I'm not sure there is a more natural way, but if you install DuckDuckGo as default search engine, then searches which use their !bang syntax to redirect to a Google search are via encrypted.google.com. Example:
That's why I've never seen any AMP pages! I've been wondering about this forever -- I thought Google must have figured out I wouldn't want them somehow. But any Google searches I do are usually through DuckDuckGo which use the encrypted link.
> does anybody have more information on what that URL is for?
Many years ago, Google Search existed only on http:// and schools used filters to block searches that they didn't like. Then Google shipped https:// for search on www.google.com, upset the schools because they could no longer block just some searches, then moved encrypted search to encrypted.google.com so that the entire domain could be blocked: https://cloud.googleblog.com/2010/06/an-update-on-encrypted-...
> Does anybody have more information on what that URL is for?
You used to have to use that domain to run searches over HTTPS. Google's enabled that for all users now, so it's kind of obsolete -- but apparently it still behaves a little bit differently?
It's from the era before which Google defaulted to TLS. Nowadays, the only known difference relates to clicking of links. Here's the info from SE[0]:
>1. Clicking on an ad:
> - https://google.com : Google will take you to an HTTP redirection page where they'd append your search query to the referrer information.
> - https://encrypted.google.com : If the advertiser uses HTTP, Google will not let the advertiser know about your query. If the advertiser uses HTTPS, they will receive the referrer information normally (including your search query).
>2. Clicking on a normal search result:
> - https://google.com : If the website uses HTTP, Google will take you to an HTTP redirection page and will not append your search query to the referrer information. They'll only tell the website that you're coming from Google. If it uses HTTPS, it will receive referrer information normally.
> - https://encrypted.google.com : If the website you click in the results uses HTTP, it will have no idea where you're coming from or what your search query is. If it uses HTTPS, it will receive referrer information normally.
You must have not wanted access to the site's full set of features, not wanted to use a mobile ad blocker, now wanted access to comments, etc. That's fine, but for many, it's an annoyance.
AMP is one of the most frustrating experiences I've had with Google. the fact that it's foisted on users, with no option to disable it, makes it borderline infuriating.
If you're stuck on an AMP page in your mobile browser, you can click on the browser's "Request desktop site" option to load the full page.
I get the frustration, but mobile sites in general also have this problem. "Request desktop site" should be a more prominent feature, at least in safari which is what I'm familiar with. It's quite buried unfortunately and I think that more non-techies would benefit from knowing about it.
It's right on the main menu in Chrome on Android. A checkbox item on the menu, so you know you can turn it on and off. So at least it isn't that hidden, same level as the other main features.
And websites should honor the "Request desktop version" at all time. It's frustrating when you enable the option and it still bring up the mobile version.
If it was any good, it would be showing the desktop scaling/layout/whatever instead of the mobile when 'show desktop version' is on.
It's also not always about being on a responsive sites, a lot of places still do a m.website.com redirect when visiting the main site from a mobile device, but with no backwards redirect when visiting the mobile site (which is almost certainly non-responsive, otherwise there'd be essentially no need for the m.* site) as a desktop client - so you hit 'show desktop version', the m.* page refreshes and you just get the mobile site with funny scaling.
The website has no way of knowing you did that: this is actually Apple's fault for not changing the logical browser dimensions when you use this feature.
You can argue that any limitation is simply due to the feature being mislabeled, but in this case it seems pretty clear what people both expect this feature to do as currently named, and that happens to match what people also seem to want, and that would include changing the viewport to make certain you actually get the desktop site functionality.
> If you're stuck on an AMP page in your mobile browser, you can click on the browser's "Request desktop site" option to load the full page.
So you have to load the AMP page and then a potentially bloated normal page. That's AMP doing the exact opposite of it's intended (or at least stated) purpose. Noscript, flashblock and adblock have done far more for page speeds than than AMP ever will.
Worst of all, many AMP pages won't load for me unless I disable Adblock. So now I have to degrade my browsing experience everywhere else to cater to AMP.
I've seen ordinary users get frustrated with it, but they don't understand why. They don't know what AMP is, and they don't realize they are on an AMP page. For example, the URL bar says they are on Google but they are reading a Slate article. The web is already confusing enough, and AMP makes it worse. Many ordinary users think they are reading content from Google, like that famous CNN interview where a lady said, "I read it in Facebook"
Which leads to the question, why is google doing this? They, you, could easily promote AMP pages while not masking the real URL! The answer is simple, profits over what's best for users.
I run a WordPress blog. From the documentations of Google and WordPress AMP plugins, I have always thought that the user will be directed to "originalurl/amp" on my domain when they click on the Google link on their phone. Now that I see it's a Google domain, this is really weird.
> Which leads to the question, why is google doing this? They, you, could easily promote AMP pages while not masking the real URL!
Perhaps to allow the content to be served from a CDN (over HTTPS), without requiring the site to CNAME over their domain to Google.
If webmasters are willing to CNAME over their domain to a caching proxy, then a less intrusive design is possible[0], such as the one recently announced by Cloudflare[1].
