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How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

markosaric.com

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Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#301

Post by mrtksn »

jammygit wrote: post #298
mrtksn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: what else those websites are supposed to do (that AMP does not provide) with all those megabytes of scripts? Newspapers display a text and an image and very rarely an interactive content(Election day maps and charts, mostly). Is there a reason FROM USERS PERSPECTIVE to have different website codebase for each publisher? For years the Web community kept creating new JavaScript libraries every day and…

I’m just annoyed at my links being hijacked. When I click a link, my intention is to visit someone’s page, not to view it through some sort of creepy iframe. When I go to share a link, why is it a google link instead of the newspaper? Why do I have to spend a minute or two hunting for the real one in the ugly ui?

I agree with this, I don’t want to share AMP links because it feels wrong for some reason. Still, on the right top corner there’s a share button that would give you the link to the original source.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#302

Post by commoner »

Mirioron wrote: post #296
eropple wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I found out that Firefox doesn't allow me to run my own add ons without their approval. This is not and has never been true. What is no longer possible is the ability to sideload extensions outside of the browser by copying files into a directory because that's how dirtbags have stuck extensions that could not be uninstalled into Firefox as part of a third-party app install. Go to `about:addons`, install add-on fro…

Are you sure? Because I just created a barebones hello world. It works fine as a temporary add-on, but I can't install it from the file. Says the add-on is corrupted. Then I downloaded a working add-on. It worked fine when installing from file. I removed the signing information. It installs fine as a temporary add-on, but throws the same error as the hello world. I'm pretty sure that the add-ons need to be signed by…

You'll need to use Firefox Developer Edition, Nightly, or ESR. Then, go to about:config and set xpinstall.signatures.required to false.

https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/signing-...

You can then sideload unsigned add-ons by following these instructions:

https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/distribu...

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#303

Post by kodablah »

o-__-o wrote: post #238
kodablah wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is based on Chromium, but does not phone home to Google Same deal with the browser I use. My preferred UI + Chromium is better for me than FF. There are three common cross-platform browser approaches: Chrome, FF, and Chromium-based. Only one of those three offers extreme visual and feature flexibility. I sound like a broken record saying it, but FF should really invest in embeddability so we can take their en…

And chromium was forked from webkit.. so why not head to the source and cut off the cancer at the root? I can't believe I just called Google the cancer, but would anyone disagree?

> so why not head to the source and cut off the cancer at the root?

For me, easy consumability. I use Chromium Embedded Framework, I don't actually put the hard work into building and maintaining an API myself. I'd love a similar effort for Gecko (there was effort at one time, but nothing of late IIRC).

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#304

Post by manderley »

emodendroket wrote: post #62
soyyo wrote: post #30

I worked on amp for a leading newspaper, and everyone who says that amp is about "making the web faster on mobile" is either very naive or doing marketing for google. For publishers, amp is about trying to top the results on google search and capture traffic, it's their only motivation to publish their content using amp, and the only metric they look in order to evaluate the results. Once they have their amp content,…

No, I'm well aware that that's what it's "about," just like I'm well aware that the search engine is mainly about advertising. I just don't care what it's about so long as the results are beneficial to me -- which they definitely are. When I see the AMP icon I know the page is going to load much faster

To me, AMP is annoying because it means I have to make two extra clicks to get the real site to load.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#305

Post by heisenhuegel »

MisterOctober wrote: post #213
40four wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preach brother preach! I made this move myself many months ago & never looked back. There is basically nothing I miss about dropping chrome/ google search. My web experience is indiscernible using Firefox & DDG. One of the only minor things I've had to adjust to is prefixing searches with my local city & state when I'm searching for things in my hometown (Imagine that! My search engine website isn't tracking my physi…

Yep, same here -- switched to DDG a couple years ago and back to FF from Chrome [except when required for the job] a few months ago. Results excellent. I understand that a lotta folks are dissatisfied with DDG's search performance, but it's been plum dandy for me. In particular, since most of what I'm searching is development-related, my experience has been that DDG results are usually _better_ that goog, i.e., I fin…

I used DDG as the primary search engine in the past and relied a lot on bangs (!s, !g). I'm currently trying the new search from Cliqz (https://beta.cliqz.com), which is similar as it also supports some of the bangs, but I find the search results better than DDG, especially for German searches. It is still work in progress though. Spell correction, for example, is not good yet in cliqz.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#306

Post by joshuamorton »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #278
stephenr wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Install a content blocker, and the original site sans bullshit is the best experience. Ironically the amp page is artificially slow when blocking amp’s JS because they force an 8 second delay - via required boilerplate css - before content is visible.

