You can't disable Google AMP

As many other people, I've also had my fair share of issues with AMP. On top of the ethical issues, the thing to finally make me fed up with it was the fact that I couldn't even load 20% of the search results on my iPhone being connected to a 1000/300 landline connection via wifi.

Kind of a self-defeating thing that they claim to make the web universally better and then force everyone to use technology that is clearly broken on so many search pages and then actively try and prevent you from using the old, actually working links.

Needless to say, I'm currently using DuckDuckGo on all of my mobile devices and am considering switching to it on my computers as well. It baffles me that Google gets away with the things they've been doing recently. I used to be really happy they exist, now I kinda wish they had tougher competition and weren't in many de-facto monopolistic positions. Other than the fact that they barely support anything they offer, be it "free" or paid products, they change and shut down projects almost monthly.

They are slowly turning Chrome into a walled garden going so far as to remove your own, manually installed extensions when they don't like what you're using. They ruined hangouts, which was a really great, even standout VOIP platform that offered not only the convenience of being browser-based, but all these plugins that would come in handy while producing content (like volume adjustments on participants and an export feature, for podcasting or D&D) or drawing boards or group YouTube video playback. They messed up mobile search with AMP, in an effort to dominate the web even more. They shut down Panoramio. They promised to fix Android for years and even 6 years after it became mainstream, the experience is noticeably less smooth than the competition, etcetcetc.

Using a Google product is only recommended if you're not planning on investing into a long-term future it seems.

Unfortunately, however convenient it was to rely on a single platform, for now I think possible solution is to look for alternatives and show our dislike by hitting them where it hurts: their install base.

> Scrolling momentum is very different, making it feel non-native

Is it different from other web pages, or from scrolling a native app? At the end of the day, an AMP site is HTML.

> 7. Copying the URL results in some Google thing instead of the real URL

This is exceptionally annoying, I agree. As a tip though, if you tap the 'sharing' widget, and scroll, you'll see a 'request desktop site' option that will give you the 'proper' URL.

As an iPhone/iOS 10 user, I cannot corroborate all of your claims.

1. Scrolling seems native to me. I just tried it again, maybe it seemed off for a moment. It's hard to tell. I don't find that the scrolling is broken as it is on many websites, and it's not difficult to achieve with -webkit-overflow-scroll: touch in one's CSS, i.e. they could fix this if it's not native already.

2. The URL bar does indeed remain visible. This is normal behaviour when you disable overflow scrolling on the root/body element and enable it on a child element instead. There are a couple of reasons to do this: if you want to size your page relative to the viewport and don't want that size to change when the user scrolls up and down, i.e. you don't want that size to change due to a disappearing/reappearing URL bar, you can force the URL bar to stay visible, thereby forcing a constant height, by doing what I described.

3. This definitely doesn't happen to me.

4. I have yet to encounter an AMP link that didn't work with Safari Reader. I would blame the author of the specific AMP page before blaming AMP as a whole if it works most of the time on other websites.

5. seems like a hazard with most dynamic websites.

6. I cannot say I have experienced, but I do not use Reddit, so maybe that's why.

7. is true. Can't avoid that, regrettably — the whole point of AMP is to serve the site from Google's CDN (and to use AMP components to follow best practices for loading assets). However, I wouldn't call it a disadvantage.

8. I do not find it confusing.

I think 2/3/8 are parts of a bigger and more general problem. The AMP bar simply isn't necessary. It's part of Google's system of control around their AMP pages. AMP should just be an optional way to display pages, there shouldn't be this whole sub-app experience of flicking between AMP articles once an article has been selected from the Google SERP.

It's a nice idea and everything, but what they should have done is implement a similar thing to the Safari reading list, where you're suggested the next article at the bottom of the one you're reading, rather than having an ugly ass navigation bar occupy 10% of the screen.

For one thing, this breaks the gestures for going backwards and forwards in navigation history in iOS Safari, which I would expect to be the first and foremost complaint by any iOS Safari user grappling with AMP.

Adding AMP will actually make the pages heavier in many of these cases.

It seems counter-intuitive to slow a page to get a lightning bolt.