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Comment by saycheese | Hacker News Reader

There is zero reason for AMP to be hijacking URLs or embedding any additional elements into a page that are detectable by the average user.

Beyond that, universal opt-out should be possible and stats on the percentage of users opting out should be published real-time.

As such, until this is addressed, I am against AMP.

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Sounds like Cloudflare is working on it [1].

"In the spirit of open source, we're working to help develop updates to the project to address some of publishers' and end users' concerns. Specifically, here are some features we're developing to address concerns that have been expressed about AMP: ... A way for end users who would prefer not to be redirected to the AMP version of content to opt out"

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/

Indeed. We have pagespeed, use it as a higher signal.

But no, Google wants to own your content and users. Only very naive person believes they do it in order to fast up the web. If they started punishing harshly slow websites with 10mb of js, believe me ,it would change over night.

UX is still horrendous.

Same here. In addition, the reasoning in the article doesn't sound sincere. If Google really cared about site speed, they would already promote fast pages more in their search results. They said they would, but it seems the boost is almost negligible.

I am worried by the attempts of several huge companies (Google & Facebook, mostly) to get more of the open internet under their control.

Would you rather see a fast site with rubbish content, or a slow site with good content?

My guess is that some altruistic folks at Google see AMP as a way of offering the best of both worlds.

But most of us know that in big business, every good idea gets abused for short term profits.

Why is there any relation to the quality of the content?

The OP said Google aren't doing enough to promote fast sites. My point was that quality is more important than speed.

Quality is orthogonal.

Google can't offer the full amp experience where pages load instantly without controlling the domain. Otheriwse, none of the optimization they outline in the blog post would be possible since it is the proxy that performs them.

That's kind of the point though. Instead of controlling other sites, they should be promoting sites that do the right thing.

That's not entirely true. mod_pagespeed (https://modpagespeed.com/), a plugin from Google for Apache and Nginx, does a whole bunch of the stuff google is offering through AMP, and it's theoretically capable of doing almost everything there. It optimises content on the fly, and stores cached versions of them on the drive for later hosting, etc. etc.

I think possibly the only thing that it can't offer that way is hosting the content through the Google CDN.

On ios safari, holding down the refresh button in the url bar gives you the option to request the desktop site.

As kludgy as that is, I've found it a worthwhile workaround until this is fixed.

It also sucks if you want to interact with the page, since, inanely, you can't click through to the real page.

What can you do on the real page that you can't do on the AMP version?

comments, etc

Navigate the site, share the underlying page, etc.

Content providers have the option of offering a link that goes to their main content. However, it's not standardized how that's set up (in WaPo, for example, it's under the top-left menu as "Progressive Web App (BETA)" ).

The silliest part is that clicking the x in the AMP bar doesn't redirect you to the real page... it just takes you back to your search results.

Looking at this from the users perspective, the URL is becoming less noticeable anyway. On mobile you don't have the screen real estate for it. And I don't see the average user complaining about the sub-second loading times. If anything, this is a step in the right direction.

Hey, just like they did with G+...and look how that went. Something something making the same mistakes over and over again.

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