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AMP Has Irreparably Damaged Publishers’ Trust in Google-Led Initiatives

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Re: AMP Has Irreparably Damaged Publishers’ Trust in Google-Led Initiatives

#121

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

merrywhether wrote: post #99
mschuster91 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or broken features because someone had to have their bells and whistles Like it or not, at least Google blazes ahead and brings new features to the browser sphere. It's not like innovation can be expected from Firefox any more, not with them cutting costs on the development team.

Keep telling yourself this. AMP, FLoC, Portals, etc are all browser “innovations” too, are you glad those came around? So many of their features are purely to give Google more ad revenue and power over the internet. I’d be willing to bet that the main reason they fund so much non-ad innovation is to overwhelm any potential new-comers to the browser space and stifle competition (even Microsoft gave up). But too many d…

If someone says AMP is bad because there's some better project for accelerating mobile pages, I'm all ears. If they say it's bad because web pages are fast enough, I'd tend to favor "bias for action", but I could imagine being convinced by something like Dan Luu's parting shot (https://danluu.com/web-bloat/) that a big new standard hurts other people trying to solve the underlying issue.

If someone says it's bad because corporate interests shouldn't push innovation... well, I'd like to understand why they're okay with the explicitly bought and paid for OpenJS board seats, or the permanent corporate tetrarchy for HTML. A lot of developers seem to have unrealistic expectations about how software governance works.

Re: AMP Has Irreparably Damaged Publishers’ Trust in Google-Led Initiatives

#122

Post by wisniewskit »

DeathArrow wrote: post #108
wisniewskit wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, keep telling yourself that you're the real hero. If folks like you really meant make a positive difference, you would have by now. Instead you endlessly try to take credit for "raising awareness" and "pressuring", which in reality just means leaving the actual work to others. You give yourself every excuse to not contribute anything tangible, then you blame them for failing while acting like some neglected orac…

>Sure, keep telling yourself that you're the real hero. If folks like you really meant make a positive difference, you would have by now. Instead you endlessly try to take credit for "raising awareness" and "pressuring", which in reality just means leaving the actual work to others. You give yourself every excuse to not contribute anything tangible, then you blame them for failing while acting like some neglected ora…

I would only like a bit more than the endless negativity, that's all. If you can't even offer that much, then why would I ever expect anything more?

It's easy to blame others and excuse yourself, but if I could find the will to get a job at Mozilla to try to help the company to a better end, then why can't some of you folks who always act like you have all the answers?

If we aren't willing or able to do better than Mozilla, then we're stuck with the Mozilla we get, no matter how much we complain about it.

Re: AMP Has Irreparably Damaged Publishers’ Trust in Google-Led Initiatives

#123

Post by coolso »

As much as I despise Google and AMP, the one upside to AMP was it allowed you access to almost every online news article that was behind a payroll. You could just Google the title of a paywalled article, click on the AMP version, and view the whole thing.

Re: AMP Has Irreparably Damaged Publishers’ Trust in Google-Led Initiatives

#124

Post by criddell »

mschuster91 wrote: post #81
petee wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe developers could stop designing websites that only work on Chrome too? I'm tired of seeing "your browser is unsupported" and denied access while using a chromium based alternative. Or broken features because someone had to have their bells and whistles

> Or broken features because someone had to have their bells and whistles Like it or not, at least Google blazes ahead and brings new features to the browser sphere. It's not like innovation can be expected from Firefox any more, not with them cutting costs on the development team.

What are the biggest features from the past decade?

Re: AMP Has Irreparably Damaged Publishers’ Trust in Google-Led Initiatives

#125

Post by mschuster91 »

merrywhether wrote: post #99
mschuster91 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or broken features because someone had to have their bells and whistles Like it or not, at least Google blazes ahead and brings new features to the browser sphere. It's not like innovation can be expected from Firefox any more, not with them cutting costs on the development team.

Keep telling yourself this. AMP, FLoC, Portals, etc are all browser “innovations” too, are you glad those came around? So many of their features are purely to give Google more ad revenue and power over the internet. I’d be willing to bet that the main reason they fund so much non-ad innovation is to overwhelm any potential new-comers to the browser space and stifle competition (even Microsoft gave up). But too many d…

> AMP, FLoC, Portals, etc are all browser “innovations” too, are you glad those came around?

At least for AMP, I indeed am glad because it finally forced the big media houses to provide pages that didn't suck ten freakin' megabytes off my 50€/2GB data plan (yeah, that were German mobile data prices until not too long ago!) for a single page load with under 10KB of actual content.

