of other stuff). Like what? The trend has generally been the other way. Flash was removed, PDFium was released. Video codecs? But they've always been that way. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cc%20%20-devtools-support-dwa/pdcpmagijalfljmkmjngeonclgbbannb https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cc%20%20-devtools-...

perihelions 4y ago

How does AMP interact with Brave's advertising monetization, BAT?

jonathansampson 4y ago
Great question. Brave's advertising is presently done on the New Tab Page, via Sponsored Images. No AMP impact there. Users who opt-in to Brave's Ad Notifications will occasionally (frequency thresholds are governed by the user) see a native notification displayed outside of the browser. No apparent AMP impact there either. Where AMP could impact things is for the publisher. Publishers are able to verify their domains/properties, and receive BAT contributions from Brave users visiting their content. If that publisher is having their content served through Google's domain, that would impact their ability to receive support from visitors.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

anticristi 4y ago

I wonder that the EU commission hasn't used GDPR or some anti-conpetition law to ban AMP in the EU.

Nextgrid 4y ago
GDPR enforcement is severely lacking unfortunately. None of the record-breaking “4% of global turnover” fines have materialized even for malicious actors that definitely deserve it.

lern_too_spel 4y ago

bigp3t3 4y ago
Nobody complained about Google's RSS monopolizing because the search engine doesn't provide RSS URLs in the top results, unlike they do for AMP links, at least nearly as frequently. RSS is also far from a similar case study to AMP in how web content is delivered. RSS optional, AMP was a lazy web dev's means to presenting pages over mobile without having to think about layout. At least that's what if felt like to me as a web user.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  And how is showing AMP in top results monopolizing the web? Bing does the same thing. A social news aggregator could do the same thing if it thinks people could read the article and go back to scrolling the feed faster. AMP loads instantly. There is nothing lazy about supporting it. Just like RSS, it requires extra work for the publisher to get the user the instant-loading behavior they desire.
jonathansampson 4y ago
I think you read too quickly, or skipped over a few key parts. Yes, AMP can cause some pages/content to load more slowly. This was stated in the write-up, and supported a link to Google's own DOJ disclosures. In that source we read that Google knew that some publishers avoided AMP because their own pages were shown to load more quickly without it, especially considering 1-second throttling on Google's part for non-AMP pages, aimed to give AMP a "nice comparative boost".
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  I think you didn't read that report at all. The nice comparative boost was for ads. AMP pages loaded from an aggregator are rendered before you click on them, and the DOJ disclosures did not dispute that this would cause them to load faster for users as it obviously would.

freediver 4y ago

I haven't noticed that many AMP pages recently. Is it still a thing and what kind of sites use them?

lern_too_spel 4y ago
Google no longer marks AMP pages in its results, but Bing does.
- jarrro 4y ago
  Wow that's new. Was this announced somewhere or just introduced silently?
perihelions 4y ago
- "what kind of sites use them?" Here's a good sample set (AMP posts on Reddit, sorted (roughly) by popularity): https://old.reddit.com/user/AmputatorBot/?sort=top&t=week https://old.reddit.com/user/AmputatorBot/?sort=top&t=week
- p1peridine 4y ago
  "AmputatorBot" lol
KennyBlanken 4y ago
They pop up on reddit fairly frequently. Lot of news sites push them, hard...when people get a share link, especially on mobile, they end up with an amp link. Lot of subreddits have automod rules that delete amp links, and there are bots that look for amp links and reply to the comment with a de-amp'd link.
rchaud 4y ago
Commercial blogsites that post often, and specifically focus on 'new' stories that people are searching for online. Think websites that do news, celebrity gossip, music, games and movies.

nomilk 4y ago

My main gripe with AMP may seem pedantic or even petty, but it's the way it messes with the URL. Copying and sharing or saving a URL is fundamental to web, and AMP makes me have to mess around to get that standard URL. It's about as small as first world problems get, but it's annoying all the same.

