[baconner]

Your hypothetical there assumes that AMP actually works well. My experience is it's got painful usability issues at least on android chrome. The worst one I see all the time is scrolling down to actually read the AMP page frequently results in the page closing, returning you to results.

Fast is good, but at least it ought to be a good user experience. I used to use google news a lot, but i totally abandoned it after constant frustrating experiences with AMP. Plus most of the amp-ified pages don't seem significantly faster than the original page. I'm not seeing the utility for users, just for google.

[mkawia]

AMP is also literally breaking internet. People share google.com/amp links,sometimes there'd be no preview and hard telling what the actual website being linked is.

[_jtrig]

On safari I get nothing except AMP links in google and cannot get myself routed to the actual site even with extensive searching. This disables sharing the link for me as well.

[rbjorklin]

Have you considered switching search engines? I've been using https://duckduckgo.com for the last two years and this is the first time I'm hearing of Google AMP.

[_jtrig]

I really really really want to use DuckDuckGo.com but the search results are probably 10% as helpful as Google. As a developer it's nearly impossible to find a really specific answer using ddg whereas google will have 3 super-relevant links.

[cheeze]

On ff/windows 10 I just get redirected to the non AMP version of pages.

How is this breaking the internet?

[deno]

Google can (or refuse to) redirect you anywhere. They also get to know about it, in case the analytics on target page was not enough.

That said, I don’t actually agree that AMP’s link rewriting is necessarily the thing that breaks internet, because the original link is still contained in the modified URL, and can be recovered completely offline.

URL shorteneres are much more harmful in that aspect.

The real danger of AMP is giving Google that much (more) power. They don’t hide links today, but what stops them from turning evil(er) tomorrow.

Preferring AMP pages is a clear monopoly practice, and should be the straw that breaks the camel’s back (if you didn’t care about the censorship…). I’m really trying to have faith in free market sorting this out, but I don’t have much faith in the Facebook drones that brought us all this shit in the first place. Are there enough free people left?

[bernardlunn]

Yes. To share I go the extra step of loading the original.

[imchillyb]

Perhaps it's your device @baconner?

I'm using an LG V20 device, with Chrome mobile, and I see a significant improvement with AMP'd pages over normal sites. So-much-so that I dread going to non-amped pages as they are slow and the ads are horrifically annoying.

I guess this is why anecdotal evidence is not as heavily weighed as a thoroughly tested and evidenced study.

YMMV

I <3 AMP

[snovv_crash]

I use Firefox mobile with uBlock Origin, and the internet is fast for me without using any AMP pages. YMMV.

[baconner]

To be fair I also use a VPN a lot of the time with adblocking. That does speed up a lot of high ad sites.

Bugwise though I've had the same issues over a couple of different phones.

[kyrra]

[I work for Google, opinions my own]

If you have specific issues you can spell out, consider filing a bug on it[0]? The AMP team is tracking most of their work via Github as far as I'm aware.

As an iOS user, one bug that bothered me for a long time with AMP was scroll inertia, which seems to be an issue with Webkit rather than AMP[1]. If you poke around the tracker, you can see the team does what it can to fix issues across all platforms/browsers.

[0] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues

[1] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/5125

[ENGNR]

Problem: A giant Google banner over web page, URL is broken

Solution: Remove banner, redirect to URL

Resolution: Closed, Google likes it that way.

Actual solution: Don't use AMP, and slowly get pushed out of Google search.

[epistasis]

Funny that AMP just happened to use some sort of page structure that triggered an iOS bug that >99.9% of the rest of the web does not trigger...

What are the chances that Google would listen to big reports, supposing that anybody could find those links? Google is notorious for being inaccessible unless you happen to know an employee personally or have enough juice on twitter. They do not have a reputation as an open or accessible company.

[theWatcher37]

You work for google, so you're unabashedly supporting a terrible attack on the open web because it's "fast"?

[bitmapbrother]

>The worst one I see all the time is scrolling down to actually read the AMP page frequently results in the page closing

Anecdotal, but I've never had this happen to me. Chrome on Nexus 6P 7.1.2

[beefield]

> The worst one I see all the time is scrolling down to actually read the AMP page frequently results in the page closing, returning you to results. Fast is good, but at least it ought to be a good user experience. I used to use google news a lot, but i totally abandoned it

I use "request desktop site" on google news to get that working properly on my android.

[dingo_bat]

Although AMP is not a performance beast by any measure, your experience is coloured because you're using Chrome on Android. Google news works pretty well on Samsung browser. It still annoys me that I can't see the link to the actual website but that's it.

[freehunter]

So you're saying that Google's official browser is slow on their official web technology on their official mobile platform? And Samsung, who is well known for their software quality issues, is a better choice?

[jdironman]

Well, he is speaking from experience. While this isn't the place for speaking from experience but more about enabling a better experience for all users he cannot deny what he has observed. However the user above us had the correct answer with filing a bug / legitimate issue with devs. That is the only way to increase usability for all users.

[Mindwipe]

Samsung's browser (and several other competitors) are faster on Android because they contain closed source rendering that's customised for their chipsets. Google can't integrate the closed source code into Chrome because they'd effectively have to fork it from Chromium to do so.

[dingo_bat]

Doesn't Chrome already contain close source code? I thought it was chromium plus Google proprietary code. For example, some features are available only on Chrome (DRM etc. "features"). If they wanted, they could optimise for a selected few top selling devices.

[dingo_bat]

I thought this was common knowledge. Chrome is horrible on Android. If you look at benchmarks, the only browser/phone combination that is close to iPhone Safari performance is the latest galaxy flagship running Samsung Internet.

[Diederich]

I have an excellent user experience with AMP on my phone using Chrome.

I agree with the fundamental and structural concerns associated with it though.

Is there anything you're doing on your connection that's unusual?

[Mindwipe]

They're also often significantly more feature poor, and the ugly URL bar is a net usability detractor.