Kill Google AMP before it kills the web
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
I think it's reprehensible for google to push this so relentlessly and beyond simply stealing links it makes google into the "internet."
This (AMP) could easily be a standard, in fact it's mostly just common sense (good lightweight HTML/CSS/JS). Instead of Google forcing its way on users and creators it could just lower the page rank of the offenders.
One other thing about AMP that pisses me off as a user and an engineer is it's one more place to maintain meaning one more shitty neglected experience. As a user I hate it when AMP pages are broken and I somehow can't get to the non-AMP version. I don't blame the developers because we have enough on our plate. My anger is solely directed to google for making the damn mess in the first place.
nowadays Yandex uses its own index even for “foreign” (non-Russian) sites.
That said, I use StartPage, who have a contract I believe with Google. It's Google's search results, minus the tracking. It's as much as I am willing to compromise on something as fundamental as search.
At least it's honest about not having results whereas Google presents 5 billion, all of which are missing one of the three keywords (which it notes in a small, light grey text, which you only notice after the first three results were completely unrelated and you were wondering what went wrong).
For example, "new double c++" is the query I did most recently and in the top 3 there are 2 results that answer my question.
Making something up at random like "torrent clients" gives me as top hit the Wikipedia article "comparison of bittorrent clients", which is better than expected.
I can't seem to think of a vague query right now. "audio books" gives me sites with audio books; "psychology books" gives me articles of 'the best 50 psychology books' and such; and looking in my query history, "draw unicode" seems vague but the top hit (shapecatcher.com) is the one I was looking for.
Something localized then: "drankwinkel echt" (where Echt is a place and drankwinkel a liquor store) indeed gives terrible results. The store name, surprisingly, works though: "gal & gal echt" gives similar results to google.nl.
Yes, that's really bad; it's what killed Altavista and could really be Google's undoing.
Still, Google is miles ahead of the competition.
Small experiment: searching for "movie old man balloons" on Google and Bing.
On Bing there is a first line of 4 videos, none of them related to the movie "Up" in any way. The second link is to Up on Imdb (good). The 3rd link is to a crazy religious fanatic site page titled "Disney PIXAR's, 'Up' - The Sugarcoating of Pedophilia!" (WTF??!? - but at least related to the movie). The 4th link is again to a youtube video with no connection to the movie.
On Google, the first 8 links are to the movie. There is a line of images, all from the movie / movie poster. There's a list of 4 questions "People also ask" that shows questions about the movie ("How many balloons would it take to lift a house?"). To be fair, the crazy Baptist site does show up on Google too (God has good SEO!), but way down below the fold.
Anyway, my point is, when answering the question, Google is certain you're looking for information about Up, and tries to give it to you.
Bing seems to have doubts and tries to guess if maybe you're looking for a funny video of a man in the subway wearing a balloon hat (??!? it's not a "movie"!!) or the hit song "99 Luftballons" from 1983 (not a "movie" either!)
Bing tries hard, but is obviously more than a little clueless.
FYI, Landover Baptist Church (which that article is from) is a very old, very well known spoof site.
A perfect search engine would not return this on the first page of results about the movie, because it's not about the movie.
Your experiment's results are not repeatable. When I do that here:
* Bing gives me 8 pages about Up (including that spoof site), one about Danny Deckchair, and a page about a magician who re-creates old movies with balloons.
* Google gives me 13 pages about Up (also including that spoof site), a book of best movie scenes on its page for The Third Man, and an article from The Rotarian from 1948.
Of course, some knowledge of how these things work teaches that this is a terrible methodology, given that it does not account for the fact that both Bing and Google tailor their search results to the searcher. One should at the very minimum log out of one's Google and Bing accounts, which you made no mention of doing.
That's a spot-on description of Altavista :)
It seems to expect more precise queries, while Google is geared toward "close enough" searches. I've found that DDG is often preferable when I have an exact phrase in mind. Google is sometimes too helpful, correcting errors that are not actually errors and failing to take some queries literally enough.
The main issues I have with DDG are that it doesn't seem to prioritize recent results (which can be good, but usually isn't) and it fails at local results, which is basically by design.
