The Problem With Google AMP (80x24.net) 56
Kyle Schreiber has raised some issues about Google's AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), an open source project unveiled by the company in 2015 with which it aims to accelerate content on mobile devices. He writes on his blog: The largest complaint by far is that the URLs for AMP links differ from the canonical URLs for the same content, making sharing difficult. The current URLs are a mess. They all begin with some form of https://wwww.google.com/amp/ before showing a URL to the AMP version of the site. There is currently no way to find the canonical link to the page without guessing what the original URL is. This usually involves removing either a .amp or ?amp=1 from the URL to get to the actual page. Make no mistake. AMP is about lock-in for Google. AMP is meant to keep publishers tied to Google. Clicking on an AMP link feels like you never even leave the search page, and links to AMP content are displayed prominently in Google's news carousel. This is their response to similar formats from both Facebook and Apple, both of which are designed to keep users within their respective ecosystems. However, Google's implementation of AMP is more broad and far reaching than the Apple and Facebook equivalents. Google's implementation of AMP is on the open web and isn't limited to just an app like Facebook or Apple.
Hate that pos (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hate that pos (Score:5, Informative)
Second this approach, except I switched to duck duck go. I find the results to be less useful, unfortunately, although I like their privacy policies and what not better. Still, too many damn amp results.
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I changed search to use DDG and changed browsers to Brave as a direct result of AMP.
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I hope someone from Google is reading this. The moment I see my results as AMPs I go to bing.com. And not only that but in that moment I fucking hate Google. And those moments keep adding up.
Google News mobile (Score:3)
They've been using it on Google News for mobile now for a while, I can't stand it. Mainly for the exact reason stated in the blurb, which is that you cannot share news stories. Plus it wastes screen real estate with the Google header at the top. Didn't we go through something like this over a decade ago when iframe came out and everyone was wanting to embed everyone else's content in their web page to show ads and otherwise maintain control over the user? Thanks for taking us back to the dark ages, Google.
Re: Cry me a river (Score:1)
Yet another example of marketing / business interests ruining a perfectly good engineering technology accomplishment.
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in general I'm a fan of most things Google.
Yet another example of marketing / business interests ruining a perfectly good engineering technology accomplishment.
Google was ruined years ago when they IPOd. Their search results have been going downhill for a while, and switching to ddg has actually been just fine for me.
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I just have my mobile browser spoof its user agent string to indicate that it's a desktop one. Problem solved.
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> I just have my mobile browser spoof its user agent string to indicate that it's a desktop one
That works on a shrinking subset of sites. Many of them will poll the display for size, and then serve you their shitty-shit version based on that.
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True. The current adaptive web design techniques are a damned plague. So far, I have been able to simply not use those websites, but once that becomes impractical, I'll find a browser that lets me spoof window size reporting, etc. as well.
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I'll try that, thanks!
No idea why I didn't try good old "lowercase I, octothorpe, numeral zero". Sixty percent of the time, it works every time!
Re:Google News mobile (Score:4, Informative)
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My problem with AMP is that Google returns tons of those results for normal searches as well. It's supposed to be Accelerated Mobile Pages, but I'm not on mobile, I'm on a desktop. I don't want to see stripped-down AMP results, I want to go to the original page.
Knock me over with a feather (Score:3)
"Make no mistake. AMP is about lock-in for Google."
Well, DUH. Is there anyone here who doesn't think this mainly exists to provide Google with more specific information regarding our individual browsing habits?
Fortunately, we can easily choose to never use it. And I'm assuming that, at some point, someone will come up with a de-obfuscation service that lets you get at the target URL without going through AMP (for those times when a person sends you a google.com/amp/ link).
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>Make no mistake. AMP is about lock-in for Google
Make no mistake. Digital & web technology literally is about pushing everything online and is about lock-in for every company. Companies have been salivating about customer lock-in for years. Web accounts, auto-billing, digital funds transfers, TOS's etc all allow it much better than the paper days.
This is about getting people in the farm trough of consumption.
I can't stand it (Score:3)
I can't share the page nor can I block ads. Luckily, I've found an iOS app (Opener) that lets me open the page without AMP. It's a hassle, but it works.
I no longer use Google News because of it ,and if it gets any worse, I'll drop Google as my search engine.
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It isn't just that, though. It breaks site navigation.
