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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

#451

Post by Houshalter »

qb45 wrote: post #437
Houshalter wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often comment without reading the articles because on an older device it's impossible. 90% of links will just crash the browser in 10 seconds. I can watch an hour long youtube video just fine, but trying to load a newspaper article will make it keel over and die. Disabling javascript does fix a lot of it, but then I can't vote on HN, and I like doing that.

There are extensions which add buttons to quickly enable/disable JS on per-site basis like NoScript for Firefox. Also, Firefox reader view fixes many websites which otherwise render empty with JS disabled for reasons I didn't bother investigating.

I don't think it's possible to get browser extensions on an old iOS device.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#452

Post by wand3r »

piyush_soni wrote: post #385
jwilcoxson wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Checkout Duck Duck Go, still not Google-level results, but it's still pretty good, and not Bing.

For past few years, I go to try DuckDuckGo every once in a while (especially when someone suggests that again on HN), but it disappoints me every time with the quality of search results. Also, if it is using Bing on inside, I'm not then sure why the results are still different than that(even at the places where there's no scope for personalization). For example type this line exactly in both bing and ddg: difference…

Sounds like your priorities are different; and that's fine. DDG doesn't parse your emails so it doesn't have your location, flight info nor a lot of user data to build personalized results. I like it a lot, it's gotten much better but it requires adaptation when coming from Google.. or just !g

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#453

Post by bambax »

alanh wrote: post #431
dTal wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>crazy religious fanatic site FYI, Landover Baptist Church (which that article is from) is a very old, very well known spoof site.

And a canonical example of Poe’s Law in action.

Yes. But the fact that it's a parody of fundamentalist Christianity makes it a very bad result, because it's a comment on religion (or fanaticism, or Internet culture, or what have you) and not about the movie itself.

A perfect search engine would not return this on the first page of results about the movie, because it's not about the movie.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#454

Post by MBCook »

om2 wrote: post #392
askafriend wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really Apple's stance? I find the scrolling to be the #1 reason why I bounce from AMP pages. I would hate for them to make this a system wide behavior.

In current iOS Safari, webpage scrolling is inconsistent from all other scrolling on the system. This was an intentional decision made long ago. In addition, overflow areas are consistent with the rest of the system, and thus inconsistent with top-level webpage scrolling. This is semi-accidental. In reviewing scroll rates, we concluded that the original reason was no longer a good tradeoff. Thus this change, which re…

I figured that the different rates had to be intentional, but I did wonder why. Thanks for the explanation. I remember the checkerboard background on the 3G when you were scrolling too fast, if the speed was faster I mention it would've been way too easy to hit that.

It never occurred to me that Safari page is what the outlier, I just assumed that Safari pages matched the rest of the system and iframes for the thing that we're off.

Maybe this won't be as hard to get used to as I feared.

Thanks again.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#455

Post by notgood »

singlow wrote: post #181
coldtea wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ad hominem attacks are considered logical fallacies only when they're used instead of a dismantling someone's arguments. Which is precisely the case here.

I don't think he is arguing against independence for publication. He is instead arguing against the app store restrictions on account that they are equivalent. It is not illogical to point out an hypocrasy if the point is that his own arguments should be more broadly applied. The tone was unnecessarily ad hominem but not the overall argument.

Yeah, my comment was a bit more emotional than required and ended up sounding like an ad hominem, but the overall point was that people (not just the author of the piece) vote with their wallet, and they voted that gatekeeping is OK; mostly they have been showing that "convenient"=OK regardless of how many privacy issues it rises or how much free speech could be affected.

Still, I understand the point of those who consider news publishing independence to be more important than software publishing independence. But I think they may be missing the bit of irony (regardless of AMP) that Google is still the search engine they use to find those news, Google may as well delete a full domain from their search results and make a site disappear into oblivion. But at least Google-search has been forced -in some cases- to keep some level of neutrality there. Apple is just freely deleting and adding whatever they want to iOS/App-store, with some of their apps having access to APIs no other app can (e.g. Safari), which is as monopolistic as software gets.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#456

Post by corobo »

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…

Can you add an option to bypass the AMP version completely? Google search is mostly ruined on mobile because everyone has jumped on the AMP bandwagon

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#457

Post by marcus_holmes »

fastball wrote: post #415
snakeanus wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the ones that will best survive in an ad-blocking world would be hobbyist journalists and bloggers. That does not seem to be that bad to be quite frank as it would probably lead to higher quality content, less copy-paste and less clickbaits.

What the heck is a hobbyist journalist?

Me. I run http://startupnews.com.au despite making no money doing it (as the plaintive pleas for sponsorship and donations on the site show). The Perth startup community needs it, so I run it.

There's similar blogs for every small community, run by people who care about that community. Usually unfunded, and only covering stories of interest to that community.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#458

Post by marcus_holmes »

jorvi wrote: post #441
ageofwant wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's more to the world than the US. The press in, for example, The Netherlands and Finland might be opinionated but they're mostly factual and high quality.

I wonder if the clickbait and fake news is an English-language phenomenon, because of the huge potential global market for English-language articles?

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#459

Post by manigandham »

pdimitar wrote: post #440
manigandham wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That only makes AMP worse. Many publishers are already squeezed with dev resources, the last thing they need is yet another standard to support instead of putting that time towards the original HTML that is universally available to all users and devices.

Absolutely. You know, in a perverse way of seeing at it, I kind of feel good that Google forces AMP; they are like "Hah, you all stupid motherduckers couldn't get your own crap together for 15 years, guess it's time for you to be ruled, if you can't make use of your freedom". If you look at it that way, it makes sense. Still, maybe it's time the web development in general gets its crap together indeed. One can dream,…

Yes. Most often, it's a business management and priority issue than anything technical. It's far easier for developers to point to AMP limitations and just say "its just not supported" rather than try to argue against adding more cruft to the page and get overruled anyway.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#460

Post by foota »

deno wrote: post #401
paulddraper wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From what I've heard this is false, since for large javascript and css libraries the parsing is faster with minification.
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