While I am still personally a huge fan of Google's work in this are and many others, sometimes I long for the days of straight boolean search queries in search engines. I could often find exactly what I'm looking for, and get the same result each time.
Are there any other major or effective engines that allow for boolean queries beyond AND/OR?
I got relevant results in my first day there. I didn't notice a drop in result quality.
Google is just that good even if I hate to admit it.
Other search engines feel like a noob salesperson who needs to be told 5 times in 5 different ways what you need -- and it's really simple stuff too.
I like experienced salespeople.
PS: DDG redirected image searches to bing, but not generic searches. Which honestly seems reasonable as doing image search well is incredibly hard, with minimal payoffs.
It sounds like Bing is personalizing your results either by location or by adtech tracking, which is kinda antithetical to the point of DDG.
Also, if it is using Bing on inside, I'm not then sure why the results are still different than that(even at the places where there's no scope for personalization). For example type this line exactly in both bing and ddg:
difference between std list and std set
The first result DDG shows is of a difference between set and a vector - not only that, it also highlights that result in a Google Card inspired fashion (which is worse because Google does that only when they have a certain amount of confidence in the answer), while the first result Bing shows is an actual difference between list and a set. So either Bing is cheating DDG, or DDG is doing something stupid on top of its results. (Also, if you cover the above string in quotes, Bing still shows 'some' search results, while DDG doesn't).
May be after using the '!' ninja techniques it'll be same as Google, but then I have also come to love the fact that I can type in 'my next flight' or 'Show me emails from ....' or 'remind me to ... ' and other personalized things on Google so may be my priorities are different here.
“We started experimenting with AMP in our Bing App last May and have noticed that AMP pages load, on average, approximately 80% faster than non-AMP pages” says Marcelo De Barros, Group Engineering Manager in charge of the AMP integration at Bing.
https://blogs.bing.com/search/September-2016/bing-app-joins-...
People talk a lot of trash about AMP, but until there's another solution that allows me to go to a news website and actually read it, I'm an AMP supporter.
But still you are loading ton of unnecessary content. Ad blocking on iOS still sucks (no custom filters).
If anything I prefer this way of working - Apple alone are responsible for maintaining a high performance adblocker in Safari, the wider app ecosystem just provides the block lists, rather than rely on app developers to write performant browser plugins.
Shills and Kool-aid-drinking zealots mostly - they are the ones usually motivated enough to do 'journalism' for free. Don't expect any professionalism, depth or any form of investigative journalismbeyond tweet-storms.
There's similar blogs for every small community, run by people who care about that community. Usually unfunded, and only covering stories of interest to that community.
We outsourced our opinions and fact-finding to journalists for a few hundred years. Now that time has past. Journalists themselves have destroyed their own industry by producing a poor quality product. Maybe in future journalists will re-invent themselves as purveyors of pure factual reporting, and those that care about that kind of thing will pay for it. But it is a niche market. Democracy, decency, enlightenment and society will suffer of course. But those things were never guaranteed with any kind of real safeguards.
If you think this was ever the case, rose colored glasses are in effect.
Unless you’re doing tree shaking, which AMP can’t do duplicate, compression has rendered “minification” useless long time ago anyway.
I'm not aware of anything AMP does differently than non-AMP with regard to tracking, except that it's declared in a way that allows it to be cached+preloaded without falsely triggering analytics.
Repro: 1. Search for some BBC news on google.com, click on an AMP link and load a BBC page 2. Notice that you're still on google.com and not on bbc.com
My contract with a search engine is that they should provide links to other sites in a relatively painless way. In exchange for this the search engine can track me while I am on the site.
AMP breaks this relationship by refusing to let me leave the site and extends tracking to other sites. The speed difference is negligible to me and not worth this violation of privacy.
Just like AMP are fundamentally websites built on a bunch of guidelines with performance and accessibility prioritized which, once you sprinkle them with enough metadata, get treated specialty by third party like google.
Yeah, I don't think I misunderstood. AMP's guidelines are just more strict before the 3rd parties start treating you specially. And in both cases, the original website/app is just fine, until it starts getting treated specially.
