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

Post by gregable » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 8:35 PM UTC

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Source for your second paragraph: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16730905 That's out of date now, though; despite still being part of the required boilerplate CSS for AMP pages, I can't find that delay in any of the https://amp.dev/ pages (the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

Post by thenewnewguy » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 8:35 PM UTC

christiansakai wrote: post #321

commoner wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still use Google Fonts, but download the font files and host them yourself to prevent your users/visitors from being tracked by Google: https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com/fonts https://github.com/gabiseabra/google-fonts-webpack-plugin

Ahhh, I wasn’t aware that it is possible to download Google fonts. Is it copyrighted though?

Post by tobr » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 8:36 PM UTC

privateSFacct wrote: post #315

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,…

If you work for a media org - than you KNOW that on the non-amp pages the synchronous java script from a hundred tracking / ad platforms (why can't these sites just use ONE tracking library) CRUSH the page load times. Despite your (false) claim that google support sync javascript ad libraries "just as they do in their regular sites" this is 100% false. The amp javascript components have DOM interaction restrictions,…

Post by golergka » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 8:37 PM UTC

brianzelip wrote: post #23

Here's one great takeaway: > Treat the cause: Third-party requests slow down the web > ... > - Google owns 7 of the top 10 most popular third-party calls > ... > So you can see why there must be some kind of internal struggle at Google. They understand the value of a faster web but they also cannot go after the main cause of the slow web. And this is how technology such as AMP gets invented and makes things worse. It…

Post by nvr219 » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 8:41 PM UTC

kccqzy wrote: post #327

deminature wrote: post #275

Probably highly unpopular opinion, but as a user I've never had anything but positive experiences with AMP-enabled sites. They load massively faster than normal sites, especially on poor mobile connections where main sites sometimes hang indefinitely trying to load javascript, ads, etc. While content publishers are continuing to overload their sites with further trackers, ads, javascript, remotely loading assets whic…

> They load massively faster than normal sites, especially on poor mobile connections where main sites sometimes hang indefinitely trying to load javascript, ads, etc. Have you tried the normal mobile websites with an adblocker?