The AMP CDN doesn't even really help with caching - when I implemented AMP at launch for some large sites, it was strongly implied that we couldn't expect any reduction in calls to our servers, and we didn't notice any reduction when AMP went live. From my perspective it appeared to be a walled garden counter-measure to FB Instant Articles and Apple News.
i am curious about the numbers, though i do not know internally or externally if there are numbers showing this.
As a power android user, i kind of like the rss-reader-esque look and feel of the amp links. It also opens blazing fast. With these in mind, minor inconveniences (like the address bar) are probably something i wouldn't mind.
If only Google had a nice RSS Reader view which was blazing fast, and allowed you to view an uncluttered, non JS version of an article, while still correctly attributing it to the original provider, while making it easy to link to the original source.
Such really simple syndication technology could even have a catch TLA. I can't really think of one, but I'm sure there is something.
Here's the deal, nearly all of the benefits of AMP are unrelated to the masking of the URL, they are in the HTML validation aspects of AMP. Masking the URL and keeping users on Google when they think they are on Slate is a rather naked land-grab with a lot of downside for users and very little benefit to users.
Why doesn't Google drop the URL masking while keeping all the real benefits of AMP? The answer, profits over people. I say this as a long time fan of Google, but this AMP stuff is where the "don't be evil" tagline turned into a joke for me.
I'm very strongly against AMP but what you said isn't strictly true.
AMP itself allows for fast loading which is true, but to support opening pages in "zero loading time" you still need pre-loading since fast loading still means non-zero loading time. To get pre-loading working in HTML you need to 1) load the iframe of the page in the background, then 2) when the link is clicked, use history.pushState() in order to manipulate the URL to appear you have moved to another page. Unfortunately for (2) the Web History APIs need* both URLs to be on the same domain so Google has an excuse that they need to change the target URL to be under Google for this to work.
Also Google wants to present the scrolling UI that allows you to browse to other articles in the search results (potentially from other domains). This can't be done if you have completely switched to the original website.
Personally I find this misguided at best, an excuse at worst. A fully compliant minimalistic AMP website (or even just a simple site that doesn't use AMP but follow best practices) will load incredibly quickly even without pre-loading. It's disrupting a lot of security and UX best practices (by replacing the address bar with "google.com" domain) just to achieve a very minor improvement. Furthermore they control Chrome. It's not too hard for them to push forward a web preloading standard and start implementing in Chrome.
Edit: Also for the scrolling UI it seems like another way for Google to push more engagement to their site rather than the target URL. It kind of runs counter to the open web nature IMO because there are innovations that helps previewing links already (e.g. iPhone 6s/7 3D touch) and it's the kind of behavior better implemented in the browser itself.
I'm saying the same thing you are. Maybe I could have been more clear, but I was trying to avoid the nitty gritty tech details. Like you said, it's misguided at best and an excuse at worse. I'm asserting that it's an excuse, because it is done in a way to keep users on google for very little benefit to the user while causing very real problems for users.
I've seen people say about "fake news" articles that have google.com as the top domain (because AMP) as an indicator of some reliability. Google is unintentionally, but actively, harming their image by being associated with and promoting such content.
Fake news make little harm to Google, like an atomic bomb fired into the sun. Google supporting fake news, intentionally and actively, does marvelous things for that piece of misinformation and it gives credit to the publisher.
I hope this AMP experiment is soon over. As someone already said here, the web is confusing as it is. Google used to want to make things clearer, better. AMP is not. It's fixing symptoms instead of causes.
The Chrome experiment in question ended before AMP was even a thought, and AMP and Chrome are separate teams inside Google. I doubt they're even mildly related.
Different teams inside a business can have coordinated long-term goals.
Regardless, their master plan[1] clearly shows "Redesign HTTP", "Browser", and "Next generation web (Fish Pod)" as precursors that lead to "Private Internet", "Walled Garden", "need more cache", and "NEWSBANK".
Not really, the page is located on slate.com, that's the canonical location, and google is adding a secondary location that is confusing and adds very little benefit. AMP provides a lot of benefits that do not depend on google hosting the page in addition to the canonical location.
I'm one of those frustrated mobile users. I like to think I keep up on tech trends (being here for one example) but I hadn't heard of AMP before. I have experienced it, though, without knowing what the issue was until now. I like to share news with friends, and recently more frequently when I try to send the url it was google instead of the domain I expected. I had to go out of my way to send them the actual source, but it didn't happen everywhere. Now I know why.
I browse AMP pages often and don't have any issues with it. It's great for getting news quickly in one page load. If I need to interact with it more, I'll simply go to the site hosting the AMP page
I've never had an issue with it. Actually I try to click on AMP links when I'm searching for news because I know I'll get an experience that doesn't suck.
As I remarked elsewhere, I actually find AMP an excellent and speedy experience. I read articles on a mobile connection in India primarily and I now invariably click AMP news story options vs. others
Why should I take the extra effort to make publisher's poor websites usable when something like AMP does it out of the box? I don't really have any ideological objections to Googleplex which would warrant such extra effort.
One of the reasons Google (and FB with instant articles) came out with is the speed, and data consumption, which matters a lot more in some countries than in others.
it does, because we care about a number of things, including:
1. Technical implementation (and alternative ways of implementation).
2. Freedom (keeping things within google's walled-garden or not)
Your average user (who doesn't necessarily know anything about software) doesn't really care about 1, and probably doesn't care about 2. They care about speed of the page, data consumption of the page, and maybe the look-and-feel of the page (bloated vs sane).