freedomben 4y ago
This bothers me greatly too and is my biggest gripe. I understand it's hard to build something like amp without that, but I think it will have unfortunate reverberations for many years to come. Especially if at some point Google pulls the plug on Amp. Will all those amp links suddenly die?
folkrav 4y ago
Doesn't sound petty to me.
gruturo 4y ago
It's neither pedantic nor petty - I find it so annoying too. It's like a car wash operator placing an unwanted sticker on my windshield.
BuckRogers 4y ago
It's about as small as first world problems get, but it's annoying all the same. This logic needs to stop. We may as all well live in mud huts. Then we can have "real problems". You can presume privilege is your problem, or, we can continue to strive for better conditions always as a culture. Low standards will lead you exactly where you belong, your mud hut.
lupire 4y ago
Even without AMP, Chrome is dedicated to hiding URLs from users.
seelmobile 4y ago
[Google employee, opinions are my own] This was 'fixed' by Signed Exchanges[0] which sites can implement. This is (imho) a cool new web tech that got drowned out in the AMP noise. [0] https://web.dev/signed-exchanges/ https://web.dev/signed-exchanges/

shadowgovt 4y ago

Honestly, this is win-win and I applaud Brave for taking on this engineering task. - Users who are concerned about AMP can use Brave to bypass Google's infrastructure - Users for whom AMP is a benefit can continue to use it - Everybody wins

s17n 4y ago
Totally agree! (And I'm usually in these threads just to defend AMP)
stiray 4y ago
Really? What happens when google no longer indexes non amp pages as most of the web pages are on amp? Just a thought teaser. As it looks like there is not much people seeing further from their noses.
- RedComet 4y ago
  Brave has a search engine for that.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  > What happens when google no longer indexes non amp pages as most of the web pages are on amp? Your thought experiment is equivalent to "What happens when Google no longer indexes the open web," and I think the answer is "Bing takes Google's place."

gruturo 4y ago

Kudos to Brave - they're a sometimes weird actor, but some of their initiatives are commendable, and they often do what Mozilla should have, but didn't. I rarely end up in AMP pages on my mobile, but when it happens I immediately feel like I stepped on a turd, and promptly backtrack / close the tab before it hijacks my back button, half the screen, standard controls (including doing something weird to scrolling) and other unpleasantries like banners whose "x" somehow overlaps my browser's bars, and are therefore out of reach (and said browser bars somehow do NOT autohide when scrolling, unlike on normal pages) Getting AMP results from Google search has been one of the drivers leading me to switch to DDG, so congrats Google, one less customer.

agilob 4y ago
Brave is doing for us all the things Mozilla promised
- dralley 4y ago
  And a lot of other shaddy things that Mozilla has never done, like the affiliate link hijacking (which yes, was supposedly a "bug" but you have to admit that it's an awfully convenient "bug"), and setting up crypto wallets for content creators without solicitation and then collecting money on their behalf.
  - jonathansampson 4y ago
    Heads up: I work at Brave. As such, I encourage you to check my claims, verify my sources, and don't take anything I say for granted. Always happy to provide more context as needed :) Firefox literally sends your keystrokes to Google, right out of the box. Brave, however, was found to be the most private popular browser by reputable researchers: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf. Brave [never] hijacked links either. Affiliate Links were offered among suggested sites for relevant search input. So if you searched "Binance," the browser would offer (among other suggestions), an affiliate link for the site. Users could then choose to browse to the property with the affiliate link, and in so doing support the development of Brave. No impact to privacy or security at all. The mistake here was with input handling. Built to handle search input, this feature also mistakenly handled fully-qualified domains. While we intended the app to offer affiliate links (when relevant) to something like "what is binance?", it was also offering them for "binance.us". The latter case was corrected quickly (and the feature itself was disabled out of the box). More about that on our blog: https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/. To your second point, about setting up crypto wallets and soliciting donations on behalf of non-participating publishers, you're mistaken there as well. To prime the support-system in Brave (called Brave Payments at the time), we staked Brave users with tokens, inviting them to direct those tokens to creators they would like to support. More clearly, Brave gave Brave users say over where Brave ought to direct its own tokens. Unfortunately, our UI/UX wasn't very clear about which creators were verified, and which were not (we followed the Twitter approach, marking verified creators with a checkmark, but doing nothing for others). This resulted in some confusion at the end of 2018, where users were directing Brave's tokens to non-participating creators (most notably Tom Scott). We received considerably helpful feedback about how the system could be improved (both from a UI/UX side, and operationally). Frankly, I don't think I've ever seen our team work so hard, and churn out such a monumental update in so little time. We had made massive changes within 48 hours IIRC. Creators were explicitly marked as verified or unverified in all cases, the BAT that Brave stakes with users would remain in the local wallet until it could be received by a verified creator. And BAT that sat pending for 90 days would be unlocked again for the user to direct elsewhere. Tom Scott was kind enough to review our changes, and explicitly gave us his approval soon-thereafter. What is now 'Brave Rewards' wouldn't be doing so well today were it not for Tom and so many other incredible users helping us find the best path forward. More about that on our blog: https://brave.com/rewards-update/ https://brave.com/rewards-update/

