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I decided to disable AMP on my site

alexkras.com

41–50 of 360 posts

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree, while technically AMP is suitable but it creates a walled garden by using Google - who actually boost page rankings if you use it, so they have publishers by the balls "forcing" them to use AMP to get higher in their rankings.

AMP does not seem like a walled garden tech. any crawler can find and use the AMP version of a page through this tag: " rel="nofollow">https://www.example.com/url/to/amp/document.html"> Thus all google is doing is rewarding sites that have implemented this and as a result load fast, no? imo, its drastically different to Instant Articles because you can never ever find the Instant Articles version of a web page. its p…

Sites that are traditionally called walled gardens (facebook, AOL, compuserve...) often combine four features; (a) all the content is hosted under the walled garden's domain; (b) the walled garden designs key parts of the navigation and layout, understandably acting in their own interests; (c) the walled garden has content policies and declines to host certain content; and (d) users must have accounts and be logged in to see the content.

AMP does (a) and (b); I don't know about (c); and doesn't do (d).

Still, I can see why people see echos of walled gardens in AMP.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#42
post #11

AMP somehow doesn't work right on my smartphone. When I go to news.google.com an click of any of the AMP links on the front page, I always get thrown back to news.google.com when I scroll on the AMP page.

And frustratingly, you can't background-open AMP links from Google News. Instead, AMP articles open wuth their own (annoying) navigation, where swiping goes a completely different article.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#43
post #21

> On iPhone, AMP seems to override the default browser scrolling. As a result scrolling of AMP pages feels off. Good news! iOS 11 fixes this. Safari actually has an inconsistent scrolling speed compared to the rest of the OS. iOS 11 makes all Safari pages scroll at the same speed as AMP sites (-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch) Also important distinction for people to remember - AMP is two products: - CDN with preloa…

Re: two products, I realized this but never really thought about it. Can one self-host an AMP (framework) implementation? Does Google still promote such content, even if it isn't part of their CDN?

Sure. It's just a stricter subset of HTML and a JS library for custom components. Self host it.

No, Google won't give you the special AMP-bolt - nor should they because they can't provide the instant load as they can for other AMP sites that they self-host on their CDN.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#44

The fact that website content is stored on Google servers and being served from Google is just disgusting.

Giving you free hosting all across the world, much closer to your users, is disgusting? Unless you're hosting a webserver on your computer, your server is most likely being hosted in the cloud somewhere (aka some random computer somewhere in the world). How is it being on a Google server, instead of company X's server, suddenly disgusting?

Because such centralization gives Google immense power. The sheer potential censorship implications alone are very concerning, for example.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#45
post #37

> On iPhone, AMP seems to override the default browser scrolling. As a result scrolling of AMP pages feels off. Good news! iOS 11 fixes this. Safari actually has an inconsistent scrolling speed compared to the rest of the OS. iOS 11 makes all Safari pages scroll at the same speed as AMP sites (-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch) Also important distinction for people to remember - AMP is two products: - CDN with preloa…

> Good news! iOS 11 fixes this. It doesn't fix the "crappy wrapper that wants to do its own scolling instead of complying with the system" issue though.

My thoughts exactly. Remember blogspot hijacking horizontal swipes? Ew!

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#46
post #37

> On iPhone, AMP seems to override the default browser scrolling. As a result scrolling of AMP pages feels off. Good news! iOS 11 fixes this. Safari actually has an inconsistent scrolling speed compared to the rest of the OS. iOS 11 makes all Safari pages scroll at the same speed as AMP sites (-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch) Also important distinction for people to remember - AMP is two products: - CDN with preloa…

> Good news! iOS 11 fixes this. It doesn't fix the "crappy wrapper that wants to do its own scolling instead of complying with the system" issue though.

Well, the wrapper has the same scrolling as the rest of the system and pages now.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#48
post #34
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to see what, in AMP, makes the web less free or open. I am usually among the first on the stockade on invasive tech, but I have a hard time to understand the fuss around AMP. Yes, the cache is problematic, as it may allow Google, in a possible future, to filter some content, censor some other or not refresh often some pages. The thing is, if it does that, people will start using Google's caching, that's as sim…

> I fail to see what, in AMP, makes the web less free or open. Google serving your pages? Hijacking your domain for the server pages and obscuring links to the original content? Use of a proprietary technology (whether open sourced or not, it's not a standard)? Abuse of power with veiled threats of punishing content publishers who are not using recommending AMP to make their pages "fast and responsive"? The only way…

> The only way to be any more against the free and open web is if they made Google search a web proxy where you never get access to the underlying page...

Give it some time. They are pulling more and more content into the search results pages which has roughly that effect, since people no longer click through.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#49
> On iPhone, AMP seems to override the default browser scrolling. As a result scrolling of AMP pages feels off.

Oddly enough Apple is changing the scrolling behavior in Safari for iOS 11 to scroll how the amp pages do.

https://www.macrumors.com/2017/05/22/scrolling-changes-comin...

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMP does not seem like a walled garden tech. any crawler can find and use the AMP version of a page through this tag: " rel="nofollow">https://www.example.com/url/to/amp/document.html"> Thus all google is doing is rewarding sites that have implemented this and as a result load fast, no? imo, its drastically different to Instant Articles because you can never ever find the Instant Articles version of a web page. its p…

I am not saying exactly that Google is evil, and maybe they don't even have bad intentions (heck, we are talking about a corporate identity here, how far can we apply morals?). But, what I am thinking is that AMP and its rivals (such as Instant Articles) hurt the free & open Web. For instance, Google Search is invaluable, but as a side effect, a website that doesn't end up on the first page of a Google Search result…

i would expect that content producers will start putting in abreviated versions of their content in AMP format to satisfy the AMP requirement as minimially as possible, and then add a link back to the original site for the rest.
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