Update what? What do you mean by "app store"?
I could make the same argument that Apple cripples iOS Safari's implementations of emerging standards that aim to bring the web experience closer to a "native feel" to keep its app store revenue churning:
http://caniuse.com/#feat=stream
...but really it's a lot more likely that getting _all_ things right on _all_ platforms is the really, really hard thing about the web, for browser vendors and web developers alike.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence (or in this case, sheer overwhelming difficulty).
sheer overwhelming difficulty + no incentive = no action
Apple's response was (surprisingly) to make the default scrolling like the overflow scrolling. So, with the next Safari release all pages will scroll like AMP pages. Hope Gruber is happy then :)
Honestly this whole thing (AMP and your comment) come off arrogant as hell to me.
I like the current iOS behavior because it's what I'm used to. I don't find the slower scrolling speed to be an issue at all. But if everything really is going to change then I will probably annoyed me for a while but I'll get used to it.
I'm not complaining that the scrolling behavior on AMP is too fast specifically (although that's how it feels to me), I'm complaining that it's DIFFERENT from everything else. All my muscle memory of how to scroll things is broken on AMP pages and only AMP pages. (I don't care if it's how iframes work, you deployed it anyway)
Once it feels like the rest of the system then it's not really much of an issue anymore. I'll get over my personal preference.
But the snark was totally unnecessary.
That they chose to ship that way instead of using an alternate implementation that didn't run into the problem ( or was less frustrating or provided an opt out ) was THEIR decision. They're not 100% blameless in this.
My second comment was because I thought the original behavior of implementing AMP the way it was and forcing it on users was arrogant and has seriously annoyed the hell out of me since it originally started appearing on iOS. I've literally considered switching search engines to get away from it because it makes using Google that much harder.
Yeah, I called it terrible to their face. Because it frustrates the hell out of me. I've tried finding ways to contact google, I've tweeted at them, I've posted in previous discussions. At no point did anyone ever seem to wake knowledge the problem other than seeing people (who I assume we're not googlers) basically say it's not their fault because that's the way Apple implemented iframes.
Combined that arrogance with what I see as rudeness... and yeah. I said terrible twice. I'm frustrated as hell at this and don't like that the solution will be "it's going to stay there but Apple is going to make it a little bit better for you".
When the scrolling gets fixed? I'm still gonna be annoyed as hell at AMP pages. They break the experience, but now just a little less. Hurray.
It almost feels like you're looking for reasons to be upset and finger-point. I hope that's not the case.
Except that thing was a bug in Safari. They used perfectly valid plain HTML without any hacks or JS.
It was still there choice to deploy using iframes knowing that that was the way it felt. They could've use JavaScript to load the contents into a div or simply pushed so far users to a page that had nothing but the AMP content on it.
They left it severely sub optimal and decided that was good enough… making google significantly more annoying to use on iOS than what it was before.
That was the choice they made and stuck too. No options to turn it off, no options to do it a different way; you just get stuck with it.
So my top-of-the-head guess of something that might avoid it based on what I thought the problem was from other HN discussions wasn't right. What a sin.
That doesn't invalidate my experience or frustration as an end user.
So you're blaming Google for not writing around an edge case bug that exists only on one platform?
They could've just as easily pushed you to a new page which contain the AMP content and wasn't an iframe, thus leaving all the standard feel and gestures working. Instead they choose to go along with what they were doing on android even though it was severely sub optimal on iOS.
I think choosing to do that WAS arrogant.
They made Google significantly harder to use as an iOS user because they didn't care and gave us no option to try and fix it.
I think the "correct" response in a case like this, where the platform owner has a bug and has committed to a fix in the pipeline for delivery, is highly dependent on the problem. Even then, it's possible to make the wrong choice given the information available at the time.
I prefer not to call the actions of a company and a group of people arrogant without more info than present, even if one of those people expressed a less than sympathetic opinion of the problem. I extend the same courtesy to Apple often enough, it would be hypocritical of me not to.