When I say HN user, i mean technically informed and most often skeptic people.
99% of internet users are average users. All your concerns are fine but at the end of the day when you want to read the news or whatever, speed matters.
I'm not convinced that's still true. Obviously I can't see google-rankings internal stuff, but...
If I search for weather, lyrics, or other common sites, the top results are always slow, bloated, JS-filled nightmares. Yet the sites that are quick and small are never to be found.
Maybe they do and they need to weight speed higher. I don't know, but I know that I don't ever seem to get fast loading results.
This feels too much like creating a problem that you want to be able to step in and solve.
The use cases between both groups may be substantially different. Understanding this helps us not draw conclusions from 'how HN users use stuff' and incorrectly applying them to 'how all users use stuff'.
This is my main problem with it. I don't mind too much that it loads an AMP page (well, I don't know, I go back and forth on it), it's the fact that if I want to share the page afterwards, I want the page to be shared to be the original site, not the AMP site, and finding a non-AMP version of the link is damn near impossible.
Yes. My boyfriend (who is not in tech) was so annoyed that he researched what it was that annoyed him and changed his default search engine to DuckDuckGo as a result.
Apple: These article webpages are annoying - let's add a client side button to make it readable.
Google: These article webpages are annoying[0] - let's force[1] everyone to grant us a royalty-free license to their whole website.
[0] The real problem might be that Google results are "getting bad" - a thing people bring up all the time but which can only be measured individually.
So people tap the first 3 results and don't get the info they were looking for. On top of that it's slow af so people are wasting time. Now Google serves up faster pages so they'll tap through 4 or 5 results.
So why not fix the real problem instead?
[1] Yeah it's optional but only to a point. First the spammiest blogs implement it and they get a free pass to partially skip the line. Then some bigger sites implement it and even things out. People here are rightfully afraid that within 12 months you can't even hit page 2 without AMP.
I actually find AMP an excellent user experience reading articles on mobile internet connections in India. Thr pages load snappily and are very responsive. The ads are not distracting etc. Among news articles, if there's AMP option, I always prefer to click it vs. others.
User here. I didn't realize I had an option to get the full site. As far as mobile web goes, I'm appreciative I don't have to slog through broken websites, CSS mishmash, flash ads, etc. Just the text, some basic structure, and fast loading times? I'm downright thankful to Google for this!
The bar has been set. Can you find a way to both resolve personal frustration and provide a better experience? Maybe a browser plugin?
Man trying to go back a page on Reddit then clicking a link on that page and seeing "there was an error, please reload the page" gets me out of there so damn fast.
Can you give an example of how to view reddit via AMP? If I just search for "reddit" on my Android phone for example, there are no AMP links to reddit, only Business Insider etc.
On my phone (chrome on android), basically any google search result from reddit goes to the amp version of the page.
(with all five visible comments, and since the full comments are almost certainly what I was searching for, I end up having to click through to the full page anyway every time)
There is an incompatibility between the Reddit app and Reddit amp links. If the Reddit app is not installed, they load just fine. Reddit likely could fix that if they were told about it. I have no idea how to tell them though.
I've had many of these concerns about AMP myself and have seen other posts on this before. I tend to agree with their points. If you want to optimize your mobile view, than you can do that without a Google pseudo-standard. When someone clicks on a link to your site, they should go to your site.
This wouldn't be that big a deal if Google didn't emphasize the rank of AMP pages. There aren't a lot of alternatives out there to search, and Google dominates the market in much of the world.
I agree with some missing content and linking issues with reddit, however the improvement in loading time is probably 10x. I'd be interested in seeing this quantified - I didn't appreciate just how slowly reddit loaded until loading the amp version, followed by the real version. Loading the amp version on a less-than-stellar mobile connection is much preferable to the real version.
> But the people who designed the page in the first place should be able to make it just as fast without using AMP.
...but they don't, which is the point.
I'll throw my hat in on being a fan of reading news on AMP pages as well (though reddit amp does seem completely broken). I wouldn't care in the least if news site x instead wrote a fast site, I'd happily use that instead. But until they do, yeah, as a user I'll click on the amp link first.
And I'm the opposite. I do my best to NOT use AMP pages. If a site can't be bothered to optimize it's own pages, then they don't get my attention/money/whatever. I can do without. Let the best developed sites win.
I actually like the AMP pages. Aside from public radio sites and a handful of other sites, news pages are so full of ads and slow loading, especially on mobile, that they're unreadable.
With AMP I can actually read articles from my local newspaper or TV station.
I guess in this case, I see it as a win for fast loading pages with just the article I'm looking for. Using AMP is my way of fighting back against autoplaying video ads and click bait links mixed in with news.
Yeah, the problem they are trying to solve is absolutely real. The concern is how they are trying to solve it. Instead of pushing sites to fix it, they are pushing sites to become part of the Google-ecosystem. Instead of trying to fix things, they'd rather use the opportunity as a power-grab
It's so strange to see Google repeating all the same mistakes AOL did so many years ago. No I don't want your fucking garden, I want the network. If you get in the way of that I'm done with you.
