
Please Make Google AMP Optional - tambourine_man
https://www.alexkras.com/please-make-google-amp-optional/
======
epistasis
I'm trying to imagine the uproar if Apple had done AMP instead of Google.
Somehow AMP has some staunch defenders, but everything, and I mean
_everything_ about how it's been approached has felt very anti-web and pro-
Google. The overall concept may be sound, but the implementation, and the
inability to escape it, has significantly hurt my opinion of Google. In fact,
I no longer use Google's search because of it.

~~~
endorphone
Do you think there would be an uproar? Apple introduced reading mode, built-in
content/ad blocking, etc. AMP actually fits in the profile of Apple --
prioritizing a fast, usable solution.

This author notes that they "feel bad" about consuming AMP content. Which is
extremely weird given that content creators intentionally volunteer their
content to AMP (aside from this user who got famous claiming that Google was
stealing their content because they had enabled a Wordpress plug-in
haphazardly).

If Google blacklisted non-AMP content, or even just deranked it, sure there's
an argument, but as of yet this notion that it's some content theft is quite
strange.

Google's intention with AMP is obvious, and obviously not anti-web: Facebook
is becoming a primary medium where users are accessing a lot of content. I
personally read all news via Facebook now, where they've integrated it heavily
with a built-in browser and now instant articles (Facebook's AMP). Compared to
this, the traditional web is just an obnoxious mess, not because of the web
but because of the abuse that AMP restricts.

~~~
jeffbax
I don't think its comparable to Apple. Apple is trying to make the user
experience of existing content better (where it is located)

Google is taking the content and serving it themselves.

The problem is sites being slow in the first place, but Apple isn't
commandeering the content itself like Google is by creating a mode where the
browser can enhance legibility of any article.

~~~
endorphone
_but Apple isn 't commandeering the content itself like Google is_

Content authors voluntarily publish their content in AMP form, so it doesn't
seem fair to say that they commandeer anything: AMP is a subset of HTML
intended for a fast mobile experience, and if you decide to take part you
publish flags allowing Google to cache it. Google isn't unilaterally
converting content to AMP.

The core argument against AMP primarily seems to be a fear that users _will
actually prefer AMP content_. Which is ultimately rather anti-user.

~~~
ricardobeat
> The core argument against AMP primarily seems to be a fear that users will
> actually prefer AMP content

How on earth did you arrive to that conclusion?

------
niftich
Google Search on Mobile is no longer a web search engine that hyperlinks to
the resulting page, but rather an search-integrated newsreader that loads
itself when you click on a result that's marked with AMP. This is
understandably a big change from how things used to be, but it isn't going to
get better anytime soon.

After all, most people on mobile spend their time inside apps, probably from
some Google competitor like Facebook. Within these apps, they click on links,
which increasingly load inside webviews; the framing app collects info on
where people go, and uses this to sell targeted advertising. Facebook is a
king in this space, and is now the second largest server of internet display
ads, after Google.

Google's assault on Facebook's encroachment is twofold: drive people to
Google's apps like the Google Now Launcher (now the default launcher on
Android) or the Google app present in older versions of Android and available
for iOS, and deploy the same content-framing techniques from their own search
engine webpage on mobile user-agents, where the competition is most fierce,
and they can also position it as legitimate UX improvement -- which, to their
credit, is largely true, as bigpub content sites on mobile were usually
usability nightmares and cesspits of ads.

I understand that the author and quite a few others are peeved at this
behavior and that there's no way of turning it off. But it's really not in
Google's best interest to even offer the option, because then many people will
just turn it off, encouraged by articles like the author's own last year where
he was caught off-guard and before he gained a more nuanced appreciation for
what's really going on.

The bottom line is this: Google is inseparable from its ad-serving and adtech
business -- it is after all how they make most of their money -- so if you are
bothered by their attempts to safeguard their income stream from competitors
who have a much easier time curating their own walled garden, you should cease
using Google Search on Mobile. There are other alternatives, who may not be as
thorough at search, but that's the cost of the tradeoff.

~~~
ShellGh0st
"on mobile" these days is a device with a quad core, 3GB of RAM, and a 1080p +
screen.

I don't want your stupid "mobile" website that doesn't work, your cut-down
"optimized" walled-garden product.

I just want the normal web, in all its glory.

~~~
Akath19
"on mobile" these days can be anything from a 3'' device with 512MB RAM to the
device you mention.

It's very easy to assume that everyone has the latest device in an affluent
society that doesn't have much of a problem buying the latest and greatest,
but I can assure you this isn't the case in most of the world.

You're failing to see that Google is used everywhere in the world and not all
countries (in fact, very few) have markets where the standard device is what
you describe or where everyone has blazing fast LTE available everywhere.

