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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

The fact that you linked to an amp version of the page, instead of the real link, is deeply disturbing to me.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphab...

I changed the link in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21730007 and detached this subthread and marked it off topic.

Seriously off topic. There have been two huge threads about AMP in the last week and something like 9 of them in the last year: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

So maybe that should inform the powers that be, that the canonical URL should be the one that's used by default?

And I was very appreciative of the AMP version being posted. It made for a much better mobile viewing experience than the typical non-AMP experience from Bloomberg.

A forced redesign, in this case motivated by AMP, is what gave you that better mobile experience. It is not something inherent to AMP, and in other ways AMP is incredibly harmful.

Most mobile browsers now have "reading mode" anyway.

The selling point of AMP is that it's a mobile-friendly web component framework. If someone uses AMP for their website, and as a result you get a better mobile experience, it's hard to see how that's not inherent to AMP.

I turn on the faucet and fill a glass of water. Taking a drink from the glass, I feel less thirsty. If someone turns on a faucet, and as a result feels less thirsty, then that that thirst-removal must be inherent to turning on a faucet, right?

This is obviously silly, but follows the same reasoning that you have stated. Drinking water reduces thirst, not running water from a faucet. Redesigning a website to be less bloated results in a better mobile experience, not designing around AMP. It is possible to redesign a website without using AMP.

Causation does not imply necessity.

I think it's fair to say that thirst-removal is inherent to turning on a faucet. It's true that there are other ways to reduce your thirst, and it's true that turning on the faucet has other effects (such as increasing your water bill) that have nothing to do with how thirsty you are. It's even true that the water company behind your faucet might be doing bad things that it ought to stop.

But it doesn't seem helpful to analyze faucets as being a monopolistic plot by Big Water rather than a technology for letting you drink when you're thirsty.

Thank you for this perfect analogy: access to running water isn't relevant to quenching thirst in the same way that amp isn't relevant to having a usable mobile website.

in theory, yes, you're correct. but the reality is that turning on the tap is usually an important step to having a drink of water.

And many websites decide to implement basics like scrolling with js, breaking reading mode.

In this case, AMP doesn't help much...it's still downloading a ton of crap.

464 requests and 12MB of garbage for an AMP hosted article.

https://imgur.com/tPHaHIO

That's because you are running in a simulator and not doing ad-blocking. Here is the real deal, 1.9MB and took 12 seconds to load completely: https://imgur.com/a/XcsNEsp

The actual Bloomberg page was 5.3Mbytes and took 30 seconds to load completely: https://imgur.com/a/zBaOzeD

If 3X improvement in loading time and data transfer is not much of a help, I don't know what it is.

USERS like AMP because it is an actual improvement of the UX. The industry complaining over AMP is like the music industry going after the MP3 in the early 2000s.

12 seconds and 1.9MB isn't anything to brag about either, especially considering you needed an ad-blocker to get there.

1.9MB in 12 seconds says about my internet connection but 3X improvement says about AMP.

Fight AMP as hard as you like, start a Kickstarter for anti-AMP explaining to the public the evils of AMP but when my search results return an AMP site and non-AMP site I am clicking the AMP.

Web tech people can revolt all they want or they can actually find a way to display a few kb of text and image quickly. You can be the music industry trying to protect their CD business or you can own the Napster/iTunes/Spotify and make your money from there.

Web publishing becomes garbage, AMP is fast loading garbage. The fast-loading garbage wins.

The article itself consists of 20 kB of text. Going from 270x the payload size to 95x the payload size, while impressive, still misses the mark.

Running a content blocker makes the original page load quickly and doesn’t require any amp.

If you need an ad blocker to make amp load quickly that defeats the purpose of amp, because the ad blocker makes the original site load quickly without the inherent google bullshittery.

I have my ad-blocker on all the time. The 3X improvement is with ad-blocker on both. AMP loads multiple times faster, therefore it does have a purpose. On the original site, things jump around until it's usable, on AMP it's right there when you tap on.

The crazy loading times are actually not that important as long as the site is usable quickly.

How so? The non-amp version loaded basically instantly for me.

If your life was materially impacted by slow mobile speeds you should spend less time on your phone.

Unlike the AMP version, I didn’t have to wait 5+ seconds for the bottom “Signed into Google as ...” banner to disappear to scroll up on the regular site. It made for a worse mobile experience for me.

> And I was very appreciative of the AMP version being posted. It made for a much better mobile viewing experience...

You should try outline: https://outline.com/XT5ULM

Reader mode shows a blank page.

The share button is right there... How do people always miss it when copying links?

Why should I use a special share button when my browser already displays the URL and my operating system already enables copy/paste?

Google makes it a pain in the ass to get to the non-AMP version. You have to click the little (i) and then the link.

On Safari at least, hitting the share sheet button and then “copy” will always return the canonical URL (which I believe the amp standard requires sites to define)

Well that's good to know. I usually end up wanting to bookmark a site in my synced bookmarks, so I need to load the non-AMP for that :/

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