Everything seems to be moving towards gardens right now. Certainly not just Google. It's one of the things that depresses me most about tech right now.
The most depressing part of it is that the HN community don't seem to care and will actively cheer it in many cases (walled garden IRC and cloud in general). The only reason we have an open internet at all is because techies cared back in the day.
The majority of the articles, excluding those from large name corps, are simple loading pages. Using primarily the basic HTML and inline CSS. You do have the occasional blog page with some fancy touches, but the majority of the links that I click on while browsing HN has me questioning why, on sub par satellite internet, that HN and a majority of it's submitted posts work when Facebook, Google, Bing, etc.. does not.
In an alternative interpretation. G+ and AMP are both attempts by google to maintain relevance when faced with obsolescence due to becoming infrastructure rather than product.
Possibly off-topic, but the article isn't displaying[0] for me on Chromium 55.0.2883.87 (64-bit), running on Arch Linux, unless I go in the dev tools and manually remove "Fira Sans" from the font-family list in .container[1]. Not sure whether the problem is with me or the site, I'm surprised it doesn't fall-back to sans-serif before I override manually.
On AMP page, clicking the X on the header box should load the HTML page. Instead it kicks you back to the search results. I think I would be okay if they fixed that one thing.
That's my main pet peeve with AMP as well. In my mind the [x] in the top bar is almost exclusively associated with 'remove the bar' behavior in Safari on iOS.
Google: "let's completely reinvent our core product in terms of user experience... and mess it up"
Google is search, everything else is secondary. 20 people in a room testing this should have been all the red flags they needed to fix it before launch.
They viewed Google as platform and clicking x, takes user back to the platform. This was one of my biggest complains about the AMP project form the start. According to AMP team lead, however, the user testing on regular (not tech) users showed, that x did what people expected.
Interesting info, but whether or not it's true, it certainly benefits their strategy. I have no doubt that they want to push the narrative that Google (Search) is the 'platform' and the news from publishers they wrap is a tab or viewport that you can [x] (exit) out of, returning to the default 'blank' Google page.
The problem with that is that the UX is inconsistent between AMP results and web results. AMP results pretend they're this fake tab that can be "closed" and you return to Google, while web results take you away to the URL like you'd expect, which means navigation is the responsibility of the browser, and not of Google Search.
Frankly, this all would make more sense in the viewport-wrapping context of Google Chrome or Google News or the Google App rather than a behavior of Google Search, but that's not the limit of their ambition.
Or just, y'know, dress up the results page a bit more, and be honest about it. Brand the AMP subsection 'Read Instantly with AMP' and have it clearly and visibly wrap the results. This gains them a bunch of mindshare.
Or change the [x] to a 'back arrow', like their own splash page shows [1].
Wow: that screenshot makes so much more sense; I wonder why they dropped it... maybe because "back" was confusing with their "swipe left/right to get other articles" hijack?
Why would clicking the x on a header lead anyone to believe that the entire page ('tab') would be closed? That's not how... any other page element works.
The first time I encountered an AMP page I figured clicking the x would load the actual page. I was wrong.
Tech people think, x means get me out of this experience. Regular people think close this "pop up" displaying where I clicked to cause this "pop up" to appear.
I pick 'none of the above'. The 'x' in the header box should make the damn header go away, keeping the rest of the page 100% intact.
Mind you, this just proves that the header is superfluous. Existing technology called 'the back button' exists to take the user back to where they came from, and it's up to Google to decide how their results page behaves when this happens.
You're right. Suppose I've become used to clicking on AMP links without realizing it so when I click X I really just want off of AMP. I really have no need to simply dismiss the bar, I can scroll down more easily.
So the argument against AMP is someone's broken implementation and "security" of Google's CDN. Sounds like terrible arguments.
That said, Google should give option to opt-out from CDN caching (if they don't already) as otherwise implementing AMP gives Google the right to host your content on their domain.
You can't implicitly grant licenses just by implementing something like AMP. That said, the DMCA contains specific language for caches (and search) so they probably have that right anyway.
My biggest problem is simply being unable to open up an amp link in a new tab. Often in Google News for example I prefer to open up several tabs and read through them at my leisure. But with AMP this became impossible - though I'm unclear if this is simply a limitation of the implementation.
And what happened to whole "don't build different markup for different devices" mantra that has been the accepted wisdom in web development for the past 4 or 5 years (whenever responsive design was discovered)? Feels like "m." sites all over again (but this time with google's CDN as a required intermediary).
As someone happy with their AMP site, I'm only happy with it on the basis that my Jekyll theme builds the whole site as a single site that happens to support AMP on the desktop page.
I couldn't imagine dealing with supporting two deployments.
I'm glad AMP's weaknesses are finally gaining attention and making their rounds. Google should not be allowed to steal publishers' traffic and strong-arm them into going along with it.
Controversial question: At what point would Google start to be considered an antitrust issue? I know the EU has made some noise about it, but I'm a bit surprised I haven't heard more about it here in the U.S.
In all fairness, lyric sites were terrible. Slow, riddled with ads, and sometimes incorrect. While Google's lyrics are a great service to the user, they're at the top of search and displayed inline. There's no reason to go to lyric sites anymore.
