
iOS 11 Safari will automatically strip AMP links from shared URLs - OberstKrueger
https://twitter.com/viticci/status/900396684844433409
======
cramforce
TL of AMP here. Just wanted to clarify that we specifically requested Apple
(and other browser vendors) to do this. AMP's policy states that platforms
should share the canonical URL of an article whenever technically possible.
This browser change makes it technically possible in Safari. We cannot wait
for other vendors to implement.

It appears Safari implemented a special case. We'd prefer a more generic
solution where browsers would share the canonical link by default, but this
works for us.

~~~
jacquesm
> We'd prefer a more generic solution where browsers would share the canonical
> link by default, but this works for us.

We had that solution it was called 'the web'.

I'd prefer a more generic solution too: get rid of AMP.

It really isn't about what 'works for you' it is about what is good for Google
versus what is good for the web.

~~~
cramforce
Happy to have a technical discussion, but not sure you are really interested.

TL;dr AMP is 100% build on web tech. Pre-rendering achieves the performance
but relies on history.pushState and iframes, which doesn't allow presenting a
URL that is not on the same origin as the search page.

We think that the UX trade off in the URL is OK given the performance
benefits. Given that it is a trade off we now have a bunch of projects to
mitigate those trade offs. More coming soon, including lots of improvements to
Safari. My team works directly on WebKit to fix bugs that affect AMP (but also
the web as a whole, since AMP is just web tech).

~~~
jacquesm
> Happy to have a technical discussion, but not sure you are reallty
> interested.

This is not about technology. And whatever goal the AMP project states it has
could have been achieved - and better - in other ways, such as the suggestion
elsewhere in this thread to simply penalize page weight. If people wanted a
consistent user interface across all websites they would have stuck with
Videotext.

> TL;dr AMP is 100% build on web tech.

Yes, so was the search engine that put each result page in an iframe. Only
difference was they didn't have a monopoly on search. And it does not make it
right.

> Pre-rendering achieves the performance but relies on history.pushState and
> iframes, which doesn't allow presenting a URL that is not on the same origin
> as the search page.

Minor technical details, not relevant. If you feel the AMP discussion is going
to be swayed by technical bits you're simply out of touch.

> We think that the UX trade off in the URL is OK given the performance
> benefits.

Who made you the deciders of what the UX of the web should look like? Stick to
generating the best search results rather than trying to co-opt the entire web
one little bit at the time and leave the UX to the browsers, it would seem you
have enough input there already.

> Given that it is a trade off we now have a bunch of projects to mitigate
> those trade offs.

The only trade-off that will satisfy me is AMP dying off because websites will
stop to support it. But as long as Google is strong-arming content providers
to use AMP that won't happen. It is no longer fair play as far as Google is
concerned. If it ever was.

> My team works directly on WebKit to fix bugs that affects AMP (but also the
> web as a whole, since AMP is just web tech).

Consider doing something more useful with your talents. For instance, fix the
long standing issue with the SERPs that makes it impossible to cut-and-paste
URLs pointing to PDFs.

~~~
Klathmon
This post feels overly agressive and hyperbolic. There's no need to insult
their job or bring out the accusations about the reasoning behind AMP.

~~~
jonahx
The post is critical and frank but well within the bounds of civil discourse.
Pleasant and understanding is not _always_ the appropriate tone (though it's a
good default). Sometimes people or companies do harmful things. To respond
with patience and respect is to normalize them.

~~~
ucaetano
> The post is critical and frank but well within the bounds of civil
> discourse.

Yeah, this is _really_ within the bounds of "civil discourse":

> Consider doing something more useful with your talents.

~~~
Avenger42
If that sentence had been followed by something sarcastic, derogatory, or
harmful, then I'd agree. However, since it's followed by "here's an actual
problem I'm having that Google could fix", I choose to believe that jacquesm
is honestly saying "you've got a lot of bright people there, but AMP is the
wrong project to have them spend time on".

------
millstone
I hope the next step is a way to strip AMP links from all URLs, backfilling
the "Disable AMP" setting that Google ought to have provided.

AMP has always worked poorly on iOS: it has different scrolling, it breaks
reader mode, and it breaks status bar autohide and jump-to-top. Perhaps Apple
would be less hostile to AMP if the implementation were better.

~~~
pdog
_AMP has always worked poorly on iOS..._

This never made sense to me.

