A new AMP update shows how it can infiltrate every corner of the internet
onezero.medium.com
onezero.medium.com
Also, I hate it when a mobile site keeps reminding me to install the app. This is extremely mobile-unfriendly. Google ought to punish those sites.
This is an extraordinarily location-specific sentiment. In the country I'm in right now, less than 25% of the population have desktop PCs. Everyone has a smartphone, if not two. Most of the world is like this, especially the developing countries with the most future growth potential.
A good test is: do you need to zoom in and then pan horizontally to be able to read the content?
On Android/Chrome, the experience is not bad. When you load the desktop site, it looks very small but you see the whole thing. Then you can zoom in and pan using your fingers... Not so different from how you use Google maps. It's just a tiny bit slower than on desktop; but everything on mobile is slower than on desktop anyway including typing.
If you're already loosely familiar with the site's UI, it's not difficult to use. Even if you have big finger, you can just zoom in first and then click. It's a quick two-step gesture which is easy to master.
Content monitizers are heavily incentivized to switch users from web to app.
So is this user-orginated or owner-pressured?
There's your problem
Lol. I don't remember the last time I came across an AMP page that wasn't missing content.
There's exceptions like restaurant menus at specific places that I'm considering, but certainly there's no mainstream news article that's worth me staining my eyes over: if it loads a desktop site on my mobile phone I'll definitely just hit back and move on regardless of the content.
I constantly find myself closing pages on mobile within the first second if they're taking too long to render or if they become fucked up from all the ads and comments and social media button, each one dislocating other elements and moving them around as it renders, or just because they were poorly designed for mobile.
There's a huge chunk of content I never bother to see because it's too much of a pain in the ass to actually read on my phone. If I have to adjust the zoom or scroll to a different part of the page to see any text, you've probably already lost me, unless it's content I went out of my way to seek out.
I might finally be able to remove the Messenger app from my phone as well.
If 99% of people don't agree with this, then why are we wasting time with AMP? AMP's primary sales-pitch to end-users when it first came out was that pages would be faster and content would be more uniform, because site operators wouldn't be allowed to add custom styles and flashy controls or widgets.
I hope developers wake up to this reality. Since that is not going to happen, i hope they abuse amp as bad as they abused html , rendering it useless
Getting the "nice experience", however, gives me amp links. And when I click on them, I'm unable to scroll?! It doesn't matter if it loads fast, when I cannot read beyond the fold.
It also breaks the "open in app" I normally have. If the link is a reddit link, for instance, I can press an icon in Firefox to have it open in "Reddit is fun".
Google has been dragging their feet for years on this one, and it perfectly fits their "oopsies" pattern of behavior [2], which ends up hurting their competition.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=975444
[2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3389882/former-mozilla...
- The search is degraded (it hides the advanced search menu in Google and most dropdowns in ff)
- Most of the sites use Recaptcha or cloudflare (also an extension of recaptcha) which gives you a low bot score if you're using anything other than chrome and then begins the never ending exercise of identifying cars and traffic lights
- I think web devs are also only testing for chrome nowadays and a lot of big and small sites just won't render properly with FF (the PH menu won't open on ff android for me unless I change the ua). It's not always chrome's fault though as many sites (like dictation.io) insist I use chrome because ff still won't support some web apis.
So there is definitely truth in it.
If you read the thread above a lot many people face this too, so at least this Recaptcha bs is quite true and prevalent.
Hangouts-in-Gmail has had a memory leak in Firefox for more than a year eventually freezes its tabs.
When you're a monopoly, you can get away with a lot.
Edit: I copied an AMP URL (https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.tomshardware.com/...) from Google search in Chrome. I posted email it into Firefox and it redirected to a www. page on tomshardware.com that loaded successfully.
The resulting pages are smaller than their AMP equivalents and load with less requests.
On my non-news sites I can say that I get more traffic without AMP.
The web doesn't need AMP to be fast, it needs common sense which has left the building once ads and tracking became the goal.
The only reason to offer AMP is to get into the news caroussel.
I'd like to see a move back to a document-based web rather than a web-application-based web: CSS and JavaScript have not been good for users. A document-based web allows users to pull down content and render it on their machines using programs users control. Coupling content with CSS and JavaScript means that users must use a website's CSS and JavaScript to render the content, which means that users must give up control of how the content is rendered. The results are predictable: most websites have crap accessibility, run a bunch of malware[1] that has nothing to do with rendering, and have user interfaces are all over the place (every website is different so you have to learn a new interface every time you visit a new website, even if they're presenting the same kinds of content).
Why should we let websites determine how content is rendered? I can pull down an AMP page and view the content the way I want to view it, so this gives me as a user a lot more power.
Sure, the most common case right now is that Google renders it on their page, and that gives power to Google. But that's just trading one evil (Google) for another (content providers who package content with malware)--as a user that's not really a net gain or loss. But having content shipped in a more document-based format is a big gain for users.
[1] Code which runs on my computer to show me ads is adware. Code which runs on my computer to send data about me to companies is spyware. If these were written in Python and packaged with a desktop program everyone would call them adware and spyware, but if they're written in JavaScript and packaged with a web application they're ubiquitous and accepted.
A CDN where active content is extremely limited, and advertising is effectively limited to Google.
A CDN entirely under control of the biggest search engine, who has a direct, a perverse incentive to take as much traffic from you as they can (see info boxes).
Presenting Google AMP as "just" a CDN is very dishonest.
Signed exchanges is considered harmful by Mozilla.[1]
* * *
> There is a lot to consider with web packaging. Many of the technical concerns are relatively minor. There are security problems, but most are well managed. There are operational concerns, but those can be overcome. It’s a complex addition to the platform, but we can justify complication in exchange for significant benefits.
> [...]
> Big changes need strong justification and support. This particular change is bigger than most and presents a number of challenges. The increased exposure to security problems and the unknown effects of this on power dynamics is significant enough that we have to regard this as harmful until more information is available.
I think that's a reasonable position. I certainly wouldn't summarize it the way they did though.
[1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ha00dSGKmjoEh2mRiG8FIA5s...
If an authoritarian can man-in-the-middle network connections and demand keys, it would be much simpler to just MITM the sites without doing anything with Signed Exchanges.
That's a very interesting definition of modern browser.
> Google rolled out a new feature that allows AMP to use server-side rendering (SSR), boosting performance for sites that adopt the technology across their entire domain.
Followed by a dozen paragraphs arguing why AMP is bad, with no further mention of server side rendering or why it "shows how [AMP] can infiltrate every corner of the internet". Is there anything new here, or is this just another rehash of the same arguments we've been having about AMP since the day it was released?
Some kind of social media campaign?
AMP will rot away a free and open internet. The internet will be turned into a walled garden for Google/Alphabet's sole benefit. (or at least a large enough chunk of it to make avoiding Google/Alphabet nearly impossible)
Edit: clarity.
Oh, that's shiny new technology. Call me when we have 3d buttons back.