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

markosaric.com

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

#91

Post by reaperducer »

bluGill wrote: post #83
eyeundersand wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be just me but I don't get why people on here tend to be critical about DDG's usability. I made the switch a year and a half back and I seriously don't miss anything. There are some niche cases where it doesn't work, you can just use the bangs in those cases. The trade-off, like you said, is well worth it. (Upon typing this, I realize I'm just echoing your comment. Either way, leaving this up to provide one…

When I first tried DDG - more than 5 years ago - it was worse. I was unable to find the answers I needed and ended up back at google. I tried off and on a few times over the years, and about a year ago I found it good enough to switch. The few times DDG doesn't find what I need I tried google: it too failed to find what I needed. In short, if you last tried DDG a long time ago try again, it is much better.

The few times DDG doesn't find what I need I tried google: it too failed to find what I needed.

I used to be one of those people who when I couldn't find something on the duck would repeat the search with Google. But more and more, especially in the last six months, if I can't find it on Duck, it's not on Google, either.

Duck gives me irrelevant results to those queries. Google gives me irrelevant pop-culture results to those queries.

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

#92

Post by judge2020 »

40four wrote: post #44
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…

Preach brother preach! I made this move myself many months ago & never looked back. There is basically nothing I miss about dropping chrome/ google search. My web experience is indiscernible using Firefox & DDG. One of the only minor things I've had to adjust to is prefixing searches with my local city & state when I'm searching for things in my hometown (Imagine that! My search engine website isn't tracking my physi…

> I got so sick of seeing targeted ads in EVERY website I visit.

Could you say if the number of ads you've clicked changed (went up or down) when not seeing targeted ads compared to when seeing targeted ads?

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

#93

Post by [deleted] »

brianzelip wrote: post #41
Mirioron wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stop using chrome. Honestly, wtf?! Firefox is awesome. I think plenty of people have found Mozilla to have made some poor decisions over the years. It feels as though you have to choose between two options that aren't great, so is there a point in switching? Take the add ons situation. At least on Chrome I can run my own add ons.

Yes there is a point to switching. Mozilla is 10000000x more on our side.

[deleted]

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

#94

Post by jtxx »

Mirioron wrote: post #76
arkanciscan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave is a good browser too. You can run your add-ons there.

I actually am using Brave and Chrome. They're similar enough that they more or less feel interchangeable.

that's cause Brave's running on Chromium

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

#95

Post by Karunamon »

Scarbutt wrote: post #68
brianzelip wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes there is a point to switching. Mozilla is 10000000x more on our side.

Yes but Mozilla is lazy, badly managed and dumb. They were too late on mobile, and if it weren't for Chrome, Firefox today would need 64GB of RAM to run.

I’ve seen Firefox north of 20gb on my 32gb desktop more than once, and tab crashes are a daily annoyance. Worse, it doesn’t seem appreciably faster on machines with less memory. I wish there was some config flag I could set that would put it on a diet...

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

#96

Post by superkuh »

bytematic wrote: post #60
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,…

Exactly, use google amp and get higher rankings and it can increase your traffic by hundreds to thousands to millions. I hate it but its how it works

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.

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

#97

Post by martin_a »

mda wrote: post #75
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…

Do you have any data that Google's services were the actual cause of the slowdown of websites?

Ever ran a website through Google Lighthouse/Page Speed Insights and saw that Google recommends to set proper cache timing for Google Analytics etc.? If that's not proof enough...

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

#98

Post by DCKing »

Mirioron wrote: post #36
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…

> Stop using chrome. Honestly, wtf?! Firefox is awesome. I think plenty of people have found Mozilla to have made some poor decisions over the years. It feels as though you have to choose between two options that aren't great, so is there a point in switching? Take the add ons situation. At least on Chrome I can run my own add ons.

> I think plenty of people have found Mozilla to have made some poor decisions over the years.

How come this is brought up in the argument at all? Mozilla is very imperfect, but they're the only major browser vendor that doesn't have their own ad networks. Safari and Firefox are the only two options that 1) are not owned by a company working against browser user's interests or 2) inadvertently end up helping the dominance of a browser in category 1. And most people can't use Safari.

Mozilla has actively shown time and time again that they're there for the end user. You can be critical of the times when they made mistakes in that mission (plenty of times), but please realize who your real friends are.

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

#99

Post by eropple »

Mirioron wrote: post #74
minikites wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think plenty of people have found Mozilla to have made some poor decisions over the years. And Google hasn't?

You bring up a good point. I think the reason I feel this way is that Google's screw ups didn't inconvenience my usage of Chrome, whereas Mozilla's have inconvenienced my usage of Firefox. What made me initially switch to Chrome was the UI change in Firefox. Years later I thought of swapping back to Firefox and I found out that Firefox doesn't allow me to run my own add ons without their approval.

> I found out that Firefox doesn't allow me to run my own add ons without their approval.

This is not and has never been true. What is no longer possible is the ability to sideload extensions outside of the browser by copying files into a directory because that's how dirtbags have stuck extensions that could not be uninstalled into Firefox as part of a third-party app install.

Go to `about:addons`, install add-on from file, you're done.

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

#100

Post by Karunamon »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #53
bvda wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except if that add on blocks Google's precious ads

Ublock/adblock/abp/etc all still works in chrome

For now. Aren’t they floating some sort of API change that drastically reduce the effectiveness of ad blockers?
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