My biggest fear is Structured Data and AMP. With Structure Data, you volunteer your most valuable data in a format Google can easily consume and adapt to its own needs - all so you can get better page rankings. When Google introduces its own service in the same market - just like lyrics - you're effectively cut off from your audience. And with AMP, you don't have to wait for Google to siphon your traffic - you're volunteering.
Thanks, I appreciate your view! That's how it strikes me as well; that Google provides unparalleled sticks and carrots towards publishers that will end up undoing those same publishers, while they (publishers) volunteer to go along and aid in the process! (Maybe they have little choice in the race to get traffic?)
In other words, Google seems like a very powerful gatekeeper of content that ends up consuming the content providers. Smacks of an abuse of their position.
And if lyric sites hosted original content, I might have felt for them. I think Google is overreaching in many ways, but not in instances like this where the content itself is such a commodity.
They're also republishing peoples' artistic creations with no permission - same goes for "Band - Topic" on youtube. Many people that publish their music through epublishers have no idea that youtube will monetize the (audio-only) video uploads of their songs, and get hit with takedown notices if they try to upload it on their own. It happened to me, and we had to really hammer the intermediary epublisher to get youtube to reupload our own video (!).
Edit: on top of that, the video that got taken down was an iphone video of people dancing to a song playing over a stereo - kudos to how accurate their detection is, but goddamn!
One thing I love about AMP, that seems to never be mentioned when people discuss it, is viewing AMP-HTML pages on my laptop.
I wrote a small chrome extension that always forwards my page to the equivalent AMP page (if one exists) and the experience of reading the news is so much better.
AMP pages off mobile are really really amazing. Compare Non-AMP[0] vs AMP[1]
Yeah but here it's functioning effectively as a better ad-blocker (one that doesn't screw up site layout). Looking at how AMP works, I can see why : you'd have to decide before you know who the user is what ads to show.
Wouldn't that effectively mean that in a search query followed by an AMP site visit only Google has the opportunity to show targeted ads ?
I imagine it's supposed to be similar to how Apple's iAd platform works for iOS apps. It's a bad shake for third-party ad networks, but it's great for user privacy, since third-party origin requests are no longer being made to anyone but the platform owner (who then anonymizes the impression metrics they give back to the ad creators, who just have to trust the platform-owner's stats.)
Sure, the AMP page looks much cleaner because it lacks the ads, side bars, and other junk that the Washington Post puts on their normal page. But they want that junk. If everyone on laptops and desktops starts using your trick, the Washington Post will adapt and find a way to put the same junk on the AMP page. Then we're back to square one.
As far as I can tell, your method of viewing a nice clean page depends on your trick not becoming popular!
Safari reader-mode can be activated on the normal page of the Washington Post when it is loaded half-way. Reader-mode discards the ads, side-bars and other junk anyway. IOW when activating Safari Reader-mode as soon as Safari allows, the AMP pages loose a lot of their benefits. Combined with ad-blocker and a proper image compression probably little benefits remains for the end-user.
Startpage.com delivers the same results google.com does. I've never hit AMP pages, so I assume they neither they redirect to AMP pages, similar to duckduckgo's !g.
Yea - I was inspired by seeing how well AMP worked on some sites and actually converted my entire blog to use AMP for every page. It's incredibly fast and I'm happy with it although I'm sure I could have achieved most of the results with some highly optimized CSS and HTML: http://dangoldin.com/
The only problem with that (and with amp in general) is the few sites that implement it poorly, namely by simply installing a WordPress plugin and calling it a day with zero effort to test the implementation. Some sites are completely broken.
On the normal implementation, clicking links on mobile from Google search, this is mostly not a problem because you're unlikely to land on some random guy's WordPress from a serp. But if you're triggering a lookup of AMP wherever it's available, you end up on a lot of broken sites clicking links from reddit and HN and stack overflow sources.
I've found a better compromise is an extension that doesn't load amp by default, but just puts a button in your toolbar that you can request an amp version with.
The only difference that I can see is that they didn't provide a pop up video on the amp version. I'd never use a site that forces me to load and click away a video on mobile anyway, not sure this has anything to do with AMP.
This just seems to make up for Google never implementing a reading mode for Chrome. I wonder if they plan to use AMP to provide one only for AMP sites.
In fact Chrome has a reading mode but only on mobile and only if page is detected to have large desktop layout, and only sometimes - you get a "mobile view" button on the bottom. Byt there is no way to have it enabled on your own from some menu
Firefox has 'reading mode' that does similar, strips out all the stuff such as sidebars, etc, without most of the downside associated with AMP (being open, to start with). Occasionally it misses some media stuff (e.g. embedded videos), but works well vast majority of the time so I'm happy with it.
It's about 100x harder to read the second link you posted because it fills the entire screen. Full-width text has been proven so many times to hamper readability...
Even with ads the original is an easier read on desktop....
I make my own amp pages by keeping JavaScript turned off on my phone. 95℅ of pages work and load instantly. Those that don't, I turn on JavaScript. If I go to those pages a lot I add them to my exception list. Sorry but I'm not an amp believer.
It just took me 8 clicks and a couple swipes to disable JS in my mobile browser, Chrome on Android. Another 8 clicks and couple swipes to enable JS. Is there a faster way to do that?
