Some publishers are fighting AMP with “View Full Experience” link | Hacker News Reader

Some publishers are fighting AMP with “View Full Experience” link

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129 pointsakras1481 comments

Usually I hate every additional button. But anything that fights AMP is good. AMP is one of the biggest threats to the open internet at the moment.

Any numbers on how much traffic a news publisher loses out if they flat out refuse the AMP blackmail and don't offer an AMP version?

We the tech crowd should help publishers to come up with creative ideas to subvert AMP.

I wonder if it would work to only show 50% of the article and then have a link "Read the full article on our website".

If a publisher had a great mobile experience, they could get even more aggressive about it. Like have a big disclaimer on top of the page "We have a great mobile website. Unfortunately Google blackmailed us to give them our content. You are currently reading a Google version of our site that we had to make because Google is hiding the open web in their search results. If you want to read the original, click here. If you want to try a search engine that searches the open web, try one of these: ..."

It's time for the European Commission to step in on AMP.

You can complain about Google's anti-competitive behaviour anonymously on http://ec.europa.eu/competition/cartels/whistleblower/index.... (though this instrument is rather for mailing insider info, so I guess submissions should be for individual cases where AMP results are hiding other content).

The link to the whistleblower tool served over HTTP, what a great idea.

The actual form / complaint are served over https, as you can see in the link.

but someone can replace the link to the form

The most frustrating thing for me about AMP is that it sidesteps the single most useful feature of Safari on iOS, the "Reader" button, by rendering the entire page in JS. I suspect this is entirely purposeful on Google's part as it cuts into ad views. It's really gotten out of hand, too. Try doing a google search for practically any news article on mobile now. The entire first few result pages are nothing but AMP.

AMP is a standard. If anything it should be easier to convert into a reader view than just arbitrary HTML. It'd be easy to add support into Safari, they just haven't bothered.

> AMP is a standard.

That's news to me. Can you link to a standards body recognizing AMP as a standard? Or did you simply mean "standard" as in an advertising company dumping some self-serving specs on some website?

Guess specification might be a less controversial term. Just saying that it's strictly defined, and easier to implement alternate native renderers for (eg Safari's reader) than raw HTML.

So is RSS and that's an actual standard.

But how many non-HTML formats should a browser really need to support?

And why should we accept that big companies can shove non-standards down our throats on public internet?

I don't think we should just accept it but the reason is because Google effectively controls the web. If Google implementes a feature then either everyone else follows suit or loses another user to Chrome. No other company has that kind of leverage.

AMP is a standard with a single implementation, controlled by the same company.

That's as useful as a standard as Microsoft Office's formats.

If you want to use an independent AMP implementation, Google refuses to give you any of the AMP ranking benefits.

It's a little bit more useful than Microsoft Office's formats since it's actually well documented, and isn't prone to arbitrarily changing without notice. Since it's developed out in the open, there will plenty of notice before any breaking changes.

The alternative implementation issue is a fair point, but doesn't seem like that's an issue for most people. I haven't seen any technical criticisms of the amp library.

I don't like Microsoft nor OOXML much but at least it has been officially standardised by a recognised independent standards body[1] (or at least decent chunks of the specification has - there are still some closed proprietary elements to it). This is more than can be said for AMP.

[1] https://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ec...

A standard isn't some random spec text you publish on the web. To become a standard, a spec has to be adopted by multiple major parties.

Quite a few notable sites have implemented AMP support as well as there being alternative AMP caches (eg Cloudflare). I'd say that it falls under being "adopted by multiple major parties."

That's a de facto standard. In IT things generally have to be submitted and approved by an independent standards body for it to be classed as a standard.

I get your point, but the question is which organization qualifies as "independent standard body"?

