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

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

#431

Post by saagarjha »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #398
stephenr wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Without their monopoly search position no one would be forced to adopt amp It is used by the major search engines in every major market, so yes, they would be forced to adopt AMP. Compare to Apple News, which gives the publisher even less control. Once again, how is it abusing their monopoly position if all their competitors get to benefit from it for free? Finally, how do you propose to enable safe prerendering on…

I don’t want prerendering if it comes with this attached to it. Fast pages don’t need prerendering.

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

#432

Post by JohnFen »

system2 wrote: post #407
buboard wrote: post #401

It's funny that, if it was a net neutrality issue, e.g. Comcast pushing a new video format and prioritizing video for their own streaming service, the internet would be a warzone by now. But we all love google. And google used to be all fuzzy and unevil. But now they 're evil

How can anyone categorize AMP as evil? They are improving and leading. No one needs to use Google, they have alternatives. This is how things evolve. Someone else will create another amp alternative and things will change later. Netflix was #1, then Hulu, Disney, amazon video came. No one lasts forever, everyone needs to evolve and this exactly is what google is doing.

> How can anyone categorize AMP as evil?

"Evil" is not a word I'd use. I think AMP is bad for numerous reasons, most of which are detailed in other comments. But the reason that is most relevant to your comment is that AMP makes the web experience worse for me.

> Someone else will create another amp alternative

Yes, I fear that this will happen.

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

#433

Post by buboard »

system2 wrote: post #407
buboard wrote: post #401

It's funny that, if it was a net neutrality issue, e.g. Comcast pushing a new video format and prioritizing video for their own streaming service, the internet would be a warzone by now. But we all love google. And google used to be all fuzzy and unevil. But now they 're evil

How can anyone categorize AMP as evil? They are improving and leading. No one needs to use Google, they have alternatives. This is how things evolve. Someone else will create another amp alternative and things will change later. Netflix was #1, then Hulu, Disney, amazon video came. No one lasts forever, everyone needs to evolve and this exactly is what google is doing.

amp is a vehicle to a) turn web content owners to gig writers for google and b) push Signed HTTP Exchanges, a dangerous protocol on the web. I can't attribute stupidity to google because they re very smart, so it must be malice

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

#434

Post by behringer »

Karunamon wrote: post #373
behringer wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop hoarding tabs. Anyway I think those are arguments in the past anyway.

"In the past"? I can reproduce this on my daily driver today . Why do I need to change my workflow because Firefox got worse at what I've used it for for years? If I have to change the way I work, why not change browsers too? If there's a tab limit beyond which Firefox can't effectively control itself, why is that not a hard coded limit?

Ram is cheap: https://www.amazon.com/slp/memory-ram-ddr4/rcnyvqomjbxu8pj

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

#435

Post by buboard »

JohnFen wrote: post #432
system2 wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can anyone categorize AMP as evil? They are improving and leading. No one needs to use Google, they have alternatives. This is how things evolve. Someone else will create another amp alternative and things will change later. Netflix was #1, then Hulu, Disney, amazon video came. No one lasts forever, everyone needs to evolve and this exactly is what google is doing.

> How can anyone categorize AMP as evil? "Evil" is not a word I'd use. I think AMP is bad for numerous reasons, most of which are detailed in other comments. But the reason that is most relevant to your comment is that AMP makes the web experience worse for me. > Someone else will create another amp alternative Yes, I fear that this will happen.

> Yes, I fear that this will happen.

nobody showed an interest in making mobile websites fast even though they ve been slow for years. The whole javascript corporate ecosystem is still openly pushing heavy javascript apps even though sites are mobile-first today. only google cared

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

#436

Post by saagarjha »

gregable wrote: post #346
ogre_codes wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't address those problems, it has effectively created a second, proprietary web which is only accessible from the Google home page. If Google actually wanted to improve the web, they wouldn't be splintering it, they would reward publishers with better search placement for building user-friendly sites. As it is, AMP is little more than a way to ensure the "Google" web is better than the non-Google web. Which…

AMP pages are just HTML. Publishers can and do use AMP pages as their "regular" pages that every user sees, not just those coming from Google. Other aggregators (Bing, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) link to AMP versions. These pages are far from only accessible from Google queries.

If they’re just HTML pages, why would I use AMP?

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

#437

Post by JoshMnem »

esrauch wrote: post #414
JoshMnem wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 8-second delay is there to punish users who block JavaScript that is loaded from Google's servers (with ad-blockers) but still have JavaScript enabled.

I think that's a bit unnecessarily tin-foil-hat. If they didn't put in the 8 second css rule it would just show blank for those users right? So adding that rule is making it work at all instead which doesn't sound like "there to punish them".

It's the other way around -- AMP pages show a blank page for 8 seconds for people with ad-blockers because of that CSS rule.

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

#438

Post by saagarjha »

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…

> The alternative is slowly viewing and skimming low-quality content.

No, the alternative is quickly skimming low-quality content with an adblocker and reader mode.

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

#439

Post by saagarjha »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #124
superkuh wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher rankings and google will preload the amp page they have and their servers for the amp link. That's why it is a tiny bit faster. It has nothing to do with the amp spec itself. It's faster because google is abusing it's monopoly search position to pre-load.

> 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…

Apple isn’t running a dominant search engine that upranks Apple News results.

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

#440

Post by danielparks »

system2 wrote: post #406
kccqzy wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Good luck doing it on mobile phone. I'd say 99.99% users out there on mobile never even attempted to use another browser than safari or chrome for ios.

Safari supports ad blockers, and they’re quite easy to set up.

Whether or not people actually install them is a good question, though.

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