For example, there are places here in Colombia where 2G is the norm, that's
the kind of people AMP is helping, not the bay area kid that has the latest
iPhone and 100Mb Wi-Fi

~~~
pdkl95
> a 3'' device with 512MB RAM ... 2G

Such luxuries. I spent several years reading web pages on a 33MHz 386DX with
_8MB_ of RAM. Yes, Netscape took a while to start (had to wait for the rest of
Win 3.1 to swap out), and downloading images was always somewhere between
"slow" and "don't bother" even with the glorious 14.4kbps of a fancy V.32bis
modem[1]. However, it still only took a few (15-20) seconds to fetch an
article and render it.

The slowness started when websites decided it was fashionable to add a few
dozen unnecessary HTTP requests to fetch megabytes of Javascript. The bloat is
self inflicted, and websites do not need Google's help to make their pages
small and fast. Unfortunately, many pages value the bloated ad loaders and
trackers, several types of spyware ("analytics"), and their favorite
"framework" more than they value the actual content of the page or the
reader's experience. Google is happy to pretend the problem isn't self-
inflicted when it gives them more tracking data.

Yes, it's important to remember that there will always be a wide variation in
the User Agent. That's one of the reasons well-designed websites progressively
enhance the heavier features. Websites can do this on their own - just like
they did 10/15/20 years ago. An over-engineered caching system isn't
necessary. Do you want a future where the internet retains some of it's
interactive, decentralized qualities? Or do you want a fancier version of
Cable TV, mostly controlled by Google _et al_?

[1] On weekends I was stuck with the old 2400bps V.22bis hand-me-down.

------
godot
There's a lot of complaint about Google AMP and Facebook Instant Articles,
e.g. walled garden, anti-open-web and whatnot.

Here's something simpler from a non-developer, average-consumer point of view.
I recently began taking BART to work daily (new job). For those who don't
know, BART is Bay Area's subway system, and (at least on the east bay side)
cell reception is notoriously spotty.

When I'm on the train, which includes 2 hours of my day everyday
(unfortunately), I'd be browsing on say Facebook, and look at links that my
friends post. Instant articles almost always load successfully (and quickly)
and external links to actual sites almost always fails to load or loads
insanely slowly.

Yes, when you're at home or in the city with good mobile reception, these
things make no sense and you'd rather hit the original site directly. Give
them their ad revenue, etc. to support them, right. But for the average
consumers who actually have problems like slow internet (like the average joe
who rides public transportation and wants to read on their phone), things like
AMP and Instant Articles actually _help_. I can only imagine outside of
silicon valley (where I live), how much more significant of a problem slow
internet/slow mobile data actually is.

P.S. I don't work at Google or Facebook, and I know this sounds like
propaganda, not to mention this is exactly what they would like to tell you as
the "selling points" of these features, in order to continue building their
walled garden empires. Fully aware of it, but I did want to bring up why they
exist and why I even actually like them.

~~~
themodelplumber
Yeah, but maybe there's a better way to get you your nice BART outcome, you
know? I think that's really part of the pushback here. We haven't really given
social permission for Google to convert the web to AMP by force.

~~~
imchillyb
> ...convert the web to AMP by force. @themodelplumber

Complete hyperbole. Google's not forcing _anyone_ to use AMP. They're not
forcing developers or users to use AMP.

There is no force. There is only usability. Users prefer usability. Developers
prefer people use their products. If a user does not, or cannot, connect to
the developer's product the developer loses. If a user cannot connect easily
and speedily to a page, they will not consider the product.

I rock an LG V20 and I use Chrome mobile. AMP lets me connect to the content I
wish to consume speedily and easily. I connect at a significantly faster rate
than without AMP. Thus...

I <3 AMP. I don't care who controls it. As long as I can connect to the
content I want, I'm good.

~~~
djrogers
> There is no force.

If you as a publisher want your content to show up in the carousel or top
search results, you really have no choice but to use amp. It’s coercion if
it’s not force.

~~~
_jtrig
"Then use a different internet" -Free Market Evangelists

------
gub09
Please, web developers, as a minimum, set up your websites so that they do not
depend on Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon or Apple for their
functionality. That means, for example, use DoubleClick or AdSense or
GoogleAnalytics if you like, but please do not use jquery from Google's CDNs.
If you do that, and the site is dependent on that functionality to work (i.e.
for text to be displayed), those of us who don't allow Google CDNs will not be
able to use the site. The same for WebAssembly: use it if you like, but please
don't make your actual content unnecessarily dependent on the use of services
from these multinationals. It makes the Web less free.

~~~
chrisan
> That means, for example, use DoubleClick or AdSense or GoogleAnalytics if
> you like, but please do not use jquery from Google's CDNs.

Why is Google Analytics ok and not their CDN?

~~~
gub09
My point is that anyone can use an adblocker or Squid proxy filtering to block
GoogleAnalytics, but if the site uses jquery from a Google CDN to render
content, that cannot be blocked without making the site unusable. It's even
worse if the Google CDN request is made with https, because then a redirection
needs to be made inside the browser.

~~~
CydeWeys
Can't you whitelist the specific jQuery library on Google's CDN though?

Serving widely used libraries out of a CDN is a best practice for a reason.
Most visitors will already have it in cache. What alternative are you
supposing? Local hosting? That has drawbacks, including more cache misses and
increased bandwidth costs for the website provider.

~~~
mabcat
It's not always the user doing the blocking. A lot of sites broke for me when
I was in China because they were trying to fetch resources from Google's CDN,
which is/was blocked there.