The big problem with that that only exists on iOS is that the 'weight' of the content is much much less than normal web pages. All your muscle memory of how far and how fast to move your finger to get the page to scroll a certain amount is wrong. Instead the page scrolls MUCH faster and further. This would be bad enough except you're still technically on the Google page and as soon as you go back or close the AMP result the scroll speed is what you're used to.
The end result is it's incredibly frustrating and feels "broken".
I understand that Google's preferred solution caused a behavior that is severely sub optimal because of the way Safari currently works. My problem is I think they handled this extremely poorly and forced all iOS users to deal with it for what, over a year?
I'm glad apples fixing it but I don't like the way Google handled it... effectively saying to iOS users "too bad" since they didn't do anything to mitigate it while waiting for Apple's fixed to come through the pipeline.
The majority of end users don't know anything about divs and iframes and don't care whose bug it is. So the question remains-- since they clearly know that this bug exists, why would they ship like this?
Every time I land on an AMP page on my iPhone, the scroll gets out of control and all of a sudden I've unintentionally followed a link to some video that starts playing with sound. It's ridiculously annoying.
I'm not sure it was a bug, it sounds like it was a design decision. Maybe not in GOOD one, but I doubt it was a true bug.
Apple's response indicates it was a bug, and nowhere has Apple said "this is a design decision we are now changing".
>a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.
As I said another comments though Safari was doing exactly what it was designed to do (for whatever reason they designed it that way). I don't think this is a bug on Apple's part. It makes sense to harmonize the scrolling behavior, but I don't believe it was unintentional.
Now I understand what someone was talking about when they said this might be ironic. I wasn't even sure what they were referring to. I can't place my finger on why this doesn't seem like irony to me. Maybe it's just not odd enough.
Apple seems to disagree with you, though. I would trust Apple to know better what Safari was designed to do.
A hypocrite (Gruber, as evidenced in another thread) calls the AMP team hacks who do terrible work. Turns out their "terrible work" is actually Apple's bug and the AMP team points this out both to Apple and to Gruber. In your eyes, this makes it all their fault.
When called out on it, you double down by saying that the team is still to blame because they chose not to work around Apple's bug. You basically want Google to be part of Apple's captive audience.
No, seriously, take a step back and consider that this is what you're saying.
I must have missed this. When did Gruber call the AMP team hacks?
> Turns out their "terrible work" is actually Apple's bug and the AMP team points this out both to Apple and to Gruber.
This is flat out disingenuous, unless you're talking about something other than the originally submitted DF article. There were multiple examples of why Gruber thinks AMP sucks. Are you claiming that all of them are "Apple's bug"?
The link of this thread was originally [0].
Although he didn't use the word 'hack' himself, Gruber said:
"Google has no respect for the platform. If I had my way, Mobile Safari would refuse to render AMP pages. It’s a deliberate effort by Google to break the open web."
So he sees them as intentionally sabotaging things.
0: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/05/20/gilbertson-amp
Let's see:
- find in page: yup, Webkit bug (Google/Chrome uses Blink).
- scrolling behaviour: yup, Safari bug.
Anything else that I missed?
I.e., "not design decision".
Oh well, maybe I'll get used to the inertia scrolling. I'll give it a shot when they make the system-wide change.
For now though, the different scrolling experience on AMP (and some other pages) is jarring to the point that I don't even bother and I just bounce.
Having all scrolling be consistent feels good once you get used to it.
That doesn't necessarily mean it was a good idea for Google's hosted AMP pages to use overflow scroll all along. The inconsistency definitely did feel weird. And the way they do scrolling prevents Safari from auto-hiding its top and bottom bars. I believe all the desired scroll effects could have been achieved without the use of overflow scroll.
Edited to add: the AMP scrolling model also breaks tapping the top of the screen to scroll to top, and this won't be fixed by scroll rate changes.
It never occurred to me that Safari page is what the outlier, I just assumed that Safari pages matched the rest of the system and iframes for the thing that we're off.
Maybe this won't be as hard to get used to as I feared.
Thanks again.
Please, please fix this. It's impossible to support something that's foisted on us and breaks basic web functionality. If I were cynical, I'd say bugs like this are designed to degrade the web experience on iOS. There's a lot of bad web programming out there, but very few sites manage to break search.
