Maybe they’ve fixed the bizarre scrolling and overly sensitive links by now, but I see no reason to find out, because I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.
Only if that doesn't work pleasantly, then you get to complain about the browser not doing its job properly. (this remark aimed at some other replies in this subthread)
It's probably not hard at all, it's just that Google's priorities are currently at "fuck you" especially if you try to avoid being tracked.
These days, I actively avoid AMP links on Android. It's such a hideously buggy, functionality-disabling system on my phone that it's not worth loading those pages at any speed.
If I want to load a single page with dense content, view it without scrolling much, and close the tab, AMP makes my mobile experience better. If I want to do anything else, AMP on Android starts to interfere with basic functionality.
Which is a pretty sad story for a Google CDN on a Google browser on a Google OS.
As for other work on scrolling:
Person contracted to fix some webkit issues: http://frederic-wang.fr/amp-and-igalia-working-together-to-i...
HN discussion made some news about scrolling changes made due to AMP's bug reports: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/05/22/scrolling-changes-comin...
Plain HTML+CSS is hard to do?
Google has gone to an exceptional effort to make things not work like they do by default. That it's even more effort to now get basic UX back shows just how misguided the entire team is.
Quick quiz: do you release a feature that is broken for 145M users, which brokenness they might plausibly encounter multiple times a day?
In a typical organization, the answer would probably be an unambiguous “no”.
Without passing judgment, I find the fact that Google decided to ship anyway to be a useful indicator of their beliefs, culture, and priorities.
It's the same for IE and web applications that didn't work in that browser. Luckily, people (for the most part) stopped using IE. We can only hope that iOS Safari will share that fate.
That said, it’s fair to ask why Apple hasn’t placed priority on the scrolling bug, post-AMP. What the real dynamics are I can only guess; I’d love to hear from lurking AMP or WebKit engineers.
All three of these are Google not taking into account mobile browser design. None of these can really be classified as issues in Safari, rather they are consequences of the Safari design and the design choices Google made.
The first two are due to the content being embedded within an iframe.
The scrolling issue was partly because Safari implemented custom scroll behavior (supposedly due to a Steve Jobs request) for its main web view, but scrollable iframes did not override the scrolling behavior. The fix here (I believe it was rolled out in iOS 11) was to change system-wide behavior for Safari to use the system default scrolling behavior, so that everything behaved the same.
The title bar issue is due to the content not being a scroll view, but a view the size of the screen containing one or more scroll views (the iframes). Which of these should be scrolled to the top on a tap? Changing this behavior could change it for deployed sites, so rolling out any sort of new heuristic requires testing and probably wouldn't be done outside a new major version (e.g. iOS 12).
The third issue is across all browsers - Google is the one serving the content, not the third party that wrote the content. Because of this, any attempt to change where the browser 'thinks' a page is being served to another domain runs afoul of pretty fundamental web security principles. You might be able to design some sort of call (similar to CORS) to ask if google is representing your content in order to get permission to forge the address, but that would be a new web standard that hasn't been written yet.
Definitely useful, though, why isn't that a feature in HTML5?
A WebKit engineer explained the scrolling bug and how they fixed it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14386292
> That said, it’s fair to ask why Apple hasn’t placed priority on the scrolling bug, post-AMP
Because Apple is incapable of fixing a browser bug without an OS update. You should be asking why Apple won't let you use a non-buggy browser on your phone to begin with.
So feel free to call it names and bring up feelings, but what I care about is the actual objective experience I'm getting.
> I see no reason to find out, because I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.
The person was basically saying "I don't feel like checking how good AMP is, I'm just going to blindly dismiss it"