~~~
CydeWeys
Surely the primary blame there lies in China's censorship of the Internet, no?
Isn't it just assumed that if you're traveling to China you need to be using a
VPN in order to have the web as you're used to it work normally?

------
daveheq
Google AMP:

1\. Obscures the web page's URL.

2\. Makes manual zoom in/out impossible.

3\. Sometimes hides content mentioned in the article, with no ability to
scroll horizontally to see it.

4\. Confuses Chrome on Amdroid into over-hiding its top address/menu bar
(forcing two swipes down all the way to the top to show) or forces it to show
(won't hide on scroll down).

This is just coming from a user's perspective, fortunately it doesn't impact
my work, but may in future websites I build due to it being almost 100% of the
news articles I read.

~~~
limeblack
5) tap to scroll to the top of page also doesn't work on the iPhone

~~~
craigc
I was just going to comment this, but I will upvote your comment instead. This
drives me crazy

------
sintaxi
I suggest stop using google search altogether.
[https://duckduckgo.com/](https://duckduckgo.com/) is an excellent search
engine and its trivial to make a google search via `!g` prefix when you are
not finding what you are looking for.

~~~
65827
I moved off of gmail a few months ago, pretty happy about that but man
duckduckgo fucking suuuucks. Really wish there was a nonprofit (with a strong
privacy policy) wikipedia like .org solution that provided good results.

~~~
amelius
What mail service are you using now?

~~~
corobo
Not OP but I recently switched to Fastmail myself. It's web interface is a bit
bland but you can use IMAP/SMTP and your device's built in client if that's an
issue

Liking it so far, really liking being able to attach my domains natively to my
inbox

------
matthberg
"What I realized today, however, is that while I don’t so much mind AMP as a
publisher, I really hate it as a user. I realized that EVERY TIME I would land
on AMP page on my phone, I would click on the button to view the original URL,
and would click again on the URL to be taken to the real website.

I don’t know why I do it, but for some reason it just doesn’t feel “right” to
me to consume the content through the AMP. It feels slightly off, and I want
the real deal even if it takes a few seconds extra to load."

I have subconsciously been doing the exact same thing for a while now, and I
think this quote covers a good deal of public sentiment. It's weird to use
AMP, yet slower without it.

Another main issue I have with AMP is that there is no speedy way to check the
url, something I do quite frequently. Instead it's just Google's hosting for
the site, with the source being only available by clicking on the link icon.

------
wmf
The author's argument against AMP comes down to "I don’t know why I do it, but
for some reason it just doesn’t feel “right” to me to consume the content
through the AMP. It feels slightly off". This is... not a strong argument.

The AMP saga has pretty clearly shown that users care about content while Web
developers only care about URLs and what goes over the wire. This is a huge
disconnect. It doesn't help that many Web developers show no empathy for the
users' viewpoint.

Ultimately it probably is easier for Google to add an opt-out to appease a
very small, very vocal minority than to educate them that the URL doesn't
matter.

~~~
ehsankia
You're being downvoted but you're absolutely right, this article is just weak
and it's only popular because it voices a popular opinion, but does a very bad
job at justifying it.

I fully agree that it should be optional and people who dislike it should be
allowed to disable it. But as you mention, the author provide absolutely no
real argument other than "it feels wrong".

All user studies so far show that it's a net positive, and I'd rather stick to
real data than feelings or anectodes.

I personally love it, but I also agree that those who don't should be allowed
to disable it.

~~~
akras14
Thank you for valid criticism. I've added the following to the post. Hope it
clears up my point of view a bit better.

Some people expressed a valid criticism that just saying “doesn’t feel right”
is not good enough. While I agree, I don’t have any solid data to back up my
argument. I believe AMP (to some extent) is a hack on top of existing browsers
and the Web, to create a faster in-browser “browser”. As a result a number of
small things (scrolling etc) don’t work on my iPhone as I would normally
expect. Considering that this post received over 1000 up-votes on Hacker News,
making it one of the top 300 posts of all time, leads me to believe that I am
not alone.

------
ciconia
At 43yo I probably belong to the older folks on HN, but those modern devices
all of us carry in our pockets to me seem just absolutely incredible and
magical. They probably can run around machines that took up whole rooms just a
few decades ago.

At the risk of sounding like an old fart (I probably do), I fail to understand
this frustration of normal mobile users with the so-called slowness of their
mobile experience. To quote CK Lewis: "Give it a second! It’s going to space!
Can you give it a second to get back from space!??"