W3C? They've certainly acted in good faith IMHO, and being TBL's child and formally endorsed by The Internet Society, which is itself endorsed by IETF, have been the go-to organization for web standards of the past, but are nevertheless a pay-your-way organization struggling financially ever since the XHTML fiasco. And it shows in their published standards of WHATWG's HTML5 specs, edited by a Microsoft employee to reflect the degree to which Microsoft browsers support HTML.

WHATWG? They've certainly brought forward HTML5, but have been financially dependent on Google from the get-go. Not wanting to diminish their achievements, but HTML and CSS have become "whatever Chrome does" for some time now. Web "standards" have become such monstrosities of complexity as to be pointless as a standard, with WHATWG pushing WASM to become even more complex. And a more declarative web isn't in Google's interest, because this would undermine their competitive advantage of being able to crawl JS-only content, and the defacto ubiquity of ga tracking. Rather, after usurping and driving HTML to the ground, Google is putting their weight behind AMP.

Last I checked cloudflare was also involved in AMP

https://www.cloudflare.com/website-optimization/accelerated-...

It is very frustrating and considering I'm using 4G most of the time I wonder why it's necessary for me at all. Google News was usable -- I just downloaded dolphin browser on iOS and am using it in desktop mode which seems to stop this. Not an ideal work around though!

On iOS Safari set your search engine to DuckDuckGo, use "!g" to search Google, and you won't see any AMP links.

I tried once but adding g! every time I want to search Google is quite cumbersome so I switched back to Google.

Also, the search results in DDG were quite disappointing. I wish they were not but I just couldn't continue using it after few days :(

I will definitely give it another shot.

The reason that works is because !g defaults to encrypted.google.com, which doesn’t support AMP yet. I think you can set that as your homepage to make AMP-free search more accessible. As it is, Safari doesn’t seem to support custom search engines.

I've had the opposite experience (mostly). I switched one day, got frustrated whenever I got bad results, started using !g for those, realized that Google returned equally bad results and now I only search Google for programming questions, which DuckDuckGo can't answer as well.

I've been a happy user for more than a year, and I don't get any of the AMP crap (which apparently isn't even shown on mobile Firefox anyway).

> I tried once but adding g! every time I want to search Google

But you don't want to search Google. That's why you switched to another search engine, right?

For me DDG works out nicely without any need for !g 19 times out of 20, at least.

I have iOS set to replace gg with !g, which makes it a bit more manageable

If it's overall text replacement then how do you manage something like an aggravation?

PS. I have changed default search engine in OSX/iOS Safari to DDG. Uninstalled Google app and installed DDG app. Let's see.

I wish that iOS safari let you specify your own custom search engine. I really want to write one that wraps ddg and filters out some results / adds a few more custom !'s but haven't found out a way to do it, seems that the search providers are hard coded in settings with no ability to add new ones / API to implement.

The reader button works on 100% of amp links I've tested. If anything, the amp links help get me to reader mode faster by loading an optimized version of the page to begin with.

Searching "equifax data breach" in iOS 10.3.3 Safari:

- Cnet: no

- Washington Post: yes

- Chicago Tribune: no x2

- Gizmodo: yes

- The Verge: yes

- Wired: yes

- LA Times: yes

- CNBC: no

- Time Money: no (broken)

Wouldn't call that working exactly.

Who is searching news via Google? News are better read by going to news sites of your choice directly. Or via RSS, which is slowly recovering from Google's embrace + extinguish.

HN'ers who hit paywalled links, for one (the "web" link doesn't work quite as well as it used to). It seems to happen to me at least once per day.

Thank God for the Internet Archive.

I think the entire reason AMP came about is because news sites were (and pretty much still are) terrible. They load slow, they peg your CPU, consume your battery, and they send megabytes of data when all you want is the 2 kilobytes of text.

What's worse for publishers? Readers seeing the AMP version of a story or readers browsing their site with an ad blocker?

> The entire first few result pages are nothing but AMP.

Except for mobile Firefox, which Google appears to 'punish' by eliding AMP links. Happy days!