You can have natural scrolling, an accurate reader view, a working back button
and other highly performant features in a mobile-optimized HTML and CSS
standard like AMP. In fact, you practically have to go out of your way to
break these things in the way that AMP does.

Why does AMP have to suck so much?

~~~
e1ven
A significant portion of the time (more than 1/2) AMP URLs fail to load,
forcing me to "Request Desktop Site" in order to load it.

When they do load, they fuckify the URL, so I can't copy/paste it normally. I
know I can go in through the page's menus and get the real URL, but it makes
it harder for no reason.

I consider the URL part of the page's UI, and commonly manually edit it. This
makes it harder.

So far as I can see, there is no advantage to AMP pages, versus a fast and
simple HTML page, with no external resource requests.

Sites can serve that themselves, rather than using Google.

In short, it breaks features I use, and doesn't provide advantages.

~~~
BoorishBears
This is why I hate AMP.

People who like it can't seem to understand that it has a crappy user
experience for some people and always assume you don't like it for
"philosophical reasons".

I really don't care about AMP from that POV, I just wish it was a secondary
link instead of the stealth replacement of where I wanted to go with a page
that usually doesn't load and messes up my back button.

~~~
protomyth
I’m with you. I expect in the coming days I will have to switch some of our
elder’s search engines to DuckDuckGo to avoid problems. I just hate technology
that changes the user experience in a broken way. Browsers are supposed to act
in a certain way. Don’t break that. Breaking UI is why we had a hate on for
Win 8. It really annoyed people with the changes.

------
OtterCoder
Thank heavens. Google's efforts to 'improve' the web have been disastrous.
Like turning every list of facts into a pointless ramble because Google needs
1000 words of 'rich content'. And Amp being a push to hobble pages by making
them into a proprietary cache format instead of encouraging simpler HTML.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Thank heavens. Google's efforts to 'improve' the web have been disastrous.

This Apple action is done to honor the AMP teams design of how AMP URLs should
be handled, so it's actually, in a sense, _part of_ Google's efforts to
improve the web, not a counter to them.

~~~
MBCook
It's also done to DECRAPIFY the links that people try and share with their
friends, providing a non-crappy user experience.

In this case that HAPPENS to align with what Google wants.

Of course google could've decided not to screw up the web in the first place…
but we're obviously way past that.

------
recursive
I don't know much about the implementation details of AMP. But my perspective
as an end user is that it's pretty great. Non-amp pages tend to take multiple
seconds to get interactive, and then the content jumps around as images and
ads and fonts load. AMP tends to be usable in under half a second.

~~~
slackingoff2017
Mostly because Google serves the page from their own servers and starts
loading it before you even click a search result. It's great for Google search
and bad for everyone else.

~~~
recursive
Then I guess "everyone else" should find a way to make a usable mobile content
website without AMP, because apparently that's a nearly unsolvable problem.
It's hard to be anti-AMP when the user experience is _that_ much better with
AMP.

~~~
JoshMnem
AMP is terrible for the open WWW and not necessarily any faster.

"Pinboard founder Maciej Cegłowski already recreated the Google AMP demo page
without the Google AMP JavaScript and, unsurprisingly, it's faster than
Google's version."

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider_google_amp_bad_bad_bad/)

~~~
prophesi
Yeah, honestly, you can do just as good as an AMP site if all you did was cut
back on the javascript and use a service worker to cache static assets/pages.

I wish AMP simply wasn't a thing, and they put more effort in promoting
progressive web apps (PWA's) instead. There's too much tie-in to Google on the
internet already.

AMP is basically "Hey, you suck at your job. Here's a subset of HTML/CSS that
not even YOU can eff up."

PWA is "Hey, you suck at your job. Here's the industry's best practices for
mobile-first development."

~~~
HelloMcFly
> Yeah, honestly, you can do just as good as an AMP site if all you did was
> cut back on the javascript and use a service worker to cache static
> assets/pages.

But people didn't, and here we are. Again, as a normal user, I'm relieved to
see the AMP symbol. I click on those links first, to the exclusion of others
given the chance, because multiple years of trust have been broken.

