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Please Make Google AMP Optional

alexkras.com

401–410 of 457 posts

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#401
post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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?

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#402
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do. They seem to be a little quiet about the idea that a right/left swipe on your content switches to a competitors page though.

I can't think of another search engine alternative - a truly objective one. It used to be Google. Then they gained a tremendous amount of market share. Even an English language verb - googled. Now it's them. And I ask, now what?

Try out DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com/). I've been using it for a few years and love it. They don't track you. They don't store your info. Plus, as far as I know they don't do anything besides search so they have no reason to not be objective.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#403
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. WebAssembly is an open-standard.

It's EXEs and JARs for the Internet. Sure, it has a text format, but it's the equivalent of Lispified Java bytecode. ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Underst... (uninformative but current), http://loyc.net/2016/lesv3-and-wasm.html (2016, from when wasm wasn't finalized, but has some good concrete examples that look like the wasm in the first link)) With this being said, it may actually be easier…

Obviously not open-source, but IntelliJ's decompiler is excellent.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#404
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Boy how I wish any of my mobiles had that feature set, not everyone is willing/able to spend more than a PC on a mobile device.

There are relatively cheap, unlocked Chinese phones available -- e.g., ZTE's Axon 7 -- with the aforementioned specs. One doesn't have to spend 600 USD+.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#405
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and changes the native scroll behavior iOS (which is much slower). Google has no respect for the native behavior

The native behavior changed in iOS 11 so that Safari scrolling on any page is just like the accelerated scrolling on AMP. Check out this response from a Google AMP engineer about scrolling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14384938

Thanks for pointing this out. I am looking forward to a homogeneous scrolling experience. Still, I don't understand why google's AMP team they would change scrolling behavior in iOS 10 and lower.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#406

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.

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 stea…

AFAIK AMP is just a list of Do's and Dont's that google qualify as AMP content. Even other search engines like DuckDuckGo and Bing could use it if the choose so. You can access AMP outside of google and host it yourself. You can go AMP-only if you o please. Instant Articles from Facebook on other hand is tied into facebook's platform.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, I like AMP for many of the same reasons I liked Google Reader and RSS feeds: I'd rather consume my content in a form that's optimized for reading.

For someone with poor vision, I frequently have to zoom my browser (in landscape mode) on my iPhone in order to be able to read the text/font. When on an AMP page, the scroll mechanism gets locked when I zoom in and I have to i zoom out completely before I can scroll the page. Of course this doesn't happen on non-AMP pages. I'd have a lot less problems with it if it didn't break my zoom functionality.

on my phone if i increase/decrease the default font size, AMP uses that.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#408
post #395
post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Websites using cdns should always use a server hosted backup, it's not that hard if (typeof jQuery == 'undefined') { document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='/serverHostedJquery.js' %3E%3C/script%3E")); }

It's annoying to test though. You'd be better self hosting everything and putting a CDN in front of your site.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#409
post #335

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 a…

> those of us who don't allow Google CDNs will not be able to use the site

I can't imagine this accounts for more than a tiny number of visitors and people technical enough to do this will know what to reenable.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#410
post #36
post #3

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

>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. L…

Also, before there was no guarantee that the organic results would contain Google ads as publishers could relatively easily find higher CPM payouts elsewhere.

Well, with AMP, the the mobile results are basically ads, then AMP results which are guaranteed to have Google ads. So the percentage of searches makes Google money increases while similar reducing revenue from competitive ad networks who are not approved.

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