silicon2401 4y ago

For some reason, I got this idea at some point that brave has a built in crypto miner as its form of monetization. Can anyone confirm if that's true or not? A browser cutting out amp sounds like exactly the kind of browser I want Edit: not sure why I got downvoted. I'm asking a genuine question because I'm always looking for google alternatives, and firefox has been disappointing lately.

jaywalk 4y ago
They do have a weird crypto thing (not a miner, as far as I know) but it's easy to disable and forget about.
PaulBGD_ 4y ago
They’re monetized by selling ads in exchange for BAT, plus they probably hold plenty of BAT which they can sell over time as they continue to increase its value.
jonathansampson 4y ago
No miner; in fact we were the first browser (to my knowledge) to block crypto-miners back in 2017/18 when they began appearing on the Web (and being delivered via third-party ad networks). Brave does come with Brave Rewards, and optional component which enables users to participate in privacy-preserving advertising (ads are matched locally, on your device). Users who opt-in receive 70% of the associated revenue for ads they see. Rewards are delivered in the form of BAT (and ERC-20 token), which can be kept, or gifted to content creators across the Web as a means of support.
- silicon2401 4y ago
  Thanks for squashing that rumor. I'll definitely give brave a try with that crypto rumor resolved and the news that brave cuts out amp
  - InCityDreams 4y ago
    I'm a joe blow. Average user. I've been using brave for 3+ years. I try the other browsers fairly regularly. Always come back to brave. Check the brave:// flags (?), and go through every option under settings. I have the crypto off, but - looking more at the brave site (including the many problems), I'm beginning to err.... be convinced(!?).

knodi 4y ago

I fucking hate APM. As firefox iOS user I can't seem to get rid of it.

pedro2 4y ago
thankfully it was replaced by ACPI

sydthrowaway 4y ago

Imagine working at Google on AMP The banality of evil

dafelst 4y ago
Join Google to change the world as a top tier software engineer, then spend all your time updating protobuf definitions to keep internal tools glued together as Yet Another Widely Used Internal API implements breaking changes. Such a lot of wasted talent.

alanh 4y ago

Recently I came across the AMP website at https://amp.dev/ https://amp.dev/ (after some years since first seeing it). It’s really remarkable how much Google wants to pretend this is an industry standard and not their own little fiefdom. I don’t see the word Google anywhere, not even on the About page.

user3939382 4y ago
It kind of reminds me of the OOXML thing where Microsoft hijacked the standards process for its own benefit.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  OOXML was a standard-after-the-fact, because Microsoft couldn't respond to some Government tenders that required that all data be stored in standardised formats. So... they "standardised" it. Hilariously, OOXML as generated by MS Office is not the standard version by default. The standard version has different XML namespaces and even slightly different capabilities. You can choose this format in Save As, but nobody does.
lupire 4y ago
The.dev gTLD is Google's; it exists for Google projects to hide their Google relationships. amp.dev does make a tiny out of context mention at the bottom of the page, that Google runs the AMP CDN. But overall it's obvious that the AMP Project trying to hide it's Googleyness by being "Open JS Foundation", which itself is a corporate trade group hijacking the word "Open".
- mcdonje 4y ago
  Google administers .dev, but it's open. You or I could get a .dev domain and use it for a project that has nothing to do with Google.
- biztos 4y ago
  TIL what really happened to godoc.org!

misterbishop 4y ago

AMP is probably the single worst thing Google has produced. But as a Pixel 6 user, I think the real solution to bypassing AMP would have to live at the VPN level. Using Firefox Nightly as my primary browser, I don't really get AMP search results. The place I see it is in Google's news feed on the right side of the home screen. Brave wouldn't solve my problem there, and I already trust Firefox more.