~~~
JoshMnem
It's at the expense of the publishers and the future of the open WWW though.

~~~
HelloMcFly
I know that's the concern, but at the moment it feels like a slippery slope
fallacy to me. Hypotheticals don't interest me because there's a million of
them, and there's a thousand of them that can make sense if you look at the
right way. Maybe the preponderance of AMP will create a shift back to the user
experience, and AMP's success renders it unnecessary. Maybe maybe maybe.

 _Maybe_ I'll rue the day I wrote this, but we're going to have to see. This
is a self-created problem, and now publishers of all stripes will have to work
to earn back the trust they poisoned.

------
plasma
Here's my AMP experience on Reddit:

1) Click the AMP link in Google 2) See half the reddit thread comments, since
AMP is a cached older version, I then need to click "View full comments" which
gets me to the mobile reddit link I wanted in the first place

3) For some reason, links in AMP reddit dont let you open in a new window --
which I often want to do when reading comments inline and see someone post a
link in a comment. Frustrating.

AMP cost me more time and effort than having just gone to the non-AMP link
directly.

~~~
pls2halp
In what way is AMP a good idea for fucking Reddit? A _social_ platform.

~~~
wmf
Reddit can't figure out how to make their mobile site fast, so I guess AMP to
the rescue.

~~~
fooker
Their desktop site works better than the mobile site on Chrome in Android.

------
chipotle_coyote
Just to make sure I'm following this myself: this isn't about disabling AMP,
it's about making sure that URLs that you send to other applications or the
clipboard from Safari will be the true URLs of the original web page, not AMP
URLs. Right? That's the only way I can read "strip AMP links from shared
URLs," but a lot of comments here are piling on to AMP itself. Which I
understand (I don't like it for a lot of the reasons already brought up here,
both in terms of philosophy and usability), but I don't think that's what
we're actually talking about.

~~~
ehsankia
Yeah, the article completely misunderstands what this is about, and so do most
people in this thread. I expected more from HN.

This is something Chrome has implemented, and they've asked other browser
vendors to do too. You want AMP to load the page quickly on your first load,
but for sharing, the canonical link is the best to give to people.

~~~
epistasis
It's a single twitter thread, not an article. And how do you think it
misunderstands what this is about?

------
matt4077
People in this thread seem to be overreacting like my immune system on
strawberries....

Apple isn't taking up the good fight against AMP. They're simply removing it
from URLs when those are shared via the build-in "share" functionality.

99% of interactions with AMP pages will see no impact. It seems like it should
be uncontroversial that it is preferable to use the canonical non-AMP URI when
sharing, so as to invoke content-negotiation between that page and the devise
of whoever clicks on the shared link.

~~~
MBCook
I don't think anyone here thinks it's controversial to share the original URL
instead of the AMP one. I don't think there's anyone here who is mad that
Apple is doing this.

We are all mad that this is necessary in the first place. Apple is modifying
their OS to fix something that Google shoved on people without any option to
disable it or thought to the secondary effects of its existence.

------
yegle
It might be simply because Safari respect
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_link_element](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_link_element)

    
    
      <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/23/politics/trumps-ire-at-aides-advice/index.html">
    

EDIT: correct HTML element <link rel="canonical">

~~~
itg
Later down he mentions it is specific for AMP.

[https://twitter.com/jan4843/status/900416144955363328](https://twitter.com/jan4843/status/900416144955363328)

~~~
themacguffinman
The tweet you linked seems to be asking a question, and I don't see any
replies on the twitter website. Can you link directly to the reply?

~~~
derimagia
[https://twitter.com/viticci/status/900418370025246721](https://twitter.com/viticci/status/900418370025246721)

------
SubiculumCode
I detest AMP and everything it stands for. I'd like to see this in Firefox.

~~~
ucaetano
"AMP's policy states that platforms should share the canonical URL of an
article whenever technically possible"

~~~
ethnic_throw
It's not clear why Google relies on demanding browsers change to provide the
experience the users expect.

~~~
SubiculumCode
Apparently their matket position gives them this ability.

------
Angostura
I wish it had an option to simply strip AMP in all circumstances. I quite
often copy & paste URLs into e-mails, for example. It's irksome to have to
request the desktop version just to get the proper domain and URL.

~~~
stephen_g
Yeah, I'm also seeing a lot of AMP links accidentally shared on Twitter too. I
just want a global 'don't ever show me AMP pages' setting, as well as to be
able to turn it off in Google search results.