Is that why I've never seen am AMP link? I've been seeing the articles and thinking "what are these people talking about, AMP links are extremely rare, I've never seen one".

Good job, Google.

So that's why I haven't understood what all this rage is about.

I'll keep sticking to Firefox and get the real web, then.

Also, you can use encrypted.google.com which won't serve you any AMP pages.

If you use DuckDuckGo with the !g bang it will use it automatically.

The most frustrating thing for me is it completely breaks find in page on mobile safari.

Slightly off-topic, but feel like someone here has the answer so asking anyways.

People keep mentioning that AMP is a "open effort" and "open source" but I've only seen the HTML framework's code, not the caching servers. Supposedly, you are able to run your own AMP Cache server, but there are no examples out in the wild.

I even took to Twitter and asked Paul Bakaus ("Open" Web Developer Advocate at Google) who wrote a blogpost about why AMP Cache is good, but no answer.

Is the AMP really a open project or is that just the HTML Framework and the goal is to lock people into Google's AMP Cache?

> Is the AMP really a open project or is that just the HTML Framework and the goal is to lock people into Google's AMP Cache?

It's Google. Whenever you ask that question and fail to find proof about openness, it should be fairly safe to assume that it's a lock-in.

The idea/technology is open, so if Twitter or Facebook wanted they could run their own AMP service, so when you click a link on their site it loads the AMP version of the BBC served from their servers. That's still not really open, but this is kind of the purpose of AMP.

> The idea/technology is open

I keep seeing that phrase but then

> so if Twitter or Facebook wanted they could run their own AMP service

seems "idea/technology is open" only applies if you're Twitter or Facebook. How about if I'm just me? I can't run my own AMP cache seemingly...

There is nothing preventing you from doing so.

But there is no reason for you to do so. For Twitter and Facebook it is more interesting since they can serve the cache to their users.

Right, it is documented how to do it, but rarely needed. Cloudflare offers a whitelabeled cache as well.

https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-c...

Yes that's what my last sentence was intended to imply. Open isn't really the right word here.

Google's cache implementation is documented (https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-c... and a few more files in that dir) but not itself open source.

Cloudflare also offers an AMP cache if you'd rather not use Google's.

It's "open" as in "not guarded by patents, you're free to roll your own".

It's "proprietary" as in "it does not make sense to run your own unless you are already a giant, and Google won't let you examine their caching servers".

So to speed up the web Google now makes me load a hobbled AMP page then I have to search for a link to actually get to the site I actually wanted to go to. How is this better? It's gotten to the point that I search for something and just give up since it's a sea of worthless AMP links.

To be fair, this is only a problem if you use Google search.

Nobody is forcing that on you but yourself.

That is true, and I've been considering switching.

I'd recommend ddg!

It's gotten pretty good lately, and you can fall back to google really easy.

Want to know how to entirely avoid amp...

Use Firefox on your phone.

;-)

So much this. I've been using FF mobile for years now, and if AMP hadn't negative coverage on HN regularly, I would've no idea what's the deal with this AMP thing, much less AMP links flooding search results.

It also lets you add an ad-blocker, so that's another reason to use Firefox on mobile :).

Not only that, it lets you use the sake ad blocker as the desktop browser. uBlock origin, privacy badger, etc.

Or, if you'd prefer to keep your browser of choice, just use a different search engine.

Doesn't work on iPhone unfortunately

HI I see that you have constant opposition to AMP because it renders badly on iphone. Do you know how expensive is DATA here in 3rd world? Native websites, force people to load trackers + install stupid apps (no space in a 4GB android phone). Please once try to get a cheap android phone and you will realize how good AMP is for us to read news. Example visit: ndtv.com indiatimes.com

Seriously, please I am not for support Google. Please do not tell me to buy used iphone to get privacy which also costs $200 (2 months salary). You need a mac to create a "apple-email" account (which costs 4months salary).

