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You don't seem to understand the technology or the argument you made. The URL bar says google.com because google.com is serving the content you are reading. In other words, it exactly honors the "fundamental contract" you find so important.

I also dispute your qualitative opinion that nbcnews.com works "just fine". If I load their top story currently from AMP it loads in about half a second. If I visit it from nbcnews.com it renders in about seven seconds and doesn't finish loading for about 90 seconds, and then when it does I get a big popover survey/ad thing with a dismiss button that's too small to touch. The mobile experience on this site is far from fine.

And what happens if you load the AMP version from their server, which IMHO is the fairer comparison when discussing complaints about the Google cache of it? AMP as a "document standard" on top of HTML would IMHO already solve a lot.

It's not really a fairer comparison, because their non-AMP view is what they currently think is appropriate to serve.

It's not.

The web has bloated out of control - and while I'm not a fan-boy, I at least think AMP encourages the right things and is a progressive step forward in the right direction.

I _like_ viewing AMP pages from an end-user perspective. And I don't think they're terribly onerous from a publisher/dev perspective.

Google could easily "motivate" them to provide AMP pages (as they have successfully done) without adding their own caching layer, which the complaints above mostly seemed to be about.

This post explains very well the #1 benefit of AMP caches (yes, there can be more than Google's, and Cloudflare has just released their own cache): pre-rendering:

https://medium.com/@pbakaus/why-amp-caches-exist-cd7938da245...

If browsers detected AMP pages and treated the address bar accordingly:

Cached from: nbcnews.com/some-article

Would you feel better about it?

Under no circumstances should web browsers be hard-coding special favors to paper over deficiencies in the user experience of Google's news product.

The entire idea is insane. Google is just another company on the internet, and should be treated like any other.

SVG was Adobe's open implementation of the ideas of behind Macromedia Flash. It solved a real pain (the lack of vector support on the Web) and has been implemented by all the browsers. Does this upset you? Most of the progress of the web platform is sponsored by companies like Adobe and Google.

AMP is a curated subset of web functionality designed to load quickly and be safely cacheable. Like SVG, it's an open attempt to solve deficiencies in the platform. It's been sponsored by Google and adopted by a lot of their properties, but it's unfair to call it "Google's news product."

SVGs are displayed whether or not they're hosted on Adobe's servers.

What other servers are serving AMP pages, (edit: and would benefit from this "cached from <other site>" URL bar display logic) other than Google's news product?

All the publishers Google copies the AMP from? Google could just redirect mobile users to that if they wanted, as can every other site linking to a page. If they then also got rid of the requirement of loading the AMP JS from a CDN Google runs, they'd actually have something resembling an open standard...

> All the publishers Google copies the AMP from?

But all of those URLs display correctly.

We're talking about having browsers add special-case logic in which some URLs on one particular special domain (news.google.com) belonging to one private company (Google) are treated and displayed differently than everything else on the internet.

> If they then also got rid of the requirement of loading the AMP JS from a CDN Google runs, they'd actually have something resembling an open standard

Sure, if this turned into an actual Open standard, and we were talking about extending browser display logic to any server on the internet that served an AMP page belonging to some other site, that would make sense.

But having browsers bless one company's subdomain with special rules that apply only to it is about as anti-open web as you can get.

> But having browsers bless one company's subdomain with special rules that apply only to it is about as anti-open web as you can get.

I totally agree with you on that. They could easily get rid of their cache domain for serving AMP, or people could build browser extensions and other projects avoiding it while still using AMP, but only because all the publishers behind it already serve AMP if you ask for it. Which is why I made the point that it is not just Google serving it, which I clearly should have explained better.

I would love that.. beyond that, a link that says "go to <website.com>" for that article, or some such, that would help too.

I have mixed feelings about it myself, as it isn't always obvious you're seeing content from website.com not google.

That link is often provided by the content providers (check bottom of page or under a dropdown menu).

It's annoying that its location isn't standardized.

That would be far worse.

I just browsed to the first NBC news article I could find and at the bottom of the article was a big button saying "View full experience" which took me to the normal NBC website. I'm not sure I see the big deal?

> Digg (remember them?) with the "Digg bar" which added a toolbar linking back to Digg for all of the internet, and well, what happened to them?

At the risk of getting off topic, the reincarnated Digg is actually pretty good.

Why do you need to get to the same article on www.nbcnews.com ?

So I can share a real link. Remove google's huge amp toolbar. Scroll normally. Have a correctly rendered page. Because I want content from the source, not google.

That seems an arbitrary desire based on an older-model of web surfing that still gets around a site by physically selecting and deleting pieces of the URL.

Lots of users don't operate that way. Caring about the URL is increasingly going in the direction of caring about the IP address.

I can share the link by tapping the "Share" option on the dropdown menu in my phone's browser. Works great.