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Please Make Google AMP Optional

alexkras.com

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Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#211

Post by fragmede »

ender7 wrote: post #151

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!…

Which is funny, because Google Amp was a piece of shit when it was called the Digg toolbar and users hated it, and it was even worse as the Alexa browser toolbar spyware, and users really hated it. Amp has some pretty dressing but amounts to the same thing.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#212

Post by Akath19 »

ShellGh0st wrote: post #134
niftich wrote: post #54

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 l…

"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.

"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

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#213

Post by tdicola »

ciconia wrote: post #194

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.…

Nitpick but your request is most likely not going to space. You're going to a cell tower that's at most a mile away from you, and that tower is probably linked with fiber and copper to all the routers on the net. Even if for some reason you go through a satellite link it's in earth orbit and not technically 'outer space'. It's still pretty magical but at the end of the day it's just a fancier wireless telegraph.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#214

Post by terrestrial »

throwaway-1209 wrote: post #198
sintaxi wrote: post #21

I suggest stop using google search altogether. 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.

DDG is a wrapper on top of Bing. Maybe just skip the middleman and use Bing instead?

Does Bing have "bangs" such as !gm for Google Maps, !gh for GitHub, !wa for WolframAlpha and so on? With no user tracking?

I was a heavy user of address bar search prefixes, but it's amazingly convenient to not have to think about it until the very end of a query (or even add it in the middle).

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#215

Post by int_19h »

ender7 wrote: post #151

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!…

As a user, I like the "fast" part, but I absolutely hate the user experience. I haven't quite figured out how Back works when you're in the "AMP experience", but it's definitely not how it's supposed to work in a browser.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#216

Post by [deleted] »

tdicola wrote: post #213
ciconia wrote: post #194

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.…

Nitpick but your request is most likely not going to space. You're going to a cell tower that's at most a mile away from you, and that tower is probably linked with fiber and copper to all the routers on the net. Even if for some reason you go through a satellite link it's in earth orbit and not technically 'outer space'. It's still pretty magical but at the end of the day it's just a fancier wireless telegraph.

[deleted]

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#218

Post by cheeze »

mkawia wrote: post #209
baconner wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

On ff/windows 10 I just get redirected to the non AMP version of pages.

How is this breaking the internet?

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#219

Post by Semaphor »

nerdponx wrote: post #87
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started using DDG a few months back and I've been very happy so far. Sometimes results aren't as great, so I just use !g to load Google. But even better, you can search across different websites! For example, !mdn for Mozilla Developer Network, or !yt for YouTube Another thing you can do is use alternative browsers. On mobile I use Firefox Mobile, which has the benefit of allowing extensions, so you can install uBl…

I actually find DDG results to be better and more relevant a lot of the time nowadays. The only thing Google really has an edge on (for my use) is searching for academic articles, because of Google Scholar.

Can't agree. Almost always when DDG has only spam or useless results, !g gives me exactly what I looked for. I like DDG, especially the bangs, but Google still gives me way better results when I need them.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#220

Post by whoami_nr »

reaperducer wrote: post #186
whoami_nr wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. You can ask Google/Facebook to provide hotspots inside trains, ask the network provider to make cell reception better inside the subway etc. There are ways to achieve a better outcome instead of locking down how you consume the internet.

So in your world, he should devote all of his time, money, and effort into getting multi-billion dollar corporations and massive bureaucracies to install millions of dollars of soon-to-be-outdated equipment in a massive urban transportation upgrade, instead of just clicking on the link that works? Millennial thinking.

Again, you are taking the suggestions too literally. What I simply suggest is a better alternative than AMP. Optimize pages better, improve their rendering engine, make better compression algorithms, complex CDN's or something which I can't even think of which makes pages snappier and better. I personally just don't agree with the AMP as a solution. I don't want to waste my time on explaining why as you can already see most of the downsides and my views are something like an union of most of them(you can start with the UX problems).

Also, just going with the solution that just works now is not always the best method going forward. It might be enough for you, but then again it isn't good enough for me.

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