~~~
fshaun
The issue is that the slowness is unnecessary. No, I cannot give it a second
when it should only take 100ms. There is such a thing as pride in craft that
seems sorely lacking today. I could not live with myself if I had build a
quarter of the websites I deal with daily. I don't know all of the causes, but
I certainly understand the frustration.

~~~
leggomylibro
To be fair, though, this applies to most types of products.

If you buy a cheap plastic hammer from a dollar store, you shouldn't expect it
to break rocks like a bespoke carbon steel ball-peen.

But if you buy a cheap website from a bottom-barrel contractor, you're allowed
to be baffled at why people don't like using it. It's just a website, for
crying out loud.

------
andy_ppp
What really gets me about the AMP Cache (AMP itself is fine by me) is that it
doesn't actually make anything faster. If you time the difference in download
speed between the real website AMPd page and AMP Cache URL the difference is
almost nothing in 99% of cases. And neither page load gives you that magical
instant hit you get on Google's SERPs.

The speed difference on SERPs is the background downloading and (possibly) pre
rendering of AMP pages. This functionality could easily be added to browsers,
keeping people on their own websites and Google not having control over the
content.

We already have <link rel="preload/prefetch"> but how about adding <link
rel="prerender"
href="[http://amp.newswebsite.com/article/etc."](http://amp.newswebsite.com/article/etc.")
/>.

This would absolutely give all of the benefits of AMP Cache without Google
embracing and extending the web. It's also much simpler to integrate, every
single site can choose to benefit from this (not just SERPs) and I don't end
up accidentally sending AMP Cache urls to my friends on mobile.

~~~
patrickaljord
> We already have <link rel="preload/prefetch"> but how about adding <link
> rel="prerender"
> href="[http://amp.newswebsite.com/article/etc."](http://amp.newswebsite.com/article/etc.")
> />.

The goal of AMP is to improve the experience on mobile, making the client
prerender instead of Google would be bad for your mobile device battery.

~~~
andy_ppp
I’m just suggesting a way to improve the mobile experience without breaking
the web. There are a multitude of ways to do this and while I see your point
about everyone using prerender everywhere (browsers should probably have
energy usage by domain and warn against bad actors) it’s surely better than
this mess where one company completely controls the mobile web.

------
sorenstoutner
My experience is that all the advantages of AMP can be had by disabling
JavaScript while browsing. And this comes with none of the disadvantages of
ceding even more control to companies like Google and Facebook.

In my opinion, JavaScript should be disabled by default and only enabled for
specific tasks or websites. Not finding exactly what I was looking for in any
other browser, I eventually created Privacy Browser on Android.
[https://www.stoutner.com/privacy-browser/](https://www.stoutner.com/privacy-
browser/)

There are extensions like No Script that can give similar results for other
browsers. [https://noscript.net/](https://noscript.net/)

~~~
jorvi
uMatrix or uBlock (in advanced mode) can largely accomplish the same in a
simpler way. However, in my experience, if you go the 'default deny' route
against scripts, the spread is about 33/33/33, with 33% of the pages working
perfectly, 33% breaking in small ways, and 33% completely borking up. Yes, you
can then add the necessary scripts to a whitelist, but it gets tiresome to
constantly have to 'fix' sites.

~~~
qb45
Whitelisting is indeed troublesome, especially in the age of CDNs, and not
really worth it for sites visited only once. I discovered that some instances
of breakage can be fixed by enabling Firefox "reader view", for others I just
start

    
    
      chromium --incognito
    

and paste the link.

------
tangue
AMP has been created for product managers. Everybody in a project knows that
slow and bloated pages hurt users, but business requirements are making it
impossible to do otherwise. Google AMP solves this problem, in an
authoritarian way (hence the outrage), by defining what's good and bad for the
Internet.

Marketing has taken the lead in corporate websites projects to the detriment
of the end-users, AMP puts the user in the center.

~~~
epistasis
As user, AMP makes my life hell. It made me change nearly two decades of
search engine loyalty because Google decided to embrace extend and extinguish.
Screw those assholes for breaking the back button, accidentally scrolling to
the side, and URLs. I mean, I hate outlook and office with a passion, but the
AMP team has somehow produced something even worse: take a monopoly and forced
a terrible UI and experience in a huge number of users. Every memeber of the
team should be thinking of how they can spin their time at Google as being not
related to AMP. Such crap, and such a bad direction for the Google experience.

------
j1vms
What some may fail to see is that the Web's success in the smartphone/mobile
era is _not_ yet secure. Both Facebook and Apple, among others, have vested
interest in treating the Web as competitive threat. I believe AMP was Google's
response to Facebook's Instant Articles.

Although there is much to be concerned about Google's ever-expanding reach
into the daily life of a good portion of the planet, I think web proponents
have more to fear from the likes of FB, Apple, and others appearing on the
horizon. These companies are mostly succeeding at meeting current UX
expectations (performance, standardization, ease-of-use), and in doing so they
are capturing eyeballs away from the web. It's possible some of those who have
left for these walled gardens may not return.

------
b0rsuk
The article displays his autocomplete hints:

    
    
      google amp pages
      google amp annoying
      google amp sucks
      google amp conference
    

My equivalents in google.com are:

    
    
      test
      cache
      disable
      maps
    

Both bing.com and duckduckgo.com (which doesn't track) don't recognize "amp",
even when I put both first words in quotes, and assume I made a typo in
"maps".