I use Brave mostly because it has a side panel which makes that two taps to reload the page with JavaScript enabled and remembers those settings per hostname. It really trims down page load times and metered data transfer.
There's not a faster way, that I'm aware of. That being said, I'm not exaggerating when I say the overwhelming majority of pages just work and the 5-10% that don't you can add them to the exception list (meaning they will run JavaScript) so you won't have to go through those 8 clicks every time.
give a try for a day or so. Once I did, I can't go back to keeping it on because the web seems so slow by comparison.
The more I read about complaints about AMP, the more it dawns on me that there are still a fair amount of people that do not understand that the web is basically Google's product.
Facebook and others have arrived to take significant time away from that product. Then combine that with things like Facebook Video and Instant Articles. Google is in a difficult position where Facebook may be able to start offering up a superior product for content as opposed to the web.
If you want to blame a big corp for AMP, you should probably take a closer look at Facebook as without it Google risks losing a large chunk of its market.
It's true. Google has AMP and Facebook has Instant Articles. They're both about keeping the content inside their walled gardens that they can both improve the performance of (especially on mobile) but I'm sure at some point use their own monetization solution.
Our early data is showing that advantages like Search engine ranking and reduction in bounce rate are making AMP a necessity in 2017. All the content gateways have their own proprietary format to keep users locked into the platform it's a smart move.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadIs it possible to set it as default on iOS/Android somehow? AMP really frustratingly breaks link sharing, and I'd like to totally avoid it.
Of course, this also works if you type this query in at duckduckgo.com
Edit to add: I guess it is a matter of time before amp pages also appear on the encrypted subdomain; another incentive to switch to DDG now.
Many years ago, Google Search existed only on http:// and schools used filters to block searches that they didn't like. Then Google shipped https:// for search on www.google.com, upset the schools because they could no longer block just some searches, then moved encrypted search to encrypted.google.com so that the entire domain could be blocked: https://cloud.googleblog.com/2010/06/an-update-on-encrypted-...
You used to have to use that domain to run searches over HTTPS. Google's enabled that for all users now, so it's kind of obsolete -- but apparently it still behaves a little bit differently?
[0]: http://security.stackexchange.com/a/32374
>1. Clicking on an ad:
> - https://google.com : Google will take you to an HTTP redirection page where they'd append your search query to the referrer information.
> - https://encrypted.google.com : If the advertiser uses HTTP, Google will not let the advertiser know about your query. If the advertiser uses HTTPS, they will receive the referrer information normally (including your search query).
>2. Clicking on a normal search result:
> - https://google.com : If the website uses HTTP, Google will take you to an HTTP redirection page and will not append your search query to the referrer information. They'll only tell the website that you're coming from Google. If it uses HTTPS, it will receive referrer information normally.
> - https://encrypted.google.com : If the website you click in the results uses HTTP, it will have no idea where you're coming from or what your search query is. If it uses HTTPS, it will receive referrer information normally.
[0] http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/32367/what-is-th...
If you're stuck on an AMP page in your mobile browser, you can click on the browser's "Request desktop site" option to load the full page.
If it was any good, it would be showing the desktop scaling/layout/whatever instead of the mobile when 'show desktop version' is on.
It's also not always about being on a responsive sites, a lot of places still do a m.website.com redirect when visiting the main site from a mobile device, but with no backwards redirect when visiting the mobile site (which is almost certainly non-responsive, otherwise there'd be essentially no need for the m.* site) as a desktop client - so you hit 'show desktop version', the m.* page refreshes and you just get the mobile site with funny scaling.
Request mobile site is really only applicable to the small amount of websites that serve a m.domain.com.
Now, they could have an option to "request desktop SIZE" that would result in sites that are responsively built rendering in "desktop size" mode.
So you have to load the AMP page and then a potentially bloated normal page. That's AMP doing the exact opposite of it's intended (or at least stated) purpose. Noscript, flashblock and adblock have done far more for page speeds than than AMP ever will.
PS: Not intending to be sarcastic. PS2: I work for google, but not on something amp related.
Which leads to the question, why is google doing this? They, you, could easily promote AMP pages while not masking the real URL! The answer is simple, profits over what's best for users.
Edit: I just did a search to find the CNN interview I mentioned, copied the URL to share here, and look it's a google URL. WHY? https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/trump-v...
I run a WordPress blog. From the documentations of Google and WordPress AMP plugins, I have always thought that the user will be directed to "originalurl/amp" on my domain when they click on the Google link on their phone. Now that I see it's a Google domain, this is really weird.
Perhaps to allow the content to be served from a CDN (over HTTPS), without requiring the site to CNAME over their domain to Google.
If webmasters are willing to CNAME over their domain to a caching proxy, then a less intrusive design is possible[0], such as the one recently announced by Cloudflare[1].
[0]: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-c... [1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/
Of course you wouldn't mind, since, as you've said elsewhere that you work at Google.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" — Upton Sinclair
edit: typo
Such really simple syndication technology could even have a catch TLA. I can't really think of one, but I'm sure there is something.
That said, i think people disable JS in general for this reason.