Edit: some detail. Safari sometimes doesn't scroll find results into view when they are in overflowed space. This issue actually affects a large percentage of web pages. Fixing it was very easy, was just an oversight in WebKit.
-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;
Changing the submission URL is unfortunate, because a lot of the discussion in this thread prior to 2017-05-21T00:52Z pertains as much to Gruber's material as the Register article. Now a lot of this discussion, as you seem to have noticed, appears out of context.
[1] https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/14385185.json?pri... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14385185 [3] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/05/20/gilbertson-amp
I know, those are native platform affordances that the web doesn't need to care directly because iOS is not an open standard. But neither is AMP.
However, having Google load this structured content and host it on its own platform is a terrible idea. Content should remain on the publisher's site. Putting too much content in one place is dangerous for competition.
* In practice there are implementation problems too, e.g. those mentioned in the linked article.
Google is using any means possible to keep the web (html, js, css) relevant in the age of native apps (that includes Facebook app running on Android). If the web stays relevant, the same goes for Google search.
You can see a preview for what that means by checking out Wikipedia's traffic decline over the last 3 years or so.
If it was microsoft they already would have shut this down because of the backlash. Google does it and people are fine with it.
We already had this two decades ago: WAP, its contemporaries (i-mode), and its immediate successors (XHTML Mobile Profile).
In theory, it's a win-win-win situation. Publisher gets free hosting (with analytics and ad money still coming to them obviously), users get a faster experience and Google is happier if the users browser more content.
In reality, AMP is obviously not perfect but they have been addressing common issues and improving. I may not be fully sold on it yet, but I don't understand the massive blind hatred.
Saying "people can just optimize their website" doesn't mean shit. They've had years and no one has been. Sites have been getting slower every year despite browsers getting faster. No one gave a single shit until AMP came around...
But instead of simply pushing that aspect harder, they're actively promoting their own tech.
They do.
The other thing is that for me, AMP has not been faster many times. I know they're working on it but having to download and run 100KB of external JavaScript before rendering frequently meant that it was slower than the real page. It helps the stragglers but e.g. WaPo or NYT load just as fast and that should be enough.
With real web pages, the native sharing UI just works as it does everywhere else.
With AMP, you have to know to tap a different unfamiliar icon and then know that the unstyled URL displayed is actually a link you can interact with. That means that sharing goes from one tap to 2-3 and that's after people learn that Google gives substandard results doing what they're familiar with and so you need to remember to do something else only for pages which you found on Google.
An AMP page served without cache has to be treated the same, or this becomed exactly the freedom issue that this entire discussion is about.
My pages are actually optimized a lot, and they actually get about 10x slower with AMP than without.
I don't want to have to choose between fast loading and good SEO, I want both. And Google only offering good SEO to those who let Google track all user interactions with their page is also not ideal (I specifically do not use any ads, analytics, or tracking, not even storing IPs in the server logs).
If your server supports HTTP/2 and has a connection with a good bandwith then static resources can be loaded really fast without any CDN because all the resources can be loaded in parallel without waiting in a queue.
The real motivation for publishers to implement AMP is that they hope to get better position in search results.
Edit: Disagree? What part isn't true?
An edge cache of an optimized page is plenty fast without preload. Images, in fact, can be preloaded cross domain if that is really needed.
You know it's a mess when the New York Times has to inject a "sorry this video doesn't work on AMP pages, visit our site" message on stories.
Considering we're on the precipice of a global authoritarian-populist cycle, there are non-market consequences to such concentration, too.
WE are on the mercy of few SV companies and whatever they decide or push is our fate.
Publishers are free to implement their own cache and host their own content. AMP is open source and they can modify it however they like.
https://www.wired.com/2016/02/googles-amp-speeding-web-chang...
"…but there’s a big catch: if readers decide to share a link to an AMP page they’ve clicked on through a Google search, the link points to Google.com (for example, google.com/amp/yoursite.com/yourpage/amp), not to your site. A Google spokesperson confirms that there isn’t a way to both have your AMP-optimized appear in Google’s prioritized search listings without having that content hosted on Google’s AMP Cache servers."
