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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Pure evil might be a bit much, but I do take issue with the behavior of the banner at the top.

End users are accustomed to a banner at the top of sites, with an 'X' on them. Things like, for example, the "EU Cookie Notice".

However, they are used to using the 'X' to get the irritating banner out of the way.

In AMP land, clicking the X sends you back to Google. What are the chances this is what the user is expecting? Who benefits from this setup?

Edit: Remember the DiggBar? https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/06/diggs-kevin-rose-diggbar-i...

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The X tested well with users, but we are reconsidering it, because of the feedback from the developer community!

Appreciate you sharing that, good to hear it's under consideration.

More cynical me might say that rolling out the 'X' with that behavior, though, gets the conversation to be about fixing the banner...versus removing it altogether.

Removing the bar is phishing and fake news paradise.

Well, because the implementation uses google urls, right? I assume they could have asked users to create amp.theirdomain.com CNAME records and upload appropriate certificates, right? Or the solution that cloudflare is using, or?

There is no navigation (only pushState) to enable pre-rendering, so the origin cannot be changed.

Ahh, I finally get it. An intentional walled garden that's a little bit open for now. I'm in the pot, and it's not terrible yet, but you just barely turned on the heat.

I assume it ends with everything in the serps being preloaded. And the only things in the serps being compliant content.

Nice derailing of a technical point!

AMP is not a ranking factor and so the percentage of results it makes up is largely a factor of the percentage of publishers publishing AMP.

You're right in that I really shouldn't be directing that at you. I believe that you, personally, are trying to do the right thing. Apologies for the snark.

However, I believe the Google devs behind Froogle also had good intentions. They provided a framework to make product pages easier to consume for Google. They provided a real incentive for publishers to conform to that standard. They got nice placement in a carousel, cached display of product images, and so forth. Then, later, well...

Edit: And whatever the technical reason for the google urls, it does open up possibilities for the future that aren't desirable. It's a dangerous precedent.

> AMP is not a ranking factor

That language is misleading: only AMP articles are eligible for "Top Stories" placement, which means non-AMP results are completely excluded from the most prominent ranking on SERPs.

AMP may not be used as a ranking factor within each class of results, but it absolutely creates two distinct classes of results, where AMP is given priority over the open Web.

Removing the bar is phishing and fake news paradise.

Umm, AMP itself is phishing paradise. https://motherboard-images.vice.com/content-images/contentim...

What is the URL to the accompanying article? This screenshot seems disturbingly effective, I'd like to see the rest of the flow. I wonder if the scam breaks down once you click the link or if it would be very hard to tell it's fishing even to a trained eye.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-hackers-broke...

This is terrifying! Is this a real email or a mockup?

The "press close to go back" idiom you've invented out of thin air is terrible.

This is a solved problem. We already have a button for going back and it works swimmingly.

Even my grandmother knows that the "X" gets rid of annoying overlays (usually ads) so she can properly view the content she was trying to get to in the first place.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12731580

We did not invent this. It is the same UI as Chrome Custom Tabs uses for in-app browsers. This may not be familiar on iOS.

It is definitely not idiomatic on iOS.

Did the team think eliminating a banner or frame that wraps enclosing content was not MVP material? I'm glad Google has now made this available, but I was shocked - and unhappy - when I first realized AMP did not originally have it.

AMP had 2 multi month public developer previews. Unfortunately it did not come up as a big issue during that phase.

Since I do not stay up to date with the latest from Google all the time, and didn't even know AMP was a thing until I encountered it in a production google search one day, I had no chance to offer feedback. I imagine many iOS developers, who must be focused on native app things rather than Web-based things, would be in a similar boat; we would be happy to provide feedback, but I don't know how I would have even been asked for feedback, let alone have discovered that something like this was coming so I could proactively make a comment.

Any ideas how this process could be improved?

I hate it for custom tabs too. But what I really hate is the way AMP hijacks scrolling and page navigation. It totally breaks the feature of Android Chrome that allows you to quickly search a selected word by swiping up from the bottom. Have you tested the interaction of AMP with that prominent Chrome feature? It's symptomatic of the way AMP breaks web assumptions.

Google maps for iPhone is incredibly confusing when it uses "custom chrome tabs". Unlike almost every app that hands off to a browser application. When in a "custom chrome tab", I want to go back maps, so I hit the home button. Because that's how you switch apps, but wait, where is maps? Oh I'm in maps. I don't see how this could user test well when it's an anti pattern to the device itself.

Almost anything can user test well. It's really hard to get right, and really easy to fool yourself.

Please just exclude AMP results by default.

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