I am not a troll supporting Google. I have in my cheap Moto E (pure LineageOS - NO Google Play) works for 2 days without charge. I too hope Google will open up more, but privacy for rich is not fine. We, the poor, need technology even if it means Google puts AMP.

Why are you happy that apple puts walled garden? You have a choice to use a different OS or phone or browser? In linux, even uploading to iPhotos is NOT possible? icloud/ical/Mail all work terrible - try it once.

I am sorry.

Thank you very much. I saved your comment and going to refer to it from time to time.

I always said that AMP is solving a real problem. I just not entirely happy with how they went about solving it.

My main criticism of AMP is that I see it as a missed opportunity to make the web(all of it) better.

If for example instead of creating AMP Google used a well know , open source tool like Lighthouse to benchmark websites and only let sites with certain score into their carousel, I bet that most of news web site would get rid of all but most necessary JavaScript really fast.

Instead they introduced a new format, so now publishers have to maintain 2 versions of the site. It also locks users into Google "platform", not an evil thing per say, but definitely a self serving aspect, for which they get criticized.

It's a complex issue. To give credit where it's due, the fact that AMP and team were able to help people like you speaks volumes in their favor. I just wished that we could work towards fixing the original web, instead of trying to invent a new one.

I experimented and it looks like they do show full article, they just show the button at the end.

Perhaps the article in the post was a developing story. Still interesting, but not as much "fighting" going on as it seemed on first sight.

No one is "fighting" AMP here, this is just trying to get the best of both worlds - high result placement and a cached first impression that drives traffic to the actual site.

I wonder what the reaction of the AMP team is. "But... but you can't do that!"

https://www.ampproject.org/learn/overview/ if you're ignorant of this like me.

This is a decent technical overview, but it completely sidesteps the sole reason why publishers actually use AMP, and the reason many people dislike it so much, which is that AMP results get put in the special carousel at the top of Google results.

If by full experience do they mean locking my browser up with JavaScript?

A lot of these sites really deserve AMP, the normal viewing experience is awful.

Some do, but it should nonetheless be easy for the reader to go back to the non-AMP version of they wish.

If there is one thing that is reliant on JS it is AMP.

>If there is one thing that is reliant on JS it is AMP.

...? AMP literally remove JS scripts from the served page..

By replacing them with AMP-specific scripts that are required for the page to show.

Yes, but its lightweight enough to not have my browser stutter while scrolling, and continue scrolling for several seconds after I stop.

I cannot say the same for most news websites.

The problem that AMP is solving is very real. The issue is that AMP is solving it in the worst way possible. Instead of using this as a ploy to force traffic to stay within Google's ecosystem, Google should encourage sites to just slim down their excessive pages.

It's real for some, but not an issue for others.

Google's ill-intent is evident from their continued lack of interest in providing a user-controllable setting to turn it on or off, despite strenuous multiple complaints going back to almost the inception of the technology.

That is publisher problem, as reader I don't care if traffic has to stay within Google's ecosystem.

You should. Google already has too much control, and they are already abusing it. Additionally, they are the ones encouraging sites to become what they are today.

I've searched a few times for a firefox plugin that would simply remove the 'amp=1' from twitter links, thinking it should be trivial enough to guarantee its existence, but no luck.

Anyone know if I missed it somewhere?

Maybe a GreaseMonkey userscript would do? Tho because all twitter links are t.co ones,it may be a bit tricky.

I understand why people don't like amp but most publishers experience is so bad that amp is better.

This has been how most Apple News stories have worked for a while.

I wonder if it's the same page generation for Apple News as AMP?

Amusingly, the loading time for the "full experience" is long enough that it's cut off in the video. I think that says everything needed about the "full experience" on the web in 2017.

Surely, if publishers wanted to fight AMP, they wouldn't implement AMP - or am I missing something here?

Google promotes AMP sites on search results. They have no choice.

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