1. You can (and must) host AMP content on servers of your own choosing.
2. Google's crawlers ingest your AMP content, validate it, and re-host it in Google's AMP Cache. Bing and other folks run similar crawlers and caches.
3. Google search results will only link to AMP content on Google's own cache.
So yes, you can host your content on your own servers. And you can give people direct URLs to that content. But Google users will only ever see links to the copy of your content that Google hosts; your servers never see that traffic.
There is no way to opt-out and still be considered a valid AMP page.
Disclaimer: I work for Google and have some involvement with AMP.
The worse case I've seen is a site in which every page crashed Mobile Safari without fail regardless of which version you ask for. It was eventually fixed but I never figured out why. If the sites are just running some script without checking then the admins have failed their line of duty.
I'm just going to file another complaint to the EU Antitrust committee otherwise, as this is a simple and clear violation. (Although I doubt my own complaint would be very relevant — all large publishers already have filed such complaints, and Google will be fined for it).
My pages actually increased their loadtime tenfold when I tried them with AMP — they're tested on a HUAWEI IDEOS X3 on 64kbps GPRS. AMP increases load time to over a minute. (On a modern phone, with a modern connection, my pages are obviously also faster — I'm also testing with a Nexus 5X on 100Mbps 4G)
I have the choice between a massively worse user experience, or worse search ranking. And that's a choice that's just not acceptable to me.
Google isn't the only party running an AMP cache.
> Content should remain on the publisher's site.
It does. Its also cached by aggregators, and AMP is designed to take advantage of being accessed from a shared cache.
>
They can offer to do a CDN like CloudFlare, but make it optional.
I want to ensure that not a single bit of my data ever runs through Google's infrastructure, while still getting all the same benefits as if it did.
If Google treats sites different just for using an AMP Cache, then I'll have to send another complaint to the EU Antitrust committee.
My pages actually increased their loadtime tenfold when I tried them with AMP — they're tested on a HUAWEI IDEOS X3 on 64kbps GPRS. AMP increases load time to over a minute. (On a modern phone, with a modern connection, my pages are obviously also faster — I'm also testing with a Nexus 5X on 100Mbps 4G)
I can't just massively increase load time for pages just for a better ranking in search results, this shouldn't even be a choice.
So the browser would still be downloading the exact same HTML document (straight from the publisher's server, how you want it) - just then ignoring all the clutter. Compare to AMP, which AFAICT necessitates serving a whole separate version of the page with only the blessed markup... it reminds me of the bad old days, having a separate mobile site instead of a single responsive design for all devices. All seems rather antithetical to that grand ideal of separating structure and presentation.
HTML6 document is a restricted subset, similar to what you suggest. I would still allow complete design flexibility, and I might even allow a subset of JS, but only for presentation purposes. Definitely not turing complete, and no ajax etc.. Probably I wouldn't allow cross-origin resources with credentials. So you could include an image or stylesheet, but the browser would not send along cookies. What I'm aiming for is a replacement for PDF, something you could read on an ebook, etc.. Just a plain document.
On the other hand, I'd have HTML6 app to be able to use the complete web platform.
Does that happen? If not, it's somewhat telling.
It is the implementation they chose, and it does have speed benefits. But, an edge cache that allows the end user more control, their own domain, an no hijacking header is possible, and would provide a notable speed benefit. If there were a choice between the two, publishers would likely pick the latter.
Only in this weird world of third-party-served-js-ads.
In an ideal world, I wouldn't care about where my content is served from. I just care 1) that many people see it, and if it is commercial 2) that I get money for it. I could just add some ads as inline to my article, served in the same way as my article's illustrations are. Not sure google allows that, though. Wouldn't surprize me if not.
1. There's the HTML/CSS/JS library/subset that's a good framework for building pages that load quickly
2. There's the 'CDN' that integrates with Google Search to preload and 'iFrame' the site in. Google 'has' to host/'iFrame' the content in their own google.com/amp pages because that's the only way to preload a page to make it display instantly.
