AMP still makes no sense. On iOS, Android and Windows it’s completely broken and friction increasing to grab a link to send to a friend in another medium.
Not only that but it seems the page slightly degrades sometimes.
For what? A theoretical page load time improvement? Maybe that’s naive but we already have “request desktop mode” to allow for bifurcated experiences. Why do we need a third thats seemingly even worse?
Total “get off my lawn” complaint but how do you turn the damn AMP off? :)
AMP is the most transparent land grab Google has pulled. It's technically unjustifiable, is arguably value destroying, and as a bonus you can't disable it.
It only makes sense in terms of trying to lock marketers and publishers into a Google-led ecosystem.
Why can't I disable it? Shouldn't there be a browser extension that just rewrites all AMP links to the underlying source (if I understand right, this always exists - the page may be AMPified but it's still served from the publisher rather than from Google).
This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm interested to know whether that would work. As I see it AMP can be just as big a problem just by being there by default on Google properties as by being something you, the consumer, can't turn off.
I tried pihole blacklisting AMP domains from my PiHole. It works in that I can't accidentally click on them, but it won't re-write them and I usually have to strip out the "amp." part myself.
I haven't found a simple way that works on both my mobile and my desktop devices yet but I'd be interested in any recommendations.
The concept of AMP makes a lot of sense. It does speed up browsing and prevents sites from being terrible. The prloblem is that the implementation isn't great and it's Google driven. But the concept is sound.
I don't know if you remember the mobile news web around 2015 or so.
Content would furiously jump around as the page was overcome by advalanches, videos on autoplay would pop up in all the corners, as you scrolled, the page would often break at paragraphs as even more videos would load, secretly sliding in the content like some infestation. If you tried to highlight text to copy, you'd see interstitial popups of yet again more ads and then discover your clipboard was populated with ad after ad.
Then when you copied the URL, it was full of fingerprints and UID hashes from all these providers so it was hundreds of excess bytes, usually leaking personal information. You'd have to chop it off or just give up and share the extra tracking garbage at the end of the url
And this was essentially all of the local news sites. They were indistinguishable from the click here to download virus typosquatting sites. It was horrific. Often loading an article would lock up and crash the browser, it was totally completely unusable. This was the post-flash web that we all desperately wanted, here ya go!
I really don't like amp, but it has fixed that problem so effectively that you have to remind people in detail that it actually once existed.
Ok I'll bite, there's a number of other pre-amp sites that basically scraped the content and then displayed it in a nice form for reading. Those did the same solution.
The only way around a centralized solution is a magical "disable garbage" ad block extension in the browser, and those also exist, and are maintained once again, by a centralized group.
Ok so another solution, just stop indexing or boosting the garbage sites forcing them to change, that's what amp does yet again.
I agree that I want some greener pasture alternative from over yonder, but what?
None of the options you mentioned force sites to spend money maintaining a second version of their site, so they're all better than AMP.
I also think you have an exotic definition centralization.
> sites
Sites is plural, so this is not a centralized solution. There are multiple competing options.
> just stop indexing or boosting the garbage sites forcing them to change, that's what amp does yet again.
No it doesn't. AMP is faster, so AMP sites get boosted based on being faster. It's an indirect effect, at least according to Google. Google could have stopped at applying a big penalty to dog slow sites. No lock-in promoting tech required.
There was a huge missed opportunity for Firefox here to do some aggressive garbage removal in these sorts of pages. They'd probably have a much bigger share now if they had
I remember it as totally unmanageable from around 2014-2016 ... Often it'd just crash the browser after about 30 seconds. It was a running gag at the office.
It is not just faster. It also encourages sensible design and cuts down on the most annoying ad practices.
I always say there are two parts in AMP, a very sensible set of guidelines for good design, enforced by code, and Google services. The first ones benefit users, the second benefit Google.
The unfortunate thing is that when I hear complaints, it is more often about the former than the latter. Something about "creative freedom", like the freedom to put up annoying pop-up ads and mess up with the "back" button and scrolling I guess.
As a user, I am very happy with AMP. Now we just need someone to take all the good bits, remove all Google crap, and make websites that are even better. AMP is open source, at least the good bits are.