And if it's a site like reddit, I can't interact with reddit the way I normally do, and I can't easily move from the amp version to the reddit version.
My simple solution: that little "x" in the Amp navigation bar, make it close the amp envelope and drop me in the regular site.
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My simple solution: that little "x" in the Amp navigation bar, make it close the amp envelope and drop me in the regular site.
Which is exactly what you expect from it, intuitively.
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I lost count of the number I times I tried that until uncovering what AMP was and switching my mobile search provider to DDG.
Short summay: (Score:1)
But it is a problem because... google.
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To be fair, people worry about Facebook's influence and complain about Apple's lock-in as well. But more to the point, Google, as the world's leader in search and many other connected services, as well as the developer of the world's most popular mobile OS, does have a responsibility to NOT abuse their market position - at least in a way that will bring regulators down on them. Market leaders tend to get a bit of extra scrutiny in these matters, and rightly so, I think, due to their sheer influence and th
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http://mozilla.org/ [mozilla.org] -> moz://a
Just request the desktop version (Score:3)
wtfi Kyle Schreiber awtfsic? (Score:1)
AMP sucks ass, everybody knows that. Thanks Kyle Schreiber.
AMP is an absolute pile of shit (Score:2)
Google News is dubious as a news source, but when this AMP shit started, I completely stopped using it on mobile. Like most "mobile friendly" websites, it disables pinch to zoom some significant portion of the time, making it shitty. MUCH more importantly, I can't share or use links without copypasta to some note app and manual dicking, as the summary states. It is a total failure, making what was once trivial into a giant pile of shit.
My response was, I stopped using it completely. I'm sure others stil
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But the WORST bit... (Score:2)
Gigantic scam. Only helps Google, not the Web.
Users or the used? (Score:1)
both of which are designed to keep the used within their respective ecosystems
There, I fixed that for you.
There are many points against AMP (Score:2)
After all as long as there will be web designers, there will be horribly bad webpages which will consume huge amounts of data. Just keep your webpages plain and simple, avoid Javascript, particularly from foreign domains, and everything will be fine.
It's not your responsibility to adapt the look of your page to the size of the browser window. If the browser is semi decent and you write proper HTML it'll just work everywhere. That's the whole idea behind HTML.
It's not all bad (Score:2)
I don't hate it. I try to keep my bandwidth usage minimal and I seek out AMP links for quick reference because it cuts out so much bandwidth usage. My big problem is that there's no native UI method to go to the real URL when necessary.
It has all the potential to be useful - in the same way that Open Graph gave publishers at least some control over how shared content appears on FB.
The whole problem with AMP (Score:3)
Put some javascript in your page and let google host a copy of your page.
AMP done right:
Restrict to a subset of HTML without scripts, canvas, etc. and rely on mobile browsers to optimize for it. If you want to, introduce a new doctype for AMP-HTML.
This week's non-problem... (Score:2)
...brought to you by www.ifyoudontlikeitthendontuseit.com
Well... (Score:2)
...but what if the site I want to use uses it.
I never even noticed AMP until last week. (Score:2)
Last week, a friend on facebook posted a link to wwww.google.com/amp/ $ARTICLE_URL and it confused me. I didn't understand why they were linking to google instead of $ARTICLE_URL.
I have never seen an AMP site, because on mobile, I only surf with Firefox + Desktop by Default [mozilla.org] and Phony [mozilla.org] addons, and with Phony's user agent set to "Desktop Firefox" (For some sites, you gotta' use both). I've hated "mobile" sites so much for years that I've been avoiding them since before Google rolled-out AMP.
Honestly, Firefox
Nothing is good (Score:2)
Google OK, here's a different standard that is limited on purpose in order to focus on content
Slashdot Ugh I don't like that either! It's too limiting!! If only everyone would make pages how I want, everyone would be happy. I won't even so much as make a single page for fear to be proven wrong though.
Is it 4 "w" or "3" (Score:1)
No idea what this is (Score:2)
I read some articles and watched some videos and still have no idea what this is.
It claims to be magic that makes loading websites faster but it just seems to be a variant of HTML where slow stuff is prohibited.
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The publishers choose to participate. They add code to their webpages to get them to work with AMP.
There are issues with AMP, but copyright concerns aren't among them.
Good goal; bad implementation (Score:2)