This simple test is therefore inconclusive, but my hypothesis is that _his_
search autocomplete hints are, ironically, colored by his search history. The
only negative word I got (disabled) is much more neutral.

Now that I think about it, duckduckgo's "no tracking" isn't just valuable for
privacy. It's also valuable for consistent search results across computers
without yielding even more information (logging in etc). A few times I made a
query and found something useful and surprising, and then I wasn't able to
replicate the query on another computer to show someone else. In any case I'd
hate to miss a rare interesting page because Google thought that extra 10
pages about Linux might interest me more.

~~~
freyr
Try going into Incognito Mode and searching from google.com. When I do that, I
get _pages, annoying, sucks,_ and _conference_.

Actually, I get those same results in or out of Incognito Mode, but it's
possible your search history is coloring your results.

~~~
b0rsuk
Same results in and out of incognito mode :-|

~~~
freyr
Weird. I suppose results may depend on our geographical locations.

------
naasking
I'm starting to hate AMP for one simple reason: it breaks the back button on
my Android phone. Like, what the hell? Didn't we do this dance over 10 years
ago? Do we really have to keep circling the same drain over and over and over
again?

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
Can you say how? Works fine for me: If I'm on Google search results, tap on an
AMP article, and then hit back, I'm back on search results. If I'm on an AMP
article, and I tap through to the host site, and then hit back, I'm back on
the AMP article (and hitting back again takes me to my original search results
page). Works exactly as expected for me.

~~~
naasking
I would if I knew the precise steps. The past few weeks I've been googling all
kinds of DIY projects, and I can't count the number of times I'd google
something, get an AMP article, hit back _once_ and end up on a _previous_
google search and not the page that linked this article.

------
omot
I never really understood why google amp is bad. Can anyone explain the reason
why people think its ethically bad?

~~~
tyingq
>Can anyone explain the reason why people think its ethically bad

This is just one of many reasons, but try this on a mobile phone.

Go to Google and search for "Trump"

Note what choices you have to pick from without excessive scrolling. They all
end in either ads or Google urls.

Click one of the featured stories in the carousel, almost guaranteed to be an
AMP site. Seems to be a prerequisite to sit in the carousel.

Lets say you land on a Washington Post story. What do you think a "right
swipe" should do? Should it navigate to a competitor of Wapo? This is Wapo's
page, right? So it should go to another Wapo page. Nope, it goes to Fox News.

Okay, so now you've navigated from Wapo to say Fox News. Hit the back button.
It should go back to the Wapo story, right? Nope, goes back to Google.

How this isn't viewed as a land grab is a mystery to me.

~~~
vmasto
For some reason I'm not experiencing the same at all.

I googled "Trump". First five stories in carousel (wapo, bbc et all) are not
AMP. I see only one AMP link in the first page results. Click on it, page
loads. Swipe right/back button gets me to Google results (as expected). Is it
because I'm on an iPhone and this is an Android thing?

~~~
djrogers
Not an iPhone issue -
[https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=trump](https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=trump)
returns. I thing but amp pages I’ve the carousel or the first page of results
other than the links to Wikipedia and his Twitter page.

Same search though ddg with !g comes out completely different though....

------
drawkbox
Towards the end of AOL (early 2000s), they used to take all content that you
visited through their browsers and re-compress and sometimes remove things
from the sites. This sometimes really ruined image color, layouts, style etc.

The agency I worked at it was a huge problem because back then clients and
business people still used AOL and would see the jacked up versions of their
site. There was literally nothing you could do, they did it to small and large
sites without abandon.

AMP reminds me a bit of that type of setup with AOL re-compressing and
crunching down sites through their network. I agree with Google on doing this
for email for security but not necessarily websites. AMP to me is quite
annoying and in general a bad move.

------
801699
"... Google's AMP team even invited me to have lunch with them."

Reminds me of this: [http://blackhat.com/media/bh-usa-97/blackhat-
eetimes.html](http://blackhat.com/media/bh-usa-97/blackhat-eetimes.html)

As far as I can tell, in order to be "forced" on a user, AMP must rely on
javascript, the browser used or maybe the OS (I trust they are not rewriting
search results to point to AMP but that could be another one).

A no javascript command line tcp client will retrieve the page without
automatically following the amphtml link. Users thus have a choice. And if
choosing the amphtml link it is easy to filter out everything but the text of
the page (the content). In that sense AMP is quite nice.

The "forced" nature of AMP should make users think about these points of
control for advertisers and Google: javascript, browser, OS. Maybe website
owners will think about them too the next time they "recommend" or "require"
certain browsers. Web should be javascript, browser and OS neutral.

------
BinaryIdiot
Honestly AMP should have been a set of tools / a framework. Think about it.

Currently with AMP Google gets not only your traffic but they get your content
on their own domains (which makes all content look like the same
trustworthiness) and, at the same time, they mark sites that have AMP
available in their search results thusly weighting those results differently
because it can train users to click on those more.

Ultimately this is bad for everyone but Google.

However, if it was a framework / set of tools we could create our own AMP
pages and simply put them on our own DNS. Google's cache is really the only
unique thing going on here and we wouldn't have to worry about sharing trust.

------
limeblack
So another article was posted a couple weeks ago about AMP. One advantage I
have seen is that you can get around intranet blocking sites if they support
AMP. Besides obviously speed this is the only advantage I have found.

------
cmac2992
I love AMP as a user. So many sites have brutal load time and jumpy pages,
popups and sometimes crashes.

As a developer I'm not a fan. It's another thing to manage and maintain. And
the last time I checked once you can't leave without some serious
consequences.

As a marketer I like the increased CTR but dislike the higher bounce rate and
limited features.

