Apparently this is a minority view around here. :)
- Images not having defined heights, leading to content jumping up as I'm reading
- Ads loading and unloading, leading to the page jittering up and down erratically, making the content unreadable
- Auto-playing videos: some start playing audio, some have the audio muted but still pause any music I have playing
- Those ads that scroll up across the page (which wouldn't be a problem, but they scroll at a third of the speed that I drag them up at)
- The "Read Full Story" buttons that animate the content downwards, freezing everything for a few seconds while the dumb animation plays
- Web fonts taking an eternity to load, leaving me with no content for ten, fifteen, or more seconds
- Web fonts loading unexpectedly and causing all the text to reflow, destroying my scroll position
There are so many more things.
But here's the thing: there are no ad-blockers for Chrome on Android. I can't turn this crap off. And overwhelmingly, I can't just pay someone money to make it stop. I would gladly hand over fifty bucks or more every month to read news in peace, but there's no centralized way to do that.
AMP, at the very least, gets rid of these problems for me. Top bar and URL issues aside, clicking an AMP link is infinitely less frustrating than clicking a non-AMP link.
AMP gives a great user experience on mobile, at least speed-wise. I haven't had any real complaints as a user. (Disclaimer: I work for a non-Google Alphabet company.)
I.e. you work for Google, but not in advertising. The attempted rebranding has been awfully heavy-handed lately.
Aside from Google, Alphabet owns Calico, DeepMind, GV (formerly Google Ventures), CapitalG (formerly Google Capital), X, Google Fiber, Nest Labs, Jigsaw, Sidewalk Labs, Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences - my company) and Waymo. These things are all "Not Google".
Google is everything that's owned/done by Google Inc. This includes Search, Ads, Chrome, Android, Google+, Google Cloud Platform, GSuite (GMail/Docs/Sheets/Slides/etc), and tons of other stuff.
I use AdGuard [1] (which is a system-wide ad-blocker for Android that doesn't require root privileges) along with Brave [2] set as a custom tab provider in Chromer [3] to get rid of pretty much all ads in both apps and websites (regardless of browser).
[1] https://adguard.com/en/adguard-android/overview.html
[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.brow...
[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=arun.com.chrom...
My desktop is the opposite, but that's because my desktop has Chrome extensions.
1. Scrolling momentum is very different, making it feel non-native
2. The URL bar doesn't hide normally. Scroll down in portrait mode and it doesn't hide.
3. The URL bar doesn't un-hide normally. Switch to landscape mode and scroll up, the URL bar does not reveal itself.
4. Safari Reader mode often doesn't work.
5. Scrolling before the page is done loading can make it look like there's less content then there actually is.
6. Some dynamic sites misbehave (e.g. reddit does not show me as logged in).
7. Copying the URL results in some Google thing instead of the real URL
8. Relationship between AMP X close button and Back button is confusing
I am curious which of these you experience, which you don't notice, and which you don't experience at all if you are an Android user?
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.
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.
Is it different from other web pages, or from scrolling a native app? At the end of the day, an AMP site is HTML.
But it's also sad that something not-quite-open is taking over an important part of the web. AMP is this Google-wrapped version of a part of the web that tries to keep you in Google's land rather than allowing you to browse the site you visited.
As a user, I like clicking on AMP links. But in a certain way, it's like eating candy. I know it's not good for the web and openness over the long term. But in the short term, it's just so nice.
A valid critique is that publishers might feel forced to offer AMP whether they want to or not in order to still get traffic and pagerank, but even then, it's not like they're being tricked. It's still opt in.
* How difficult it will be if I want to share the link with someone (because I don't want to share an AMP link).
* How difficult it is if I want to go exploring around the site that has the thing I am reading.
It seems counter-intuitive to slow a page to get a lightning bolt.