* Build fast webpages.
The linked article says: "Yes, AMP pages load fast, but you don’t need AMP for fast-loading web pages." Well yes, but people don't build fast webpages without AMP. They could've done all the time, yet webpages got more sluggish over the years.
For example, searching for "Python" returns five pages of results where only two aren't about the programming language. But at the top of the page, bested only by python.org itself, is a huge carousel of 11 AMP stories about snakes in the everglades. These stories also appear in the normal search results, but not until the bottom of page 7.
So somehow the #68 result, "Python hunters eliminate more than 100 snakes from Everglades," got boosted to #2, because rankings #2 through #13 (if you count the AMP carousel) are not available to merely fast and relevant content.
This being the case, I think even if building fast webpages may not allow one to circumvent AMP in the instant, it is still a strong way of removing much of the grounds for its existence.
But Josh descends to hyperbole. I've been both critical and supportive of AMP on here [2], but it's important to not lose sight of the big picture. AMP isn't an effort by Google to kill the open web; it's a technology whose existence was forced by Facebook Instant Articles' meteoric rise, a competitor from a company that doesn't even operate on the level of the open web, but runs a family of products where the data flow is one-way: inbound.
Instant Articles made publishing harder on the web, giving preferential treatment to articles posted within Facebook's walled garden (cf. AMP giving preferential treatment to content that adheres to the AMP spec, the same way they give preferential treatment to content served with TLS). With Instant Articles fizzling a bit [3], AMP's importance as a strategic play is lessened, and we can enjoy its benefits without feeling like we're pawns in a game between two massive content aggregation portals.
Besides, Apple News is the same idea as AMP; I'd be curious how Josh feels about that.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13415625 [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20%22AMP%22&sort=byDat... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14126073
Clicking on one of these AMP results in Google Search will lead to a Google-hosted page with the base URL of "google.com/amp/", which loads an iframe (or equivalent) of the AMP article content. This whole thing takes up the entire viewport, save for a small grey horizontal bar up top, which collapses (hides) with JS if you scroll down far enough, but is otherwise pinned to the top, staying adjacent to the browser chrome.
This AMP navbar, as of time of writing, has the original publisher's domain name in the middle (which isn't a link, just informational text); then on the right side is a link ("chain-link") icon which will produce a small overlay containing the article's original (non-AMP, non-google.com/amp/ link), and a vertical triple-dot button with a link to 'More info'. This 'More info' link takes you to a Google Search Help article [3] (along with a really, really long visit_id as a tracking parameter), which talks about AMP and the Google AMP Cache, says that "The Viewer is a hybrid environment where Google and the third-party webmaster may each collect data about you", links to a few FAQs and the Google privacy policy, and the like. In the past, the navbar was different [4], and its deficiencies where a frequent source of criticism.
In short, Google Search on Mobile serves AMP results out of Google's own AMP Cache in a not-completely-obvious in-place wrapping viewer that tracks your visits, but it's now possible to get original URL [4]. Meanwhile, Cloudflare, currently the only other operator of an AMP cache, offers auto-AMP links [5] for customer domains, and offers an SDK to customize the wrapper-viewer [6] that will surround the articles surfaced for that domain.
Apple News is a client application that combines a feed-reader with articles delivered from Apple News' servers; these latter types of articles are always hosted by Apple [7], and in the beginning the only way to publish to it was to use Apple's APIs to post to Apple News directly [8][9]. Now there's integrations that will consume content out of your CMS and post it to Apple News on your behalf, which makes it easier to use, but doesn't change the fact that the the content is published into Apple's ecosystem.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/02/google-will-now-favor-pages-us... [2] http://imgur.com/a/rggVe [3] https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/7220196 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13582844 [5] https://www.cloudflare.com/website-optimization/accelerated-... [6] https://www.cloudflare.com/website-optimization/amp-viewer-s... [7] https://www.wired.com/2015/06/apple-builds-content-business-... [8] https://help.apple.com/newspublisher/icloud/#/ [9] https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Ge...