~~~
bradgessler
Google could accomplish the same objective by penalizing pages that abuse
users with ads or load slow.

------
abrowne
I've never actually seen AMP "in the wild". Is it because my only mobile
browsing is with Firefox on Android?

~~~
floatboth
Yeah, same. Firefox Nightly Android + DuckDuckGo, but _sometimes_ I do use
Google, still haven't found an AMP page.

~~~
callahad
That's because Google sniffs Firefox's user agent and serves it an older, less
featureful version of Google Search. One that doesn't support AMP. Spoofing
Firefox's ua-string to appear as Chrome will get you the full Search
experience, including AMP.

~~~
johnsmith21006
But according to some on here a no AMP response with FF is better as no AMP.
Which is it?

Personally prefer the faster speed with AMP.

------
frankydp
Isn't AMP just an RSS reader for the entire internet?

If they solved the URL issue somehow(even if faking the address bar), and had
original and AMP links in search; it would probably reduce the antiAMP
argument quite a bit. Which both seem to be just UI issues.

~~~
tyingq
Hijacking right and left swipe and the back button are also issues.

Google's attitude that it's "your page" despite the URL and header is complete
BS. They clearly hijack it for their own benefit.

~~~
MBCook
I CANT STAND sites that do that. At a minimum it's frustrating because I tend
to hit it accidentally. Then there's the infuriating fact that it messes with
the system back/forward gestures on iOS. Of course every website does
something different so it's not really something you can actually learn to
use.

Worst of all I was on the website the other day where I couldn't use pinch to
zoom without it moving me to a different page. It was literally impossible to
zoom into the content.

I can't stand all these things where websites seem to try to invente the
features that are already built into mobile phones. "Will make a bar that
makes it easy to share this!" I can ALREADY share things easily on my phone.
And it doesn't waste 10% of my screen at all times. Also, I can configure at
the way I want.

------
ender7
Users: I like AMP pages, they're fast!

HN: But the open Internet!

Users: What's that?

HN: Normal websites!

Users: Like...the really slow ones? With all the annoying popovers? And pages
that take forever to load? And for some reason cause my fancy new phone to
slow to a crawl?

HN: Well, those websites should rewrite their entire codebase to be faster.

Users: That doesn't help me, though.

HN: Trust in the free market! The problem is you, the user, who just needs to
exert more pressure on website purveyors so they'll make performant web sites.

Users: You mean, like, preferring websites that offer faster experiences?
Okay. _Continues to use AMP._

~~~
baconner
Your hypothetical there assumes that AMP actually works well. My experience is
it's got painful usability issues at least on android chrome. The worst one I
see all the time is scrolling down to actually read the AMP page frequently
results in the page closing, returning you to results.

Fast is good, but at least it ought to be a good user experience. I used to
use google news a lot, but i totally abandoned it after constant frustrating
experiences with AMP. Plus most of the amp-ified pages don't seem
significantly faster than the original page. I'm not seeing the utility for
users, just for google.

~~~
mkawia
AMP is also literally breaking internet. People share google.com/amp
links,sometimes there'd be no preview and hard telling what the actual website
being linked is.

~~~
_jtrig
On safari I get nothing except AMP links in google and cannot get myself
routed to the actual site even with extensive searching. This disables sharing
the link for me as well.

~~~
rbjorklin
Have you considered switching search engines? I've been using
[https://duckduckgo.com](https://duckduckgo.com) for the last two years and
this is the first time I'm hearing of Google AMP.

~~~
_jtrig
I really really really want to use DuckDuckGo.com but the search results are
probably 10% as helpful as Google. As a developer it's nearly impossible to
find a really specific answer using ddg whereas google will have 3 super-
relevant links.

------
alenros
Wrote down this Tampermonkey\Greasemonkey script that would do the job of
automatically redirecting you to the original content. can also be obtained
from [0]

// ==UserScript== // @name Un-AMP // @namespace
[http://tampermonkey.net/](http://tampermonkey.net/) // @version 0.1 //
@description avoids google AMP links and navigates to the original content //
@author Alenros // @match
[https://www.google.co.il/amp/*](https://www.google.co.il/amp/*) // @match
[https://www.google.com/amp/*](https://www.google.com/amp/*) // @grant none //
==/UserScript==

window.location.href=document.getElementsByClassName("amp-
canurl")[0].textContent;

\---------------

[0][https://github.com/alenros/Un-AMP](https://github.com/alenros/Un-AMP)

~~~
akras14
Does it work on mobile?

