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Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

theregister.co.uk

401–410 of 489 posts

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a solution has existed for at least a decade: ad blocker :)

Ad blockers serve minified JS and CSS through a CDN?

Because minified JS and CSS was invented by AMP?

Unless you’re doing tree shaking, which AMP can’t do duplicate, compression has rendered “minification” useless long time ago anyway.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like the principles (minus the tracking) of AMP should become a W3C spec. Surprised Microsoft and others haven't pushed for this.

What tracking? I'm not aware of anything AMP does differently than non-AMP with regard to tracking, except that it's declared in a way that allows it to be cached+preloaded without falsely triggering analytics.

Actually we could do even better and let the browser do the tracking and anonymize the data.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#403
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's made it significantly harder to use Google search on iOS. Works well enough on Android Chrome. Irony is, AMP, Android, Chrome and Google Search are all Alphabet (Google) products. I am personally all for platform portability, but certainly it's been Apple who have been pushing for One Closed Ecosystem since the introduction of iPhone, and Apple users have been very happy about it and playing down the vendor lo…

> Now that there's a shard in the walled garden, another player seemingly using the very same tactics as Apple, it's frustrating to see the same users complain about how much it sucks to be disenfranchised from modern computing because they use a different vendor - only this time Apple is the "other" vendor. I don't think they're actually are a lot of Apple fan is claiming that the one benevolent company should contr…

> I don't think they're actually are a lot of Apple fan is claiming that the one benevolent company should control everything as you posited earlier your post.

True, of course. But I think many like the fact that Apple is not an advertising company, that Apple has a transparent business model, that Apple (for now) defends its users' privacy.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#404
> Except that, hilariously, to create an AMP page you have to load a, wait for it, yes a JavaScript file from Google.

What does the Javascript file do? Is there an open-source equivalent? If it transmits data to Google, could you instead collect the data server-side and send anonymized data with a cron job once-a-day to Google's endpoint to reduce the slowdown and privacy issues?

It looks like AMP bans all Javascript except for the one Google-provided Javascript file, which provides common UI components:

https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec

"While it does allow styling the document using custom CSS, it does not allow author written JavaScript beyond what is provided through the custom elements to reach its performance goals."

Unless Google's library includes everything, even a simple 'Delete' button requires Javascript if you want to use the right HTTP verb. I'd worry about using anything that leads me into a corner like that.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#405

AMP is Google's latest attempt to build a walled garden. It's more dangerous to the web than Facebook's WG because of Google's near-monopoly on search. AMP does indeed need to die in a very hot fire. And in the long term, it's high time somebody built a less creepy, better functioning search engine.

Bing user here. I switched a few years ago when I finally got sick enough of Google's many creepy abuses of power.

It's just as good. As others have noted, Google's search is only good when you're signed in. Because they use all that data to personalize the results.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#406

In theory* I don't mind the idea of having a more standardised subset web page that has a consistent internal structure and that renders quickly. However, having Google load this structured content and host it on its own platform is a terrible idea. Content should remain on the publisher's site. Putting too much content in one place is dangerous for competition. * In practice there are implementation problems too, e.…

Seems to me the right approach would be for sites to embrace the HTML5 semantic tags ( , and so forth), and browsers to offer a way to view just that semantically-marked-up content - without scripts, with restricted CSS, and maybe with some kind of filtering out of third-party content. Something like Firefox's "reader view", but including more bits of the page. So the browser would still be downloading the exact same…

Isn't that pretty much what AMP is? IIRC, you don't need a separate version of the page with only AMP on it - Google's cache just extracts only the AMP parts of your page when caching. Or has this changed since I saw it? (And if so, why - that would probably also be an argument against your solution :) )

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, DuckDuckGo just requires a habit shift. You're used to Google knowing everything about you and utilizing that to provide you catered results. Be more specific on DDG and you should be fine.

This was my feeling as well. Try using Google from a public library and it returns results similar to DDG.

Not at all. I'm not logged in to my Google account at my day job and I still got relevant search results when I arrived. DDG wouldn't after months of use at home.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#408
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do ad blockers really solve the problems that this article criticizes AMP for? You've closed one bag of worms and opened another one. How can independent publishers live in an all adblock world? State publishers like criticized in the article might survive. You're again centralizing journalism, this time into the few organizations that can get their readers to pay a subscription.

They cannot. How can wagon wheel makers live in the age of the car? Their business model is defunct. We outsourced our opinions and fact-finding to journalists for a few hundred years. Now that time has past. Journalists themselves have destroyed their own industry by producing a poor quality product. Maybe in future journalists will re-invent themselves as purveyors of pure factual reporting, and those that care abo…

> Maybe in future journalists will re-invent themselves as purveyors of pure factual reporting

If you think this was ever the case, rose colored glasses are in effect.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#409
post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my feeling as well. Try using Google from a public library and it returns results similar to DDG.

Not at all. I'm not logged in to my Google account at my day job and I still got relevant search results when I arrived. DDG wouldn't after months of use at home.

You don't need Google account to be profiled by them.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#410
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duckduckgo is a lovely idea with abhorrent search results. Like, unusably bad results, at least to the extent that I'm a reasonably tech savvy user. I'm often searching for papers as a grad student, or typing things "close enough" and hoping Google figures it out for me etc. Duckduckgo cannot keep up. I love Bangs, I love the idea, but the search is nigh-useless. That said, I use StartPage, who have a contract I beli…

DDG "worse" search results are also a product of you not being profiled. Or to put it in another way, Google better search results are also a product of all your habits being gathered and analyzed. Sadly we can't have a search engine that knows nothing about us and guesses at the same time what we are looking for. DDG can give better results, but this require being more specific when searching.

I'm not sure this is true. Google results are still amazing when used at a friends' or a public computer and not logged in, etc. (not to mention incognito mode, which you could argue still profiles you through your ip).

Other search engines feel like a noob salesperson who needs to be told 5 times in 5 different ways what you need -- and it's really simple stuff too.

I like experienced salespeople.

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