Why doesn't Google drop the URL masking while keeping all the real benefits of AMP? The answer, profits over people. I say this as a long time fan of Google, but this AMP stuff is where the "don't be evil" tagline turned into a joke for me.
AMP itself allows for fast loading which is true, but to support opening pages in "zero loading time" you still need pre-loading since fast loading still means non-zero loading time. To get pre-loading working in HTML you need to 1) load the iframe of the page in the background, then 2) when the link is clicked, use history.pushState() in order to manipulate the URL to appear you have moved to another page. Unfortunately for (2) the Web History APIs need* both URLs to be on the same domain so Google has an excuse that they need to change the target URL to be under Google for this to work.
Also Google wants to present the scrolling UI that allows you to browse to other articles in the search results (potentially from other domains). This can't be done if you have completely switched to the original website.
See this link for more discussion https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/6210
Personally I find this misguided at best, an excuse at worst. A fully compliant minimalistic AMP website (or even just a simple site that doesn't use AMP but follow best practices) will load incredibly quickly even without pre-loading. It's disrupting a lot of security and UX best practices (by replacing the address bar with "google.com" domain) just to achieve a very minor improvement. Furthermore they control Chrome. It's not too hard for them to push forward a web preloading standard and start implementing in Chrome.
Edit: Also for the scrolling UI it seems like another way for Google to push more engagement to their site rather than the target URL. It kind of runs counter to the open web nature IMO because there are innovations that helps previewing links already (e.g. iPhone 6s/7 3D touch) and it's the kind of behavior better implemented in the browser itself.
I hope this AMP experiment is soon over. As someone already said here, the web is confusing as it is. Google used to want to make things clearer, better. AMP is not. It's fixing symptoms instead of causes.
Money. Amp vs adblockers
Well, that explains why they wanted Chrome to hide URLs[1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7693995
Different teams inside a business can have coordinated long-term goals.
Regardless, their master plan[1] clearly shows "Redesign HTTP", "Browser", and "Next generation web (Fish Pod)" as precursors that lead to "Private Internet", "Walled Garden", "need more cache", and "NEWSBANK".
[1] http://undergoogle.com/tools/GoogleMasterPlan.html
Do you really want to go down the rabit hole of a browser displaying a different url than what you are viewing?
Your average user (who doesn't necessarily know anything about software) doesn't really care about 1, and probably doesn't care about 2. They care about speed of the page, data consumption of the page, and maybe the look-and-feel of the page (bloated vs sane).
When I say HN user, i mean technically informed and most often skeptic people.
The distinction matters.
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-i...
If I search for weather, lyrics, or other common sites, the top results are always slow, bloated, JS-filled nightmares. Yet the sites that are quick and small are never to be found.
Maybe they do and they need to weight speed higher. I don't know, but I know that I don't ever seem to get fast loading results.
This feels too much like creating a problem that you want to be able to step in and solve.
Check the link rel canonical tag. Obviously not ideal but nowhere near "impossible"
Apple: These article webpages are annoying - let's add a client side button to make it readable.
Google: These article webpages are annoying[0] - let's force[1] everyone to grant us a royalty-free license to their whole website.
[0] The real problem might be that Google results are "getting bad" - a thing people bring up all the time but which can only be measured individually.
So people tap the first 3 results and don't get the info they were looking for. On top of that it's slow af so people are wasting time. Now Google serves up faster pages so they'll tap through 4 or 5 results.
So why not fix the real problem instead?
[1] Yeah it's optional but only to a point. First the spammiest blogs implement it and they get a free pass to partially skip the line. Then some bigger sites implement it and even things out. People here are rightfully afraid that within 12 months you can't even hit page 2 without AMP.
If I didn't know this was for mobile browsers I would think it was a gift to blind users who do not use GUIs.
amphtml links also provide an easy way around paywalls, most of the time.
I have no idea what is the true purpose of these amphtml links. It sounds like it's some advertising nonsense.
As a text-only browser user I see no ads and experience no page load delays, but I do see how overstuffed web pages have become.
In this regard, amphtml is a breath of fresh air.
The bar has been set. Can you find a way to both resolve personal frustration and provide a better experience? Maybe a browser plugin?
It also results in lower quality news appearing at the top of searches in cases where they have implemented AMP and the better sources haven't.
(with all five visible comments, and since the full comments are almost certainly what I was searching for, I end up having to click through to the full page anyway every time)
This wouldn't be that big a deal if Google didn't emphasize the rank of AMP pages. There aren't a lot of alternatives out there to search, and Google dominates the market in much of the world.
...but they don't, which is the point.
I'll throw my hat in on being a fan of reading news on AMP pages as well (though reddit amp does seem completely broken). I wouldn't care in the least if news site x instead wrote a fast site, I'd happily use that instead. But until they do, yeah, as a user I'll click on the amp link first.
With AMP I can actually read articles from my local newspaper or TV station.
I guess in this case, I see it as a win for fast loading pages with just the article I'm looking for. Using AMP is my way of fighting back against autoplaying video ads and click bait links mixed in with news.
The majority of the articles, excluding those from large name corps, are simple loading pages. Using primarily the basic HTML and inline CSS. You do have the occasional blog page with some fancy touches, but the majority of the links that I click on while browsing HN has me questioning why, on sub par satellite internet, that HN and a majority of it's submitted posts work when Facebook, Google, Bing, etc.. does not.