It's not about "creative freedom". It's about Google forcing its will on the internet.
- You want to be at the top of our search, in the search carousel? You must implement AMP. We don't care how fast or beautiful your website is. Oh, and only news sites may apply.
- You want to show people the canonical URL? To show the source of the website? No. We will show that it comes from Google, we will actively try to discourage people from finding links to your website, and we will actually launch an initiative in Chrome to kill the URL altogether
- You want to measure activity and engagement on AMP pages? Oh, no we're going to send you a different, very limited and reduced set of analytics data
- You want to show ads in your AMP pages? Oh, it will only be from the ad providers that we, the largest ad provider, allow.
- Do you want to engage in how AMP is defined and designed, and change how it works? No, you can't, we go through a totally opaque process, and we only deliver final decisions that you have no say on. Oh, yes, once we've made all the big decisions (including things like AMP for Email) that actively harm the web, we will create a token "governing organisation" that will do everything in the open, fingers crossed. Not that it matters at all.
That’s all and great, but as a user I simply don’t care. It’s like asking users to care about HTTP/2 or HTTP/3. Theoretically it matters, but in practice the only thing I care is that I can actually browse the web on my phone. And AMP for all it’s faults does a damn good job of making an ad infested web browsable on crappy internet connections.
Having it enforced by Google actually makes it easier to get funding by organizations since now administrators can’t simply just tell their devs to ignore standard.
I agree on this perspective but not the facts. AMP on iOS is buggy as hell. Pinch to zoom, Reader Mode, URL bar hiding, rotation are all routinely broken.
For a lot of us DDG isn't a viable alternative --- the quality just isn't there. (No, I am no talking about English or other European language result -- Japanese, Thai, etc. are all terrible)
I desperately want to use Firefox nightly or beta... But the mobile experience is a disaster. They were on track to roll it out to Firefox stable, but I guess now that the team's gone, I won't have that forced down my throat...
"Accelerated Mobile Pages" should not be showing up on desktop at all. If they do, that's poor coding by the website itself. Just like how you often get stuck on website's mobile version when browsing on desktop.
> it’s completely broken
That's a pretty big statement, could you specify in which way it is "completely broken"?
> friction increasing to grab a link
This has been mostly fixed, I haven't had an issue in the past year. On Chrome and Firefox I believe, it works natively, and in other browsers I believe it adds an extra bar at the top to grab the link.
> Not only that but it seems the page slightly degrades sometimes.
Quite the opposite, in my experience it's often a far simpler and focused page with less crap. The only slight disadvantage is that comment sections on articles are often disabled, but they are usually a click away. It makes sense anyways to not load those by default on mobile.
> A theoretical page load time improvement?
It's definitely not theoretical. It's also a way to bundle websites allowing easier edge caching which helps tremendously.
> we already have “request desktop mode”
Partly because the majority of websites never gave a shit about optimizing their mobile experience without an incentive.
> seemingly even worse?
I truly believe this is a case of "assigning downsides you notice to AMP, but upsides being mostly invisible". You wouldn't have anyone to assign it to when you see a mobile page on desktop, but if it's an AMP page, then you have someone to get angry at.
Another example would be how a spam protection could be blocking 99% of the spam, but if a couple bad content get through, you'll think the spam protection is doing absolutely nothing and it sucks, because you don't get to see the 99% of work it's actually doing.
These are all unbelievably resoanable and fair comments. Particularly #2.
Since it’s been a few days, just to respond to only the easiest point, copying a link to the non-AMP website so socially share takes 3 to 4 incremental clicks on mobile, so that’s what I meant by that.
But reflecting you’re spot on, since I can’t quantify the benefit AMP has had on the internet it’s hard to claim the negatives are so eggregious. Thx for that perspective.
Not only that but it seems the page slightly degrades sometimes.
For what? A theoretical page load time improvement? Maybe that’s naive but we already have “request desktop mode” to allow for bifurcated experiences. Why do we need a third thats seemingly even worse?
Total “get off my lawn” complaint but how do you turn the damn AMP off? :)