How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer • Hacker News Board

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

#491

Post by squiggleblaz » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 9:07 AM UTC

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…

Why does safe prerendering need to break URLs? Why can't the pages be safely prerendered client side?

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

#492

Post by squiggleblaz » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 9:09 AM UTC

lern_too_spel wrote: post #449

saagarjha wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You're right. Apple is worse. They show only Apple News results.

But there's a difference between having a service which only shows your stuff, and having a service which apparently shows the entire internet, but subtly prefers your stuff. Most people find the latter far more questionable than the former, because if we want to find anything, we need to know where to look.

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

#493

Post by nothrabannosir » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 9:10 AM UTC

shawnz wrote: post #415

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there's nothing like super generic about it. Google has a de facto monopoly on site rankings, which gives it de facto editorial control over the content of the Internet down to a very fine level. If Google decides to drop a site from search, that site loses traffic and is effectively removed from visibility. This is not a user choice. Users do not to get to say "Well, that site is too slow for me, so I won't visi…

What you're arguing against is opaque site rankings. But what does that have to do with AMP as a technology? How does AMP enable them to have more opaque rankings than before? All the control you're talking about is something they'd have regardless of the existence of AMP.

AMP is an example of the bad faith exercising of that monopoly. Bad faith because we judge it by the negative press: there is considerable push back and controversy, yet it remains. That alone separates it from other factors like “actual page speed”, which is also used but which everyone agrees with, which is why it’s considered good faith.

No need to judge it based on its technical merit: a significant amount of people hate it, yet here it is. End of.

This is not a legal question (yet), this is a moral question. The legal [and technical] question is relevant, but not the be all end all of any discussion. People sometimes also just want to discuss how they feel. It’s relevant to get consensus about that. And people feel bad about AMP.

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

#494

Post by jhanschoo » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 9:11 AM UTC

Udik wrote: post #420

thereisnospork wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> That is why AMP has been successful >This is not. If google removes ranking incentive, people will forget about AMP the next day Google giving ranking incentive to sites that are faster seems like the exact sort of thing they should be doing.

> Google giving ranking incentive to sites that are faster seems like the exact sort of thing they should be doing. Really? I thought Google's purpose was to find information in the web, not to give me fast links. If I am looking for an article, I want that article, not a different but faster one. If I am looking for a piece of information, I want the best fit, not the second or third best but faster fit.

> find information in the web

This has not been true for more than a decade. The primary use case of the Internet today is to connect users with service providers of all stripes, and not just information repositories.

For most of these, the quality of service is more correlated with their "speed".

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

#495

Post by account42 » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 9:57 AM UTC

rdiddly wrote: post #421

Great post, although I'm a little meh on lazy-loading images. I like when the whole page is finished loading the moment I think it's finished loading. But more to the point, lazy-loading can be a crutch just like AMP is, for solving problems that shouldn't exist, such as: your page is big & bloated. If you keep it small, there's no need for lazy-loading. But you have to limit the number of images, and optimize the on…

Yeah, please don't add lazy loading.

- It breaks viewing the site with javascript disabled.

- It prevents viewing the site offline (e.g. on an airplane) without first scrolling through the whole content while online.

- Unless implemented perfectly it adds delays before content you have scrolled to becomes visible.

Deciding when to load stuff should be the browser's job. Don't reimplement the browser in javascript.

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

#496

Post by IanSanders » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 10:11 AM UTC

ogre_codes wrote: post #221

I'm not a fan of Google's proprietary web, but it's worth pointing out that this is largely a response to the increasingly shitty way publishers treat their users. Just reading basic articles on the web has become a painful exercise in dodging "Subscribe" faux-pop-ups; trying to scan text while your vision is bombarded with unrelated video; and user-hostile scroll capture effects. For much the same reasons Google AMP…

I started blacklisting hostile websites and encouraging people to do the same.

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

#497

Post by account42 » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 10:16 AM UTC

markosaric wrote: post #363

sm4rk0 wrote: post #323

Marko, bravo for making that clean and readable site (and having 0 trackers, as reported by Firefox Klar)! There's one issue I noticed when clicking the links to page sections (#anchors). Those lazy-loaded images make the page scroll away from the section title I jumped to. Is it possible to fix that by having images replaced by placeholders of the same size?

Thanks for the kind words and yeah no trackers/third-party calls/cookies etc. Have tested on regular Firefox for mobile and on Firefox Preview too (you should try it if you like Klar) and it works fine on both. I'll see if I can add placeholders when all this traffic slows down. Don't dare to touch much at this time.

Please remove lazy loading completely and instead leave the decision when to load content to the browser. Static content should never use any scripts.

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

#498

Post by saagarjha » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 10:20 AM UTC

lern_too_spel wrote: post #446

saagarjha wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Tell that to Apple, Facebook, and RSS aggregators, all of which do the same thing but worse. Whether or not you want it, I and apparently most other users do want it.

As has been mentioned before, what Apple, Facebook, and RSS aggregators are doing is quite different than what Google is: they're not purporting to be search engines.

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

#499

Post by account42 » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 10:23 AM UTC

exabrial wrote: post #236

I remember looking at the original HTML5 spec and going, there is no way lower power / low bandwidth / high latency devices will be able to handle this efficiently. Nevertheless, we moved fast and broke things, ratified the HTML5 spec and paved the cowpaths without a second thought to language or efficiency. Somewhere along the line, things came full circle. HTML was slow again, so we needed a new new way to efficien…

In what way is HTML5 is inherently slower than previous versions? Pages tend to be slow because of the tracking and adds addded to them as well as client-side "rendering" for static content. None of that is required by HTML5.

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

#500

Post by squiggleblaz » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 10:29 AM UTC

dunstad wrote: post #474

ferongr wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then you have to suffer using Firefox on Android.

There's nothing wrong with it, I've been using it for ages.

Well, once a webpage has played audio there's a notification that hangs around till you restart the phone. That's probably better than the cost of running Chrome, though.