stiray 4y ago
It is not the worst. It is just "one of them", how to get the monopoly over web content.
- misterbishop 4y ago
  It is the worst. It offers nothing to anyone, it has a terrible user interface, and it breaks basic features of the world wide web. If AMP is genuinely a way to enhance online user experiences, then make it opt-in, instead of the current no-way-to-opt-out.
kllrnohj 4y ago
Ok there's a lot of amp hate here, and a lot of it justified, but when amp first picked up steam as just a regular mobile user it was amazing. I basically filtered searches to only look at those with the amp icon because in the real world in real conditions on mobile connections they legitimately & consistently loaded 10x faster than non-amp pages. And basically never had the dreaded random scroll jumps during loading. Since then networks & phones got faster, a lot faster, and the difference maybe isn't worth the cost anymore. Also I think the amp restrictions have greatly relaxed, making amp just as slow? But "single worst thing"? Hardly. At launch it delivered and big time, the UX experience was night & day.
- dmw_ng 4y ago
  The main trick behind AMP is simply the ability to load third party content in a hidden IFRAME on the google.com origin securely. Your clicks were instant because they were literally pre-rendered client-side before you clicked, and that's why custom JS is prohibited. SXG and WebBundle basically help map that trick out into the browser's domain, rather than some nasty restrictive JS library. It allows eliminating the whole megabyte-sized supersystem of JS nonsense that makes up the AMP library and having just plain ol' regular HTML/JS, while still netting most of the performance benefits of the old approach. Mobile networks may have improved but the speed of light has not, and so these techniques still have a place in contemporary networking.

nanidin 4y ago

I de-AMP'd by switching my default mobile search to DDG.

phreack 4y ago
I felt literally forced to leave Google on mobile by AMP. DDG's results are often worse and I end up having to !g, and it's always a punch in the stomach having to see two screens worth of poorly marked ad-results, SEO spam and AMP - all of those getting worse every month. And even then, their indexing of sites like Stack Overflow, Reddit, and other major players with good content is still miles ahead than DDG when I'm trying to find the solution to a problem.
mastazi 4y ago
But AMP can pop up in unexpected places, for example Twitter links on mobile used to be AMP until recently. Just changing search engine will not prevent AMP completely

UberFly 4y ago

If you run Pi-Hole here's the RegEx to add to your blacklist ^(.+\.)?amp\..+\.com$ ^(.+\.)?ampproject\.org$

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dont__panic 4y ago
Thank you for this. Added to my pi hole. Seems to be working great so far for the occasional AMP links my coworkers send.

gundmc 4y ago

I don't remember coming across many AMP pages recently. Since Google stopped favoring AMP in the search results the other year, it seemed like AMP was dying off. Is this feature even still relevant in 2022?

stakkur 4y ago

This is great. I believe Firefox does this already, and you can do it on Safari via extension/plugin (Amplosion, Overamped).

nicklaf 4y ago
Not sure about Firefox cutting out AMP directly. I personally use this extension to do it: https://www.daniel.priv.no/web-extensions/amp2html.html https://www.daniel.priv.no/web-extensions/amp2html.html

tyingq 4y ago

Everything you need to know about AMP is in one very specific section of the spec: "AMP HTML documents MUST...contain a <script async src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script> https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script> tag inside their head tag" [1] Meaning, "Your content must load and run some Google controlled javascript, that does who-knows-what to your content and end users". In the past, that's included injecting a big header that pushes your content down, hijacking swipe events on your page, an [X] button that looked like it would delete the AMP banner header, but instead navigated away from your page back to google, etc. [1] https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/learn/spec/amphtml/ https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/learn/spe...

