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Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#241

Post by Gigablah »

MBCook wrote: post #202
cramforce wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but there is some irony there. We were as surprised as anyone. I do like the new inertia much better. Allows for much faster scrolling similar to Android.

I don't think there's any irony here. You deployed something that worked horribly on iOS, you didn't offer a way to opt out, and when someone else put in a fix for your terrible UX that just happens to change everything else to the way your stuff currently works you use it to gloat and a guy who pointed out how terrible your UX was. Honestly this whole thing (AMP and your comment) come off arrogant as hell to me. I l…

You call someone's work "terrible" (twice) to their face and now you're upset over a little bit of snark?

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#242

Post by kazinator »

Are they serious with the following?

AMP HTML uses some stupid Unicode emoji character:

  
       ^ HN filtered out the voltage symbol, bravo.
Just, no, Google. You're not Ken fucking Iverson, and this is not APL. Just supporting one way of doing it, , is perfectly fine.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#243

Post by Retric »

inopinatus wrote: post #136
monochromatic wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried Duck Duck Go exactly because of the AMP issue. Its search results are bad enough that I couldn't keep using it even though I wanted to. I'm on Bing for now.

I get identical results from DDG and Bing, and that isn't surprising because DDG's search backend is Bing.

I really don't ex: "ice cream calories" share several but not all sites and use a different order for those they share, which just suggests similar algorithms.

PS: DDG redirected image searches to bing, but not generic searches. Which honestly seems reasonable as doing image search well is incredibly hard, with minimal payoffs.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#245

Post by freyr »

cramforce wrote: post #165

With respect to scrolling: We (AMP team) filed a bug with Apple about that (we didn't implement scrolling ourselves, just use a div with overflow). We asked to make the scroll inertia for that case the same as the normal scrolling. Apple's response was (surprisingly) to make the default scrolling like the overflow scrolling. So, with the next Safari release all pages will scroll like AMP pages. Hope Gruber is happy t…

Another bug I've noticed is that AMP breaks in-page searching with iOS Safari. If you perform an in-page search, the browser will not scroll to the found instances of the search term on an AMP page. I imagine it's related to the other scrolling issues.

Please, please fix this. It's impossible to support something that's foisted on us and breaks basic web functionality. If I were cynical, I'd say bugs like this are designed to degrade the web experience on iOS. There's a lot of bad web programming out there, but very few sites manage to break search.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#246

Post by acdha »

ehsankia wrote: post #77
Antrikshy wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't realize AMP content was hosted by Google.

The original content is still on the website, Google hosts a cache server, rehosting the website's content around the world closer to the users for faster access, for free. In theory, it's a win-win-win situation. Publisher gets free hosting (with analytics and ad money still coming to them obviously), users get a faster experience and Google is happier if the users browser more content. In reality, AMP is obviously…

The main problems I have are that it breaks two really important web features: sharing links and trust. Users seeing google.com URLs means they trust them more, which has helped propaganda sites and phishers.

The other thing is that for me, AMP has not been faster many times. I know they're working on it but having to download and run 100KB of external JavaScript before rendering frequently meant that it was slower than the real page. It helps the stragglers but e.g. WaPo or NYT load just as fast and that should be enough.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#247

Post by alpha_squared »

MBCook wrote: post #202
cramforce wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but there is some irony there. We were as surprised as anyone. I do like the new inertia much better. Allows for much faster scrolling similar to Android.

I don't think there's any irony here. You deployed something that worked horribly on iOS, you didn't offer a way to opt out, and when someone else put in a fix for your terrible UX that just happens to change everything else to the way your stuff currently works you use it to gloat and a guy who pointed out how terrible your UX was. Honestly this whole thing (AMP and your comment) come off arrogant as hell to me. I l…

Snark? I think we're reading two different comments. I think it's fair to share surprise at a response like that from Apple. I would be surprised, too.

It almost feels like you're looking for reasons to be upset and finger-point. I hope that's not the case.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#248

Post by PrimHelios »

MBCook wrote: post #202
cramforce wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but there is some irony there. We were as surprised as anyone. I do like the new inertia much better. Allows for much faster scrolling similar to Android.

I don't think there's any irony here. You deployed something that worked horribly on iOS, you didn't offer a way to opt out, and when someone else put in a fix for your terrible UX that just happens to change everything else to the way your stuff currently works you use it to gloat and a guy who pointed out how terrible your UX was. Honestly this whole thing (AMP and your comment) come off arrogant as hell to me. I l…

> You deployed something that worked horribly on iOS

Except that thing was a bug in Safari. They used perfectly valid plain HTML without any hacks or JS.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#250

Post by ninkendo »

2_listerine_pls wrote: post #222

Can someone explain How is this killing the open web? Isn't this an open standard?

It's not the standard, it's what google does to amp sites: re-hosts them on their own site so your site is now (essentially) google.com/yoursite.com.

AMP as a standard is great: limit javascript to a known set of behaviors, ensure images/etc all have defined sizes so content doesn't jump around... but google's using the benefits of this standard as a trojan horse to route even more web traffic to their servers, enabling them to get better and better analytics and insights to your browsing behavior. (Now all the things users do on your site are visible to google too, even after they've "left" the search results).

The whole thing sets off alarm bells and indicates an overall strategy that's aimed towards moving the web into a google walled garden. There's all sorts of dystopian futures we could imagine here: promote search results that are AMP, while users appreciate the speed benefits, and become less likely to click any non-AMP links, and suddenly every web publisher has to get on the train or lose viewership... so that they can monitor yet more of what we do online, widening their competitive moat, etc.

It's scary stuff and there needs to be a CLEAR separation of the benefits of AMP as a standard, from what google's doing with it.

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