~~~
alenros
Yes - if you have one of these extensions installed. Tampermonkey even has an
application for Android.

------
whyagaindavid
Here in 3rd world with flaky 2/3G and just 100-300mb data, AMP is welcome. We
still use 1G ram phones!

------
tempodox
If we need Google to tell us to do something that could just as well be
achieved by applying reason and sane engineering, without capitulation to a
monopoly, then something is deeply wrong with our industry.

------
jbg_
I started using a self-hosted searx[1] instance recently, and I highly
recommend it if you'd prefer to not have to care about this nonsense.

It's the first time I've found an alternative to google.com that is actually
usable (i.e. I find what I'm looking for near the top of the first results
page every time I make a search).

You can use Google as one of the results providers, but you won't see any AMP
results, and since searx can mix in results from Stack Overflow etc, you might
find that a different search engine than Google still gets you good results.

I think Google would pull fewer of these monopolistic tricks if people would
realise they have genuine alternatives.

[1] [https://github.com/asciimoo/searx](https://github.com/asciimoo/searx)

------
makecheck
Be sure to structure your Google searches as "g!" searches to DuckDuckGo and
AMP effectively disappears with the same set of search results.

~~~
robin_reala
Only because Google haven’t turned on AMP results for encrypted.google.com.
It’s presumably only a matter of time until they do.

~~~
terrestrial
!g has been my exclusive portal to Google for years (also on mobile). I never
understood what all the rage was about until I went to try it in the "normal"
Google. This is the first time I've seen that "lightning" icon. Wow.

So that's how it feels like to be a "lucky 10 000".

 _crawls back under stone_

~~~
robin_reala
Absolutely, my !g usage will drop right off when Google decide to add in their
other SERP ‘functionality’.

------
quadrangle
> this jeannie is firmly out of the bottle

It's "genie"

~~~
akras14
Thanks, ESL. I even googled it to see if I got it right, but Google failed me
there.

------
bsaul
This is crazy, i never noticed those amp links until i read this article. I
never clicked on it because my brain somehow classified them as "weird google
stuff looking like a new kind of ads". It looks so much like the "external
content" ads you find on some website, plus it provides less room for the
first sentences of the article, so it made it look even more like clickbait.

What did happen though, is that i found google results a lot worse on mobile,
and ended up not searching for stuff on my mobile. Google results really look
like a mess on mobile now...

They really went from minimalist zen to baroque indian arabesque over the
year...

------
codazoda
So, funny thing. I have been ignoring amp results by accident. I didn't
realize what they were and they look like sponsored ads, so I had complete
"banner blindness" to them. Odd, now I'll try a few.

------
vultour
> AMP took off. Over two billion pages are using AMP

I don't think I've ever seen an AMP-enabled website, I certainly never noticed
any buttons suggesting I visit the original website.

~~~
mattmanser
Only works on Chrome.

~~~
Viper007Bond
That's simply not true. I get it all the time in Safari on iOS.

------
andy_ppp
I mean, if you take AMP to it's logical conclusion why should Google allow
anyone to host their own webpages when Google can host them all better and
faster.

~~~
dragonwriter
The point of AMP is everyone can host their own pages, and anyone who wants to
can host their own AMP cache. So, no, your description isn't taking AMP to
it's logical conclusion, it's extrapolating a distortion of AMP.

------
johneke
Even if people are for/against AMP, I think it does make sense to have AMP
optional. For instance Google searches will often show the "Ad"-ified link at
the top, but with the regular link somewhere below in the search results.
Google could just as easily have the AMP and non AMP links in the search
results if they aren't really the evil corp everyone thinks they are :)

------
cubano
> To be honest, I don’t even know what Facebook Instant Articles are.

Amen, brother.

------
jeshwanth
AMP should be optional, I was getting irritated yesterday as many pages are
not getting loaded.

------
reaperducer
As someone who used to make WAP web sites for mobile phones, I find AMP's
limitations comforting and its goal laudable. Much better than the throw-
another-javascript-framework-on-the-pile ethos that they teach kids coming out
of school these days.

------
JeremyBanks
Google search doesn't really have many options like this, and I'd be shocked
if they added this one.

But given the URL format, it should be trivial for a browser extensions to
rewrite links or requests from AMP pages to the original. I bet it already
exists.

~~~
limeblack
And how do you plan to do this when no mobile browsers suppport extensions?

~~~
krrrh
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/android/)

~~~
limeblack
So my statement wasn't completely accurate but there still is no support for
iOS. [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-firefox-
ios](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-firefox-ios)

~~~
xiphias
Things like this are the main reason why I switched to Android from iOS after
iPhone 1 and didn't look back (also I love my Samsung Edge hardware).

------
lokedhs
Honest question. How do I see an AMP page? Perhaps my use of a browser is
different that most others (I don't use Facebook, for example) but I can only
recall seeing an AMP link once or twice.

Do you only see them when doing a Google search?

------
Artlav
As someone who just heard of AMP today, i still can't find any site where it's
used, nor have i ever encountered it in the wild.

Is it an american thing, not enabled for other countries? Just what am i
supposed to look for?