hackerfromthefu 4y ago
Evil
bduerst 4y ago
The Amp javascript can be self-hosted [1] away from Amp's servers, there's even a framework demonstrating how to do it [2]. The only difference is that it doesn't pass Amp validator, which is necessary for the Bing search result icon. Developers have requested the feature for the Amp validator to include self hosting but it hasn't been added yet (or have any plans to AFAIK). [1] https://gist.github.com/mdmower/b56e94f0dc36beafb825b0c5e31fceef https://gist.github.com/mdmower/b56e94f0dc36beafb825b0c5e31f... [2] https://github.com/mdmower/amp-self-host-demo https://github.com/mdmower/amp-self-host-demo
- tyingq 4y ago
  Interesting, though I am citing the AMP spec, and it does say MUST. I'm curious if Google would put a self-hosted AMP page, for example, in their carousel. I think it probably can't.
  - bduerst 4y ago
    It's been exactly a year since Google announced they are no longer prioritizing AMP content in the carousel, or as SEO in general, so they probably would put self-hosted AMP there (if it passed the SEO bar): >Besides algorithm changes, there will be several user-facing changes. For starters, the Top Stories carousel in Search will no longer be limited to AMP content. The Google News website and mobile apps will similarly surface more non-AMP content. Lastly, the AMP lightning bolt icon will no longer be used to badge eligible content: https://9to5google.com/2021/04/19/google-search-page-experience/ https://9to5google.com/2021/04/19/google-search-page-experie...

fidrelity 4y ago

As someone who myself relies on Google's SEO traffic I'm a bit hesitant to say this (but luckily I'm small enough that Google doesn't care about me at all): AMP is terrible for everyone except Google themselves. It's a plain abuse of their quasi monopoly and I support everything that fights AMP. Another reason why I'm happy to use Brave both on desktop and especially on mobile.

disadvantage 4y ago

It's easy to slag AMP because it's Google, and privacy-aware people really don't like Google and denounce all their actions without even thinking. But on the other hand: what if AMP is actually a good thing? Like if it speeds up the web and addresses web obesity, why not embrace it?

jonathansampson 4y ago
Please see the "Why is AMP Harmful?" section :) https://brave.com/privacy-updates/18-de-amp/#why-is-amp-harmful https://brave.com/privacy-updates/18-de-amp/#why-is-amp-harm...
robonerd 4y ago
So what if it saves me a few milliseconds of load time and megabyte or two of RAM? Maybe that has some value a shitty mobile connection, but such marginal gains are not worth conceding even more control of the web to Google. I'd rather websites take 10 minutes to load than have Google MITM my life.
dogleash 4y ago
Yes, that's the carrot. Now look for the stick. >what if AMP is actually a good thing? People said this when AMP was first announced too. Good for people with lives comfortable enough to be so off-guard that this didn't set off any alarm bells; but businesses are not your friends. Thankfully with the benefit of time and hindsight the Texas Attorney General has documented some of the catches for us: https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/images/admin/2020/Press/20201216%20COMPLAINT_REDACTED.pdf https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...

codalan 4y ago

Right on. Hopefully this feature is added to Vivaldi Mobile, too.

encryptluks2 4y ago

Isn't it publishers deciding if they want to make an AMP page or not? Also, there is no way to make sure publishers aren't harvesting your data. So if a publisher cares about privacy, how about they just don't make an AMP page? Seems like common sense and most other people here are complaining over nothing. I don't see people here complaining about Cloudflare proxying half the Internet.

soundnote 4y ago
Yes. But when AMP came out Google gave preferential treatment to amp pages. And if you're in the news business, when Google says "jump" you do so.

BuckRogers 4y ago

While I moved to Edge after 19 years on Firefox and I'm happy with it, for me it's clear that Brave is the new Firefox.

DHPersonal 4y ago

If you’re in iOS then there’s an extension available to redirect to non-AMP versions of sites. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amplosion-redirect-amp-links/id1585734696 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amplosion-redirect-amp-links/i...

nerdjon 4y ago
Another recommendation for Amplosion! When I found out about this a few months ago this was the quickest purchase I have made on the App Store in a long time. I despise AMP and how Google has infected the internet with it. Told all my friends about it, even offered to pay for it for them if they wished. Anything to help AMP die.
rubyist5eva 4y ago
Yes! I love it, easily worth the few bucks and works seamlessly.
captn3m0 4y ago
Note that iOS Browser extensions only work for Safari, and not other browsers such as Firefox or Chrome.
karlzt 4y ago
That's mentioned in the article.
- DHPersonal 4y ago
  Well now I feel foolish. I looked for the name of the app in the article and didn’t follow the “literally pay” link in the paragraph.