------
mrmondo
I absolutely support this move, I've been trying to rid myself of AMP since it
was released and this at least stops me from having to clean up URLs when
sharing them.

~~~
ucaetano
"TL of AMP here. Just wanted to clarify that we specifically requested Apple
(and other browser vendors) to do this. AMP's policy states that platforms
should share the canonical URL of an article whenever technically possible."

Apple is just following AMP's request.

~~~
MBCook
Why are you posting the exact same comment as a response to so many others?

~~~
ucaetano
Well, informing people? I actually do this in a lot of threads. Is that bad?

~~~
MBCook
I don't know, it doesn't seem useful to me. Especially since the thing you're
quoting is currently the #1 comment.

~~~
ucaetano
Valid point. I deleted some of them in less relevant threads.

------
whalesalad
I guess I am the only person who appreciates AMP. I really love the
abbreviated version of things, without all the extra crap that has to load
over the wire to render what amounts to a few paragraphs I'd like to read.

------
tannhaeuser
Hopefully Apple fighting AMP makes it a non-starter going forward now since it
isn't reaching lucrative iOS users.

~~~
dragonwriter
You get better placement for using it (and not just with Google), so if Apple
were to redirects their users to your regular site, why wouldn't you still use
it?

~~~
e1ven
AFAIK, you do NOT get better placement for using AMP. You get better placement
for having a fast site, which you can do easily without AMP.

------
Fej
Anyone else think that the EU is going to file an antitrust suit against
Google over AMP? Seems possible given their lack of hesitance in the past.

------
mratzloff
Accelerated Mobile Pages, for those who are curious.

[https://www.ampproject.org](https://www.ampproject.org)

------
NathanWilliams
I got so sick of AMP links I switched to Bing as default. Compared to google
is sucks, but still better than dealing with AMP pages. When I have to, I use
[https://encrypted.google.com](https://encrypted.google.com) which is
currently AMP free.

I would switch back immediately, if I could disable AMP on my google account.

------
jonluca
Hopefully it'll fix some of the issues with getting redirected on desktops
when people share links here/on reddit

------
nodamage
My understanding is that AMP pages load a cached version of the content inside
a nested iframe. Doesn't this break browser extensions/bookmarklets that rely
on processing the current HTML on the loaded page? Stuff like Instapaper or
Pocket, for example?

------
drawkbox
AMP reminds me of AOL's web browser back in the day and possibly Facebook
today, directing everything through their network and controlling the
experience.

AOL used to break lots of sites/graphics/scripts which noone would put up with
today, AMP just makes you use and run everything through Google or else. This
is a move to control more of the web through a walled garden and goes against
the distributed nature of the web.

The one thing that AMP may be beneficial for is archival purposes, preserving
content past when another source may keep it. However, knowing Google products
and how they are killed off like George R.R. Martin characters, no hope for
that.

------
emilfihlman
AMP is horrible and should just be buried.

------
makecheck
Here is how Safari could fix the mobile web in a matter of weeks:

1\. If a site downloads more than 100K, halt the page load or display a "too
much data" error.

2\. If a site takes more than 1 second to render, halt the page load or
display a "too long to load" error.

Do that for a few days and maybe these absurd sites would lose enough views
that they might actually bother to figure out where their data is going.

I recently had to browse with "data roaming" at the low low price of $2.05 per
MEGAbyte and had to disable pretty much everything on my phone within minutes.

~~~
kdamken
So no pictures whatsoever for mobile web sites?

~~~
makecheck
Frankly yes, at times I would love that option. A "tap to load/view" link is
sufficient for many situations.

------
lokedhs
I only wish there was a way to automatically have those pesky t.co links
resolved when sharing.

I don't use Twitter, but other people do, and when they share a link to me I'd
like to be able to 1) see what I am clicking on, and 2) avoid sending
analytics information to Twitter when I do so.

------
sergiotapia
I love Apple the most when they throw their weight around for the benefit of
the end user. It's pretty clear that Google's main concern is ads ads ads.

Apple already has my money, they focus 110% on making my life easier and their
products fantastic. Go Apple!

~~~
tuxracer
Being forced to instead load some (almost universally awful) publisher site w/
72 MB of JavaScript & CSS, absurdly intrusive ads popping up as you try to
read, etc.... is an improved experience?

~~~
kuschku
So you think this very website you’re using right now – HN – could be improved
by AMP?

I doubt that.

The only pages that get improved by AMP are those that abuse AMP then again
anyway.

