Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Please Make Google AMP Optional

alexkras.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 457 posts

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#381

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

naasking wrote: post #210

I'm starting to hate AMP for one simple reason: it breaks the back button on my Android phone. Like, what the hell? Didn't we do this dance over 10 years ago? Do we really have to keep circling the same drain over and over and over again?

Can you say how? Works fine for me: If I'm on Google search results, tap on an AMP article, and then hit back, I'm back on search results. If I'm on an AMP article, and I tap through to the host site, and then hit back, I'm back on the AMP article (and hitting back again takes me to my original search results page). Works exactly as expected for me.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#382

Post by JoshMnem »

endorphone wrote: post #337
IanCal wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Restricting what you use to the AMP subset would make your page quite fast, with a dependency on a javascript file that most mobile browsers should have cached, along with having your page in the top carousel loading in smoothly like all the others. This can all be detected from your main page when crawled (as it'll link to the AMP version) so depending on the device one or the other can be presented as a search resu…

None of that requires being hosted by google. Caching is a part of the platform and is entirely coherent with the goals, and if you want analytics or ads, you approach those in a different way. AMP caching isn't limited to Google - Bing, for instance, caches and serves AMP as well. Ultimately anyone could, and HN could cache and quick-serve AMP content for supporting sources. AMP is open source and any one can take p…

"Open source" in that context is a meaninless buzzword. It is not "open" when giant companies appify your content in their walled gardens, even if you can read part of the code.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#383

Post by JoshMnem »

hk__2 wrote: post #93
holografix wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should really be careful of sourcing your news on fb, you're being spoon fed the news fb's algos want you to see.

> you're being spoon fed the news fb's algos want you to see. This comment is applicable to all media sources: replace "fb's algos" with any newspaper, website, or TV channel name. You might want to be careful of sourcing your news from one single source instead.

Choosing which separate media outlets to read gives far more control than leaving it up to one company, Facebook.

This extension is great: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#384

Post by JoshMnem »

niftich wrote: post #54

Google Search on Mobile is no longer a web search engine that hyperlinks to the resulting page, but rather an search-integrated newsreader that loads itself when you click on a result that's marked with AMP. This is understandably a big change from how things used to be, but it isn't going to get better anytime soon. After all, most people on mobile spend their time inside apps, probably from some Google competitor l…

> if you are bothered by their attempts to safeguard their income stream from competitors who have a much easier time curating their own walled garden, you should cease using Google Search on Mobile.

You're making excuses for Google, but forgetting about smaller, independent companies. It is not in our interests to have our content appified and restricted inside of Google's walled garden. When a big company like Google (or its competitors) attacks the open WWW, then web publishers should oppose it.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#385

Post by longsangstan »

daveheq wrote: post #328

Google AMP: 1. Obscures the web page's URL. 2. Makes manual zoom in/out impossible. 3. Sometimes hides content mentioned in the article, with no ability to scroll horizontally to see it. 4. Confuses Chrome on Amdroid into over-hiding its top address/menu bar (forcing two swipes down all the way to the top to show) or forces it to show (won't hide on scroll down). This is just coming from a user's perspective, fortuna…

I understand the frustration with AMP from a developer's perspective (SEO, stealing traffic..etc). But as a user I tend to click links with a thunder bolt icon(AMP/Instant article) because they are just faster. I don't really recall any bad experience.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#386

Post by JoshMnem »

omot wrote: 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?

There is also some discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14518985

And more links in these articles:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider...

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/05/20/gilbertson-amp

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#387

Post by JoshMnem »

tertius wrote: post #354
ccommsxx wrote: post #352

I've been waiting for a comment on why re-hosting verbatim copies of the original content by google is not considered copyright infringement? How come there seems to be no discussion on this at all?

Start by showing how proxying is copyright infringement. Or even search results...

Republishing copyrighted content on another domain without permission is copyright infringement. I don't know if Google's terms allow their republishing of copyrighted content via AMP, but most people in charge of those decisions at their companies probably aren't paying attention to the domain name or the implications of what they are allowing. At the very least, companies are being coerced to allow the republication of the content.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#388

Post by qb45 »

jorvi wrote: post #268
sorenstoutner wrote: post #191

My experience is that all the advantages of AMP can be had by disabling JavaScript while browsing. And this comes with none of the disadvantages of ceding even more control to companies like Google and Facebook. In my opinion, JavaScript should be disabled by default and only enabled for specific tasks or websites. Not finding exactly what I was looking for in any other browser, I eventually created Privacy Browser o…

uMatrix or uBlock (in advanced mode) can largely accomplish the same in a simpler way. However, in my experience, if you go the 'default deny' route against scripts, the spread is about 33/33/33, with 33% of the pages working perfectly, 33% breaking in small ways, and 33% completely borking up. Yes, you can then add the necessary scripts to a whitelist, but it gets tiresome to constantly have to 'fix' sites.

Whitelisting is indeed troublesome, especially in the age of CDNs, and not really worth it for sites visited only once. I discovered that some instances of breakage can be fixed by enabling Firefox "reader view", for others I just start

  chromium --incognito
and paste the link.

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#389

Post by askafriend »

baxtr wrote: post #347
daveheq wrote: post #328

Google AMP: 1. Obscures the web page's URL. 2. Makes manual zoom in/out impossible. 3. Sometimes hides content mentioned in the article, with no ability to scroll horizontally to see it. 4. Confuses Chrome on Amdroid into over-hiding its top address/menu bar (forcing two swipes down all the way to the top to show) or forces it to show (won't hide on scroll down). This is just coming from a user's perspective, fortuna…

...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

Re: Please Make Google AMP Optional

#390

Post by leggomylibro »

gub09 wrote: 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…

Thing is, if you're a news site, your news isn't going to show up on Google's news platforms if it doesn't support AMP.

As a customer, I don't like this behavior at all. I do not like AMP, mostly for the small issue that it's very difficult to link to the base page. Minor consistent inconvenience, major feature rage.

But I can't imagine what it's like for a web developer. You need to support a whole other platform just to maintain your audience, which is also your lifeblood. Also, that audience won't actually see your page; just the text with some Googly UI. Avoiding it would be fantastic, but it also wouldn't be a realistic option.

Post reply on HN