sharken 4y ago

Main reason to use AMP links is access to content that is otherwise restricted. But I dislike AMP to the extent that I hope more browsers will implement this De-AMP feature. Brave is also fighting another fight with Google, this time with the Brave for Android browser, where Google has decided that all users want to have Tab Groups. The latest status is that users of the Brave browser for Android still can't get the old Cascade Layout back yet. More on https://community.brave.com/t/add-tab-cascade-layout-back-to-android/358153/90 https://community.brave.com/t/add-tab-cascade-layout-back-to...

soundnote 4y ago
As a complete tab group addict, I really don't understand not liking them, but options are options. Reading about it on github, seems like the old tab list was a 7000 line removal from Chromium proper.

mdoms 4y ago

I didn't realise AMP still exists. It definitely seems to be less relevant today, I hardly ever find myself on AMP pages anymore. I assumed Google had killed it.

rubyist5eva 4y ago

Switched to Brave a few weeks ago after getting fed up with Mozilla, not sure how I feel about using yet-another-chromium browser but it’s fine so far. Posts like this help ease my mind a bit at least.

matth3 4y ago

I've seen AMP pages really fail for retail sites. I followed this link yesterday and ended up on an AMP page with no way to purchase the item or continue on within the site. No idea if that's the site's fault or Google's but it must be costing them customers. https://www.google.com/amp/s/woodworkersworkshop.co.uk/amp/veritas-low-angle-smoothing-plane-with-o1-blade/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/woodworkersworkshop.co.uk/amp/v...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tentacleuno 4y ago

> Second, AMP is bad for security. By design, AMP confuses users about what site they’re interacting with. Users think they’re interacting with the publisher, when in actuality the user is still within Google’s control. User-respecting browsers defend the site as the security and privacy boundary on the web, and systems like AMP intentionally confuse this boundary. They've actually been pushing to confuse that boundary even more since 2019, with their Signed Exchanges specification[0][1]. In essence, when you (unintentionally) visit an AMP page from Google Search, the URL typically starts with google.com/amp/websiteyouwantedtogoto.com. Signed Exchanges is essentially a way to drop the "google.com/amp/" bit, as demonstrated by one of the animations on [0]. Even Cloudflare supported this and rolled it out on their free tier[2]. [0]: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/04/instant-loading-amp-pages-from-your-own https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/04/instant-lo... [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/16/18402628/google-amp-url-problem-signed-exchange-original-chrome-cloudflare https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/16/18402628/google-amp-url-p... [2]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-amp-real-url/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-amp-real-url/

BrendanEich 4y ago
ICYMI, https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1516492008700796929 https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1516492008700796929
- freyr 4y ago
  Does Brave Search not rank slow and bloated sites lower for mobile users? If you do introduce such signals into your search ranking in the future, should we assume you have bad intent?
  - BrendanEich 4y ago
    We do not downrank based on perf tests, but if we did, your bogus tu quoque would need us also to be Google-sized monopoly or market superpower pushing our own AMP analogue that assimilates such “better performing” content into our servers, the better to surveil, control, and monetize. As we don’t propose any such AMP-analogue, and we don’t perf-rank, your selective “you might do it too!” response falls flat.

a5aAqU 4y ago

For Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/

fleddr 4y ago

Google's AMP has to be one of the best examples of how manipulative Google has become towards developers, users, the world. AMP is presented as "the web on a diet", and AMP's speed advantage supposedly achieved by its clever and enforced constraints. Protecting us irresponsible web developers from coding slow pages. Sounds believable, sounds good. Problem is, that's not at all the reason AMP is fast. It's fast because as you scroll through Google's search results on mobile, AMP pages are preloaded as you scroll by them. Then you click one and its instantly there, because it was preloaded. Which is something Google does not do for non-AMP pages, for "privacy reasons". Which is quite rich when you force users of a publication to consume it via Google in the case of an AMP page. Anyway, this is why an AMP page has a 3-5s head-start compared to any other non-AMP page. As more and more people notice the blatant lie that is AMP "performance", here comes the next manipulative tactic. They show some vulnerability. "OK OK, maybe this wasn't the proper 'standard' way to do it, but we were in a rush to solve the performance crisis". The performance "crisis" for which there seems little internal Google consensus, as every single fucking of their own products violate best practices or actively contribute to it (Google tag manager), yet never get a ranking penalty, but I digress. This next part is a stroke of genius. What really happened here is that Google failed to fully trick the user. They want the user to believe they are on domain.abc whilst in reality they are on google.com. They tried all kinds of hacky glitchy methods to conceal reality but could never make it water tight. So by admitting to some error and promising to improve their game, they'll now use the standardized approach: signed exchanges. Good guy Google "listened" to criticism by now implementing a standard that allows them to FULLY trick the user, as it's built right into the browser. So they'll be back. So whenever Google tries to sell something as good (speed, web standards), know how full of deceit they are. The other tactic is "open source", as if that means anything. You know what the real disappointment is though? The complete lack of regulation. How on earth can a company that is a monopolist in search, browsers, analytics AND advertising do an obvious power grab like this in the open and just fully get away with it, not a care in the world? We need modernized digital regulation, drastically.

