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Comment by ejcx | Hacker News Reader

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]

[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-...

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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.)

That's not true. There is space in amp for a variety of iframe'd ad providers.

AMP supports many dozens of ad providers. 2 of them are owned by Google.

Why is that better? I guess it's nice that the video doesn't auto-play, but otherwise the only difference I see is margins that are way too wide.

edit: This is with an ad blocker on though.

SFGate is a bad example because they don't set margins. Most other sites are a lot better.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Makes me sad that they pushed AMP vs creating a standard format for how 'reading mode' content is selected.

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.

Reading mode strips out the ads, so I can see why Google is not too excited about it :)

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/

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....

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

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.

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