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Comment by lemonspat | Hacker News Reader

> I remain convinced that AMP is poorly implemented, hostile to the interests of both users and publishers, and a proprietary & unnecessary incursion into the open web.

Brutal, but at least we know an insider agrees that AMP is hostile to the web. If others leave, will that push Google to make better decisions? Probably not.

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Thank goodness. AMP is the reason I don’t use Google on mobile. It just sucks. They could have done a million things that could have improved the quality of the mobile web and they chose one that actively makes using it unbearable.

Same here. I use DDG as the default search engine on my iPhone just to avoid AMP

Kiwi Browser > Settings > Privacy > Remove AMP

Nice, I didnt know this, I have have just been using a extension in Kiwi Briwser instead.

I’d love a browser that can do this for iOS if anyone has recommendations

Thought it'd be appropriate to plug what we're working on here. We're a YC company (W19) are building an iOS browser that's extensible. You can build "extensions" to inject your own JS into pages if they match a certain condition.

We're still beta testing (and launching early next year) but you can get the browser testflight beta from here https://insightbrowser.com/ and the AMP disabling extension here http://share.insightbrowser.com/8

Would love feedback or any changes you'd like to make. Feel free to respond here or abhinav@insightbrowser.com

Will this pass Apple’s review? I thought anything that allowed you to run arbitrary code on their platform was an automatic hard no.

I run a Chrome extension that's popular here on HN, called BeeLine Reader. We have an iOS app (and share/action extensions) and have toyed with the idea of building a general-purpose web browser, but we'd much rather be part of an extensible mobile browser. Would love to chat about how you're attacking this problem (and avoiding related App Store prohibitions)!

Nice I'll take a look!

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/100468ecb8684d38bc36f8d02ce...

I get that AMP sucks from a "Google control the web" point of view but you make it sound like it sucks from a user point of view. I can't see why though? It's basically only used by news sites and it just gives you the article content faster and with fewer ads. What's not to like about that (as a user)?

One consistent place I see it used is Reddit. Say you want to find a risotto recipe and a Reddit thread comes up. So you go there and it’s a question and comments have the answers. Now with AMP you can only see so much of the comments, can’t upvote/downvote, cannot expand/collapse comments, can’t see the URL, your light/dark mode preferences stored on Reddit isn’t respected, and the whole thing is weirdly slow and has scrolling issues. And the best part is that the whole bottom half of the page is taken up by links to random other Reddit posts that have nothing to do with the one you’re looking at. It is a shitty shitty experience to the point if it was invented by AOL we would all be laughing at it.

Don’t forget the “signed into google as ...” banner that blocks the “no i don’t want to download the app” button, and that it makes the “read more...” button on a long text post require a full page reload

A lot of this is reddit’s fault, as they completely undoubtedly have deliberately ruined their own mobile browser experience to try and force you to download the app, but AMP makes it at least doubly bad

May I ask what you use instead? Duckduckgo?

DDG for life (honestly the first thing I do with all browsers, mobile or desktop, is swap out Google for DDG).. It's good enough, and when it isn't I can just throw a '!g' on it and hope Google will be better. Mileage varies on that, though. Some people think Google is still the best search engine, and some of us don't (I mean that in regards to quality of search results, not 'Google is evil' or some other emotional metric), if you're still in the former group then switching to DDG may not be your best move.

Google has gamed their search algorithm so much that DDG is IMO objectively better now. Top results on Google for things I'm interested are always trashy fake blogs for affiliate links and things like that.

It's funny, I usually have the opposite experience. I try to use DDG as much as possible for ideological reasons, but I find myself coming back to Google search most of the time because I get better results.

I think it is shaped by your searches. When I am searching for some math term to help my kid do his homework !G is better, but for anything business or media related I stick with DDG results. Not just affiliate links but literally hijacking search with their own content is insufferable.

Related: Can we start an HN trend of replacing the word Google in posts with !G to throw some shade at the evil empire?

Depends how niche it is. More niche things google does well on: that error code, that specific game discussion on Reddit. Duck duck go now does better on searches which will be optimised for google by businesses.

Love whichever search engine you want, but "IMO" and "objectively" can't go together, by definition.

One common search I often compare is searching for a specific topic on Reddit. Google is really annoying there because of AMP but if you search something like “3d printing layer shift Reddit” you will get a full page of results from Reddit and they are relevant. DDG will return about 3 even though there are clearly more, and the rest aren’t Reddit results. So for this kind of search Google produces better results but shittier experience. Still, I will take DDG for this and switch to Google if I really can’t find what I need in the first three results.

3D printing layer shift site:reddit.com

Or:

3D printing layer shift !r

Not the person you’re asking, but I too use DDG because AMP is a bad experience

I use Google but loathe AMP. But when I encounter it I usually click/touch that ”i” icon thingy and then hit up the real URL for the article.

What everyone else said: DDG.

bromite.org removes AMP results automatically.

> If others leave, will that push Google to make better decisions?

Certainly not. If decision-makers believe it is in their interests, and they can get away with it, they will keep doing it. So you can try to convince decision makers that it is not in their interests, or you can try to show them that they can't get away with it. Quitting an advisory board does neither.

Note that the OP didn't really say they thought or intended it would. They said they were glad they tried to impact AMP positively, they don't think they succeeded, and they are choosing to spend time on other things such as an educational program. Of course by making a public announcement perhaps they hope to affect something, but probably more encourage others in the struggle; after seeing how they couldn't have much impact on the advisory committee, I am sure they know they won't have much impact simply by resigning from it, at least not impact on Google directly.

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