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Comment by Meai | Hacker News Reader

AMP has a pretty bad user experience that is unrelated to performance: It's super confusing for me when I am on a news site and the url bar shows a long unfamiliar string. It actually makes me feel like I need to check if I'm on a fishing site or I was misdirected or I misclicked.

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It's also annoying to have the amp menu bar taking up space at the top. Screen real estate is scarce and another menu bar at the top is just confusing.

In Mobile Safari, it's even worse as the bottom navigation bar is present when the page loads and then stays present.

Since AMP uses an overflow technique to handle content/scrolling, the page never triggers a scroll event on the body. So not only do you see a toolbar at the top (which admittedly, slides out when you scroll down), you see the browser toolbar at the bottom (which persists!)

Yes. I feel exactly the same way. Moreover, it also creates an extra step if I want to share the link with a friend quickly. I'd rather have them see

bloomberg.com/<interesting-story> vs.

google.com/amps/<etc>

Chiming in to say I 100% agree. People use the URL as a 'gut check' to ensure they are not on some scam/spam site, and AMP screws that up.

I'd be very interested to see numbers on the success rates of lookalike phishing sites once people get used to AMP and stop checking URLs to see if they're in a valid location. I wonder if you could somehow track this with google trends over the next year or so?

I honestly have no idea how to get from an AMP page to the regular version of the page, and it's endlessly frustrating. I dislike AMP but understand and somewhat appreciate what it does (despite disagreeing with its core premise), but the fact that there's no way that I can discern to go from, for example, the AMP version of a reddit thread link to the real, actual page, makes the whole thing extremely frustrating.

They have a link icon in the header. Click it then click the url that appears.

I don't usually see any header.

Example: https://techcrunch-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/techcrunch.com...

Hmm, I don't want to dive too deep into AMP, but I do get a header on that page in Chrome Android.

edit: wait, no I don't. I get a header when I visit the page via google search, not when I follow the link directly. I haven't noticed this before because google is the only way I usually end up at AMP pages.

Google link: https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2018/08/08/samsu...

My first encounter win AMP was copying and pasting and link into a text message and it had a google domain. I was confused as all hell. Took me a minute to get the actual link.

It's also really frustrating to not have the browser's Find in Page feature work.

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