~~~
floatboth
Search for some hot news topic on Google with Chrome on Android, you'll see a
ton of AMP pages. I haven't encountered it in the wild either because I do not
do that pretty much ever.

------
falcodream
If my regular page loads as fast as the AMP page, to within some margin, could
Google drop the AMP version and link directly to me? It would make AMP a tool
for improving the web rather than replacing it.

~~~
corobo
You could just not enable AMP if your site loads faster without it

~~~
millisecond
Problem is that Google is boosting amp in search pages, making it 'required'
for sites that live on SEO.

------
ccommsxx
I've been waiting for a comment on why re-hosting verbatim copies of the
original content by google is not considered copyright infringement? How come
there seems to be no discussion on this at all?

~~~
tertius
Start by showing how proxying is copyright infringement. Or even search
results...

~~~
JoshMnem
Republishing copyrighted content on another domain without permission is
copyright infringement. I don't know if Google's terms allow their
republishing of copyrighted content via AMP, but most people in charge of
those decisions at their companies probably aren't paying attention to the
domain name or the implications of what they are allowing. At the very least,
companies are being coerced to allow the republication of the content.

------
burgerdev
> My issue with AMP being used inside Google the Search engine

I'd suggest trying an alternative, maybe
[https://duckduckgo.com](https://duckduckgo.com).

------
plasma
Like the article, I often dismiss AMP and visit the original, because I want
the latest content - AMP is cached and so for sites like reddit the content is
out of date.

------
homero
At least they give you the link now, before was horrific

------
grizzles
I posted an alternative solution.
[https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/8534](https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/8534)

The ticket was closed a few days ago. People dislike stuff like AMP, but we
are probably stuck with it, there just isn't much interest in alternatives.

------
geekme
The publishers should stop supporting AMP collectively. I own a couple of
websites and I have not enabled AMP in either of them.

------
learntofly
I use an older iPhone as my primary internet device when at home.

From google news, the top hits are served through amp and I lose about 1/10 of
my screen area to a pointless blue "bar" underneath safari's address bar. This
loss of screen space is the only reason I object to amp.

~~~
andars
I also use a iPhone that is a few years old. My experience has been that
Google sends me to AMP pages in Safari and scrolling literally doesn't work.
It just does that springy thing (as if there is no more content) on both top
and bottom.

------
dabber
I haven't read through the comments here yet but my initial impression of the
article is 'ha, I was literally thinking this today'; because I was. AMP is a
little heavy handed for my tasteS. Another instance of HN being on the same
wave length I guess.

------
skmanish
Not able to view AMP pages in my Google chrome right now, neither on my
friends' phones

------
tomphoolery
Why doesn't AMP change the URL bar itself? I don't see a reason why it can't
utilize the browser history API and attribute the correct URL page view,
considering Google is probably doing your analytics too.

~~~
jayflux
The history API can only change the path, you can't change the entire hostname
with it, that would open too many doors to phishing if that was possible.

------
bradezone
Google AMP is the devil and I've long since switched to DuckDuckGo as my
search engine on mobile. The thing I hate most about ANY technology is when
they think they know what I want more than I do.

------
radicaldreamer
I can’t help but think that Google considers more and more posts like this a
success metric for taking over this part of the web (like Facebook does with
its walled garden).

------
tobyhinloopen
I must be stupid but I never seen an AMP page anywhere. Link?

------
0x0
AMP is bad and anyone who's invested in it should feel shameful for making the
internet a worse place.

~~~
izacus
Internet being turned into a shitty place by bad developers and advertisers is
why AMP exists in the first place.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
You just said "Jimmy pissed in the pool, so who cares if Timmy shits in it?"

~~~
izacus
I have hard time sympathizing with people who made the web a horrible blinking
ad and malware laden experience for everyone. Especially when they're
complaining about something that brings actually content and performance
forward again.

~~~
tyingq
That's the trojan horse though. Google pushes the performance aspects of AMP,
when I suspect that's not the killer feature for them. See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14529605](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14529605)

------
wbc
anyone from the project? wanted to test out but it looks like the create link
is dead:
[https://www.ampproject.org/docs/create/](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/create/)

~~~
godot
I went through the ampproject.org homepage and reached this docs/tutorial
link:
[https://www.ampproject.org/docs/tutorials/create](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/tutorials/create)

Seems like the link you found is outdated.

------
Shorel
Just make your blog in Jekyll instead of WordPress.

Much faster everywhere, in all browsers and platforms.

------
dreamcompiler
Maybe if we all start adding

Pragma: no-AMP

to our HTTP requests Google and publishers will start noticing we care.

------
zhuzhu
This guy earning with Google adsense

~~~
gub09
Yes, why does a private website needs 10 trackers/data-miners? For the ad
revenue?

------
PaulHoule
Use bing?

~~~
dabber
I think you meant DuckDuckGo

;)