I'm not particularly liking the situation, but the fact is that the only entity able to actually force change is Google.

ETA: Sorry, I forgot Apple who managed to get the Web rid of the proprietary, expensive (for authors) and insecure scourge that was Adobe Flash, but that was about the only progress that came from Apple. I'm not counting PWAs because Apple utterly failed to make web apps actually competitive with App Store apps for profit reasons!

Re: AMP Has Irreparably Damaged Publishers’ Trust in Google-Led Initiatives

#126

Post by lallysingh »

roenxi wrote: post #11

I don't like AMP, but I like this headline less. That is classic media trolling. They don't know what "publishers" actually feel about Google and there is no evidence than anything is "irreparably broken". It is actually remarkable how quickly businesses forgive and forget.

The author is a publisher, by definition.

Re: AMP Has Irreparably Damaged Publishers’ Trust in Google-Led Initiatives

#127

Post by mschuster91 »

criddell wrote: post #124
mschuster91 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or broken features because someone had to have their bells and whistles Like it or not, at least Google blazes ahead and brings new features to the browser sphere. It's not like innovation can be expected from Firefox any more, not with them cutting costs on the development team.

What are the biggest features from the past decade?

To name those I use in my daily work: WebRTC, img srcset, the video element, WebASM, media queries, CSS animations. I haven't had the chance to play with the new authentication stuff (Yubikey) yet.

Yes, some of that, e.g. srcset, animations and media queries, was possible using Javascript... but god, it was awful to use, even more awful to debug (especially "stuttering" issues or unresponsive pages due to some animation locking the render thread) and, worst of all, a couple tabs with JS animations open and you could watch your battery go empty faster than the gas needle of a BMW X7 on a German Autobahn!

The only thing that is still, for now over than thirty years, needing massive effort is HTTPS client certificates.

ETA: And... best of all, Chrome and FF forced people to regularly update, meaning the days of supporting a browser that hadn't seen an update in a decade (IE6) are gone. Mobile devices aside, you only need to take about half a year worth of browser versions to test, and cross-browser compatibility issues have all but vanished for standard stuff (with the notable exception of Apple).

Re: AMP Has Irreparably Damaged Publishers’ Trust in Google-Led Initiatives

#128

Post by rchaud »

ashtonkem wrote: post #30

Honestly at this point, if you trust google you’re a fool. It’s demonstrated itself to be unreliable, capricious, and absolutely willing to break the law if it thinks it can get away with it. Do business with them if you absolutely must, but under no circumstance should you actually trust them.

Publishers did not want to have to refactor their page templates with a bunch of AMP markup to please Google.

For most companies, it was a question of whether they were OK risking being left behind if other publishers got favourable treatment running stories on AMP validated pages.

This comes back to Google's domination of both search and Adwords. And it comes back to the unfortunate reality that people don't want to subscribe or otherwise compensate websites for putting out information for free.

Re: AMP Has Irreparably Damaged Publishers’ Trust in Google-Led Initiatives

#129

Post by ghoward »

exlurker wrote: post #117
throaway46546 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear google outright punishes you for using Firefox with any of their services. Major annoyance for me right now is paste is broken on their terminal emulator when connecting to a Compute Engine VM instance over SSH.

Let me push this again: Chrome, sans Google. My main browser is Firefox, but this will do in the few cases I "need" Chrome. https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

+1, and build from source if you can. I do on Gentoo, but then again, that's the point of Gentoo...

Re: AMP Has Irreparably Damaged Publishers’ Trust in Google-Led Initiatives

#130

Post by kstrauser »

petee wrote: post #58
pmontra wrote: post #14

If they are really displeased with Google, and I'm sure they are, they should run a campaign to invite users of their sites to install a browser different than Chrome. If they manage to destroy Google's quasi monopoly on the browser they'll make Google less powerful overall.

Maybe developers could stop designing websites that only work on Chrome too? I'm tired of seeing "your browser is unsupported" and denied access while using a chromium based alternative. Or broken features because someone had to have their bells and whistles

I’ll name names: I can’t use Safari to log into a website that uses Auth0 because its authorization flow depends on cookies working the way Chrome wants them to. I’m using Safari’s default cookie settings and not going out of my way to disable or block them. Their notes give instructions on how to “fix” Safari by disabling ITP, which I’m not gonna do.

We need to use the business website that Auth0 logs us into, but I’m not touching Auth0 until they fix their stuff to work with more privacy-respecting browsers. I can appreciate how difficult that may be from a technical point of view, but as an end user, no thanks.

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