I feel it can.
Everything just feels so bloated.
In many respects I like gardens, I like curated contents.
But I like the web more. The web needs diversity. We need more search engines for instance.
On a serious note. Escaping Google on the internet is impossible. Can't be done without inconvenience.
Edit: sorry that was actually in the article.
[0] http://i.imgur.com/qJKSvMC.png [1] http://i.imgur.com/zYDZrtr.png
Edit: I couldn't reproduce this with Chromium on Ubuntu 16.10. I might set up an Arch Linux box to see if that makes a difference.
Maybe you use some strange fonts?
Google is search, everything else is secondary. 20 people in a room testing this should have been all the red flags they needed to fix it before launch.
I really think AMP can benefit a lot from PR stand point by letting techies opt out from it, but leaving it on for "regular" users. See https://twitter.com/slightlylate/status/820344221450125312
The problem with that is that the UX is inconsistent between AMP results and web results. AMP results pretend they're this fake tab that can be "closed" and you return to Google, while web results take you away to the URL like you'd expect, which means navigation is the responsibility of the browser, and not of Google Search.
Frankly, this all would make more sense in the viewport-wrapping context of Google Chrome or Google News or the Google App rather than a behavior of Google Search, but that's not the limit of their ambition.
Or just, y'know, dress up the results page a bit more, and be honest about it. Brand the AMP subsection 'Read Instantly with AMP' and have it clearly and visibly wrap the results. This gains them a bunch of mindshare.
Or change the [x] to a 'back arrow', like their own splash page shows [1].
[1] http://imgur.com/a/vAtqq
The first time I encountered an AMP page I figured clicking the x would load the actual page. I was wrong.
Mind you, this just proves that the header is superfluous. Existing technology called 'the back button' exists to take the user back to where they came from, and it's up to Google to decide how their results page behaves when this happens.
Given that there are at least three similar specs, shouldn't there be a Light HTML5, or something that provides the same set of underlying guarantees?
That said, Google should give option to opt-out from CDN caching (if they don't already) as otherwise implementing AMP gives Google the right to host your content on their domain.
I couldn't imagine dealing with supporting two deployments.
http://phandroid.com/2014/12/31/google-lyrics-search/
In all fairness, lyric sites were terrible. Slow, riddled with ads, and sometimes incorrect. While Google's lyrics are a great service to the user, they're at the top of search and displayed inline. There's no reason to go to lyric sites anymore.
My biggest fear is Structured Data and AMP. With Structure Data, you volunteer your most valuable data in a format Google can easily consume and adapt to its own needs - all so you can get better page rankings. When Google introduces its own service in the same market - just like lyrics - you're effectively cut off from your audience. And with AMP, you don't have to wait for Google to siphon your traffic - you're volunteering.
In other words, Google seems like a very powerful gatekeeper of content that ends up consuming the content providers. Smacks of an abuse of their position.
Edit: on top of that, the video that got taken down was an iphone video of people dancing to a song playing over a stereo - kudos to how accurate their detection is, but goddamn!
I wrote a small chrome extension that always forwards my page to the equivalent AMP page (if one exists) and the experience of reading the news is so much better.
AMP pages off mobile are really really amazing. Compare Non-AMP[0] vs AMP[1]
[0] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Trump-on-the-minds-of-...
[1] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/amp/Trump-on-the-minds-of-MLK-...
Wouldn't that effectively mean that in a search query followed by an AMP site visit only Google has the opportunity to show targeted ads ?
edit: This is with an ad blocker on though.
Here's a much better example.
AMP - https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/post-nation/wp/2...
No-AMP - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/01/1...
As far as I can tell, your method of viewing a nice clean page depends on your trick not becoming popular!
Startpage.com delivers the same results google.com does. I've never hit AMP pages, so I assume they neither they redirect to AMP pages, similar to duckduckgo's !g.
On the normal implementation, clicking links on mobile from Google search, this is mostly not a problem because you're unlikely to land on some random guy's WordPress from a serp. But if you're triggering a lookup of AMP wherever it's available, you end up on a lot of broken sites clicking links from reddit and HN and stack overflow sources.
I've found a better compromise is an extension that doesn't load amp by default, but just puts a button in your toolbar that you can request an amp version with.
This probably would speed up loading times as it would only have to display/load certain content.
I love 'reading mode' on firefox and safari (mobile). Unsure what other browsers support it but they all should.
Even with ads the original is an easier read on desktop....
On FF mobile, with the "Toggle Javascript enabled" add-on it takes me 3 clicks to reload a page with JS disabled.
give a try for a day or so. Once I did, I can't go back to keeping it on because the web seems so slow by comparison.
I am curious if the cloudfare cached pages are going to get a logo, though.
Facebook and others have arrived to take significant time away from that product. Then combine that with things like Facebook Video and Instant Articles. Google is in a difficult position where Facebook may be able to start offering up a superior product for content as opposed to the web.
If you want to blame a big corp for AMP, you should probably take a closer look at Facebook as without it Google risks losing a large chunk of its market.
That's AMP.
You can read more advantages at http://alphapages.io