~~~
tuxracer
HN itself? Nope. Many publisher sites do benefit however. Especially local
news sites that likely can't attract the best tech talent and/or contract out
pages to be shoveled out by contractors.

Re: Abuse of AMP. AMP places sane restrictions on pages
[https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec#html-
tags](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec#html-tags) including hard
limits on CSS size, etc... Google enforces these restrictions for pages served
through their servers.

This is a much much needed effort to take the publishers toys away given
they've proven they cannot be trusted with the full feature set of the web
without adult supervision.

~~~
MBCook
> Especially local news sites

You mean TV channels? The ones that all look the same? The ones run by
Sinclair broadcasting which will soon be able to control 76% of them?

There seem to be very few true local companies left, the ones around pretend
to be local when in fact they're identical to every other one owned by their
national parent company.

And that company can afford to do it right. They're rich. They don't need
Google to do it for them

~~~
tuxracer
> And that company can afford to do it right. They're rich.

In that case not sure what their excuse is but my point still holds true:
Their sites are almost universally godawful and they're demonstrably not able
to be trusted with the full feature set of the web. AMP provides some sanity
including things like hard limits on the size of CSS.

------
guelo
Would be great if it got rid of twitter shortened urls and other similar
walled-garden cruft.

------
Nuance
Must've resulted from this:
[https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/851111291229847552](https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/851111291229847552)

------
jtl999
Thank goodness

On a related note, anyone know an extension for desktop Chrome that converts
AMP pages to non-AMP pages? Or is that not programmatically possible?

------
swlkr
Nice, I do this manually right now.

------
pcora
Yes! Yes! 100 times yes! Thank you Apple!!

I hate that amp crap! It's the main reason for moving to ddg.

------
daveheq
Haha. Apple officially thinks Google is a nuisance with news sites, like Adobe
with Flash.

------
breatheoften
Hurray!!

------
rc_bhg
wtf is Amp?

------
LeicaLatte
Don't think Apple will accept any amount of billions from Google to let AMP
pass through.

~~~
russjr08
The AMP team asked them to do this.

------
bhhaskin
Good on Apple for standing up to Google. This is great for an open web.

~~~
cramforce
This change was requested by the AMP team.

------
yakz
If your content is valuable, why would you convert it into a Google format,
upload it to Google servers, and allow them to serve it wrapped in a Google
page?

Google should appreciate the ad revenue from linking to your valuable content.
Don't give Google more control over your content.

------
Sargos
A lot of people are going to "cheer" this move but this is yet another anti-
web move that Apple has made without regard to standards or how it will affect
other areas of tech. Apple has a clear record of flouting standardized
technologies in Safari like breaking iframe sizing in iOS mobile and not
supporting many common APIs and is very opaque about whether or not they even
view the web as a first class citizen. The code I work on almost has as many
Safari hacks as we have IE hacks.

If Apple would stick to just making great hardware and products and follow the
standards like other vendors do then I feel like the whole tech world would be
better off.

Edit: Apparently I need to spell out in more detail my arguments because if
read at surface level people only focus on AMP. This isn't about AMP. This is
about sharing a link to something you are viewing. You are currently viewing
the AMP page and that might look a certain way or even contain a certain type
of graph that looks a certain way because it's static and fast to load. If you
click Share and send this to a friend they will receive an entirely different
page that might look different than what you were seeing. I don't think it's a
good thing that we can no longer trust sharing a page with someone else. Now
the ultimate destination is being edited behind the scenes without you
knowing. It's a slippery slope that, like other things Apple has done, have
possibly bad consequences in the future. The road to Hell is paved with good
intentions after all.

~~~
cylo
I don't understand how you see AMP pages representing a standard web? AMP
represents the complete opposite of web standards and anything to remove it
from the web leaves us all better off.

~~~
madeofpalk
Opposite of web standards? It's HTTP+HTML+JS+CSS. What part of AMP isn't
standards compliant?

~~~
slackingoff2017
The AMP client source is available but worthless. Google validates that you're
running their blessed version of the framework and if you change a single bit
in the files Google doesn't serve your AMP content anymore.

It's a classic walled garden, like the Android app store. You can develop
Android apps that don't meet their guidelines but you can't distribute them
through normal channels.

~~~
Larrikin
The Play Store is pretty liberal in what they allow, more so than the Apple
App store atleast.

