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Comment by bluetidepro | Hacker News Reader

AMP Is ruining mobile web. I cannot stand it. If it was actually made to be fluid, I'd see the value. But it's such a terrible UX, and so janky with the way it "pops in", and messes up "browser back" abilities. Out of all the shitty things Google has ever done, AMP is #1 to me on that list.

Orrrrrr just give me a damn option to turn it off, if I want. I will never understand why companies force people into these types of major UX decisions on their behalf. Stop assuming every user is stupid. Sure, make it the default, I don't care about that for the everyday user, but for something as fundamental as the browser, I should have an option to turn off every single Google opinion they bake in.

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If you use DuckDuckGo you don't have to deal with AMP at all. Giving it a go on mobile is a good way to see how well it works for you too as searches tend to be less mission-critical compared to desktop-based searches.

Any good alternative to Google News?

RSS.

This is what I did. When the Google News redesign happened, it made Google News substantially less useful to me. Enough so that came up with a replacement.

It's not for everyone, as it requires running your own webserver, but I use Tiny Tiny RSS to aggregate the feeds of the various sources I'm interested in, then can read the aggregated feeds (I have multiple, a different feed for each general subject) through the web interface and/or by using an RSS reader. I use an RSS reader (gReader) on my mobile devices to do this.

I'm pretty sure that not all RSS clients require to run your own webserver? Opera used to have one, Thunderbird maybe ?

I'm working on building something like this for myself actually. I'm just curious, what would you hope to get out of a replacement tool?

HN + a regional newspaper is my solution.

http://newsmap.jp/

https://www.bing.com/news

https://statesreport.com/

https://newstral.com/en

https://www.memeorandum.com/

https://cor.ax/

https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news

http://www.newsola.com/#/us/n

https://www.newsnow.co.uk/h/

https://www.newslookup.com/

https://legiblenews.com/

https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

AMP is literally the reason I switched to DuckDuckGo.

Unfortunately, it is my experience that DuckDuckGo excels on the desktop (lots of facts and technical questions), and falls short on many mobile use cases ("best cafes in Some City," assistance with shopping or goods, maps, etc).

I use it on my phone anyway, but I wind up using `!g` all the time.

(yes, I made this same complaint on the DDG topic just a couple days ago)

Yeah, Google is far better at location-aware searches. To be honest most of those are usually done in Google Maps (sigh.. please somebody make a decent Google Maps alternative!) anyway, so it's not really an issue.

> please somebody make a decent Google Maps alternative!

https://wego.here.com/ ?

It's not just location-awareness. They also excel at weird fuzzy searches.

random example: My girlfriend lost her laptop in airport security, and I wanted to find a picture of the specific scratch-and-sniff sticker she put on it for the claim form. Duck Duck Go search for "glossier blackberry sticker" didn't find it; Google Images did, first try.

* this turned out to be a good move, I got a positive response from TSA within minutes

> Yeah, Google is far better at location-aware searches.

That's one of the reasons that I'm glad that I stopped using Google search. I've always hated location-aware searches.

On Duckduckgo there's a switch to turn on Region just below the search-field, or even choose Region manually. It helps alot!

One issue is that "a decent Google Maps alternative" would cost literally billions at this point. This kind of infrastructure is really the government's job, but they have struggled to keep pace...

You can still try Qwant (pretty good in my experience), Bing or Startpage (which uses Google in the back - but I never had any trouble with AMP when using it). It's not like there is no choice. And of course, there should be no reason to support Chrome either, Firefox is a great alternative.

EDIT: interesting, never thought such a comment would get a downvote... Google brigade?

> EDIT: interesting, never thought such a comment would get a downvote... Google brigade?

It breaks more than one of the site guidelines to post like this. Would you mind reviewing them and following them when posting here?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Startpage was recently bought by an ad company.

https://reclaimthenet.org/startpage-buyout-ad-tech-company/

Thank you very much, I wasn't aware of this! Changing my default search engine... again.

Oh, that's why I've never really had any trouble with AMP - I've been using DDG for years.

Posts pasted from other people frequently have AMP - guess I should suggest a better search engine to them.

You can also install a browser extension that redirects AMP -> origin for you.

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirect-amp-to-ht...

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/

Yeah, I use DDG and only get crappy amp links on reddit and other forums. Either don't click or manually remove the amp. Google can [insert insult here].

This could be a game changer, I did not know this!!! I will look at that today, thank you so much for the tip!

I've found DuckDuckGo to work very well as my default search on mobile (so well, in fact, that I can't remember the last time I had to go to google for a search).

I still haven't brought myself to use it on my laptop, but I do use Bing on Vivaldi (I use Opera, Vivaldi, FF Dev Edition, Opera Dev Edition, and Chrome Canary - the first two for everyday browsing, and the rest for dev-ing. I use google in Opera, and Bing in Vivaldi).

Using search engines other than Google is a nice change of pace, even if not solely to avoid AMP pages.

Avoiding AMP is not so straightforward. I use DDG too, but I still end up on amp links, Twitter for example uses AMP links by default.

It's also really annoying when you want to copy a link to send to people, but it copies the amp link instead.

What on earth? Chrome does this? (I'm a Firefox guy)

It does! At least on mobile.

Every browser does this if you copy the address in the address bar, because it's an AMP link. (I believe "sharing" the link will use the canonical, non-Google one.)

Google browsers on google devices will rewrite the URL bar. IMO this is one of the more egregious offenses — the URL bar no longer accurately reflects the website you are browsing.

That wouldn't be a surprise; rewriting is.

What is an example of a web site I might have used that breaks the Back button because it uses AMP?

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