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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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 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.

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

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!

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?

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-...

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