travisgriggs 4y ago
> Google's AMP has to be one of the best examples of how manipulative Google has become towards developers, users, the world. It's a publicly traded company (which makes rich people richer AND funds our retirement plans). It's simply optimizing its feedback loops. Any publicly traded company gets more and more evil as it extracts more and more value. To change this, we'll have to recognize how ubiquitous of a utility for all walks of life the internet has become. And begin thinking about certain aspects of it in the same way we do other public utilities.

halotrope 4y ago

On a slight tangent: I am a very happy user of “Amplosion” on iOS. Gets rid of this god-awful AMP bullshit for good. Did not see any AMP “enhanced” page for two years now. https://apps.apple.com/de/app/amplosion-redirect-amp-links/id1585734696?l=en https://apps.apple.com/de/app/amplosion-redirect-amp-links/i...

karlzt 4y ago
That's mentioned in the article.

igetspam 4y ago

As a loyal Firefox user... I may be switching browsers. I'm mostly happy with Firefox but not entirely. I used brave years ago but wanted to support an open web by supporting competitive software. I've been looking at brave more recently because the web doesn't care and Firefox has made some questionable decisions lately (like pocket and suggested results from sponsors and the turning red ad... which is a good movie but a terrible move by Firefox). I use brave on my phone and I'm pretty happy with it and I hate amp links. This is a compelling change for me.

Zetaphor 4y ago
Friendly reminder that Brave is just "Red Chrome". It only continues to exist as long as Google deems Chromium based browsers a viable means of eliminating worries of antitrust legislation, as only Google employees make direct code contributions. The same argument can also be made for Firefox since a sizeable portion of their funding comes from Google, but at least they're developing a separate rendering engine. That is more conducive to a "open web" built on "competitive software" than everyone using Blink and the standards being driven by Googles whimsy.
aero-glide2 4y ago
I too switched from firefox to brave. https://gist.github.com/supersonic71/96277273dab6422bb913629679b54657 https://gist.github.com/supersonic71/96277273dab6422bb913629... Follow steps 1,4 and 5 to turn off the annoying stuff in Brave.
miked85 4y ago
There is a FF extension to redirect AMP pages: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/

NaturalPhallacy 4y ago

AMP is just the 2022 version of iFrames.

Trias11 4y ago

Brave is my default browser.

itshossein 4y ago

I’m not a fan of Google, and you might hate to hear this: Sometimes here in Iran AMP is a lifesaver for us. Almost every single useful website/service is banned here due to government’s mass censorship (unbelievably, including tech news websites, some wikis, some regular Linux repos, tweeter, FB, YouTube, and even DuckDuckGo!) and AMPs might help you visiting a webpage in case your VPN doesn’t work properly. PS: Google services are not filtered here.

chakrihacker 4y ago
Try using startpage then

jarrro 4y ago

Out of curiosity: Is AMP behavior consistent across countries? I remember previously that when I was visiting an AMP link (example: https://www.google.com/amp/s/woodworkersworkshop.co.uk/amp/veritas-low-angle-smoothing-plane-with-o1-blade/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/woodworkersworkshop.co.uk/amp/v...) it was taking me to google.com and displaying a bar on top of the page. Right now google's servers return HTTP 302 redirection and redirect me to the actual page. I'm located in Switzerland. Did something change recently?

wonderbore 4y ago
I'm in Indonesia and it's also redirecting me. Is it possible that the website disabled AMP so Google just quits?
- jarrro 4y ago
  You might be right! I'll try with other AMP pages...