Source for your second paragraph: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16730905 That's out of date now, though; despite still being part of the required boilerplate CSS for AMP pages, I can't find that delay in any of the https://amp.dev/ pages (the ampbyexample.com replacement demo site). This is really shady.

It's a little more complex than that:

If you disable all js, there is no delay. If you specifically block amp js, there is a delay. There could certainly be a shady reason for this, but the justification makes sense: one of the goals of AMP is to have, basically, a single, correct, initial paint. That's why images are statically sized and amp sticks placeholders there until the real images load. The js delay exists to allow the site to fetch the js and use it to correctly render the initial paint, even on a slow/flaky connection where the js takes a bit to fetch.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#307

Post by joshuamorton »

stephenr wrote: post #194
lern_too_spel wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> google is abusing it's monopoly search position to pre-load. How is that abusing their monopoly search position? Abusing their monopoly search position would be making publishers integrate directly with them to enable preload, like Apple News. Instead, they ask publishers to serve documents that can safely be prerendered, and all their competitors get to (and do!) consume those documents as well to enable safe prer…

Without their monopoly search position no one would be forced to adopt amp and further strengthen said monopoly position.

How does amp strengthen a monopoly position?

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#308

Post by latexr »

hknd wrote: post #85
ossworkerrights wrote: post #10

I really doubt google will become "irrelevant" anytime soon. What most of us nerds forget is that tech products become popular when they solve real life issues for non technical people. We can sit here and debate all day what protocols are better, and which browse is cooler, and why Google is evil, because it will not become irrelevant anytime soon unless there is a better end user product. Happy bashing Google, Face…

And that's exactly the reason AMP is so popular with end-users. It's fast, and opens instantly on slow networks with your phone. End-users don't know what AMP is, and most don't know that the lightning symbol is AMP. What they know is clicking it gives them fast results, and that's what 99% of people care about.

> And that's exactly the reason AMP is so popular with end-users. It's fast, and opens instantly on slow networks with your phone.

Is that the reason, or is it that the results are at the top?

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#309

Post by jimrandomh »

My experience with AMP, immediately before seeing this article:

1. On desktop, I clicked through a link on Facebook, leading to an AMP page

2. The page was clearly meant for mobile, and looked bad on desktop; the images were full-screen size, the font was too big, and the text line length went all the way to the edges of my very wide browser window.

3. I used Ctrl+Minus to adjust the zoom, which fixed the font size but not the images or the line length.

4. I looked at the top and bottom of the page for a "desktop site" link, and couldn't find one.

5. I looked at the address bar, and saw that the URL was an AMP URL. This is the first time I have noticed that I am using AMP in more than a month.

6. I closed the tab and went to HN, where this was the top article.

When AMP works well, it's inconspicuous, so it's not so surprising that most of my remembered experiences with it are negative. Still, I think google needs to invest a bit more in preventing this sort of bad experience, because currently it comes across as "google breaking the web".

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#310

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

mrtksn wrote: post #50
soyyo wrote: post #30

I worked on amp for a leading newspaper, and everyone who says that amp is about "making the web faster on mobile" is either very naive or doing marketing for google. For publishers, amp is about trying to top the results on google search and capture traffic, it's their only motivation to publish their content using amp, and the only metric they look in order to evaluate the results. Once they have their amp content,…

Serious question: what else those websites are supposed to do (that AMP does not provide) with all those megabytes of scripts? Newspapers display a text and an image and very rarely an interactive content(Election day maps and charts, mostly). Is there a reason FROM USERS PERSPECTIVE to have different website codebase for each publisher? For years the Web community kept creating new JavaScript libraries every day and…

> From USERS PERSPECTIVE, AMP is a godsend.

This right here.

The first time I found myself on an AMP page, I thought "Holy crap, this page is fast and responsive!"

It was a couple months later I started seeing hate for AMP on HN and was kind of surprised. I understand the dislike of Google basically taking over, but I feel like Google is telling publishers "Since you guys can't figure out how to make fast web pages, we're gonna basically do it for you".

> AMP is Youtube for written content.

A few commenters have taking issue with this, but I interpreted it to mean early YouTube. Before YouTube became a thing, sharing videos online was difficult for a non-technical person. Just like YouTube made it easy to share videos, AMP has made it easy to make responsive pages.

Though a key difference is that it isn't hard to make responsive mobile web pages. Site owners have just decided that tracking, metrics, and advertising is more important than UX.

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