AMP is just an alternate HTML framework that prevents certain things, that's all. Not sure why everyone is so eager to opt-in to a less flexible system instead of fixing their existing web presence. All it does is increase the amount of time and resources needed to now maintain effectively 2 different versions of the same site while also losing control over rendering, URL location and privacy.
Also the main reason for slow sites is all the ads - ads which are are usually served by DoubleClick, the biggest ad server on the planet and owned by Google.
To 99% of the businesses I worked with, software development is a singular expense. It's treated like buying a tractor for the farm. Hell, even farming equipment is more generously funded by the buyers for possible future expenses (compared to most software development) -- maintenance, repairs, parts that periodically need replacement, fuel.
For one reason or another, most businesses treat software development like buying a socket wrench from the local store and never even thinking of spending another penny on the developed product in the future. They expect it to run perfectly forever.
It's a sad state of affairs.
Still, maybe it's time the web development in general gets its crap together indeed. One can dream, right?
The other criticisms about how it performs on iOS seem truly secondary, they could easily fix them but we're still left with the far bigger issue.
Additionally, criticisms about iOS having a closed ecosystem seem irrelevant to this. An App Store is one thing, but starting down the path of effectively adding "high speed lanes" to the supposedly free web is scary.
Publishers have to date shown a remarkable inability to grasp the idea that user experience matters. Just about every major online publication is painful to browse on a mobile device, even ones that have embraced responsive design, because of things like slow-loading ads, excessive use of JavaScript, and enormous modal prompts for things like subscription offers and newsletter signups. Every year the situation gets worse. And no publisher appears to be willing to buck the trend; presumably they believe that, as long as everybody else's site is just as bad, doing so would just be leaving money on the table. So the economic incentive for change is not there.
AMP is a terrible idea for a lot of reasons, any one of which would in a sane market make it an instant non-starter. But the state of online publishing demonstrates that it is anything but a sane market; it's a market trapped in a death spiral, and in that situation any idea that seems to offer a way out is going to get some traction. So it is with AMP.
The only way to make AMP (or something like it) irrelevant would be for the publishers to get their houses in order on their own, without the need for external pressure. But their leadership doesn't have the kind of farsightedness such a move would require, and that leaves room for someone like Google to come in and do their jobs for them.
And in the long term, it's high time somebody built a less creepy, better functioning search engine.
I personally don't really recommend StartPage because you can't get away from Google's opinionated ranking on a site that provides Google results.
But in short, use other search engines and they'll get better. Stop giving Google your search behavior, it's what they use to keep themselves on top.
BTW, Cloudflare has an AMP cache as well....
DDG uses multiple sources, including Bing and Yandex. They also have their own efforts like their knowledge graph-type data features, which are open source and can be contributed to.
It's just as good. As others have noted, Google's search is only good when you're signed in. Because they use all that data to personalize the results.
Disabling javascript does fix a lot of it, but then I can't vote on HN, and I like doing that.
Also, Firefox reader view fixes many websites which otherwise render empty with JS disabled for reasons I didn't bother investigating.
I can just get to the page, read it, and then leave. There's no futzing around with:
* long scrolling down "the fold" filled with clickbait in-site links or other unrelated nonsense
* interstitial and overlay ads
* crappy non-mobile interfaces
* "Shared" buttons stickied to the bottom or top of the viewframe
There's still ads around the page (in-content ads between paragraphs and "you may like" or "recommended" ads at the bottom of the page) and navigational elements to browse outside of the AMP page. It's the mobile content consumption experience as it should be.
I use ddg myself and as much as I like it, it's still quite a bit away from Google in quality of search results. Usually it's good enough, but I still get result pages where ddg has nothing I want and appending !g gives me what I want in #1
> !g
bang quite often when I need to really find something
In this light, how do I sell to them the idea that investing in AMP content (same trap different server) will help with rankings/performance where they do not care?
Sadly enough, the Internet is happening inside social networks, Amazon and mobile apps. AMP is late to the party, no?
Back, say, 10-12 years ago it used to be really common for sites to jigger their outgoing links, such that the target site would appear in an iframe underneath a toolbar from the original site. This was widely reviled, and mostly died out, and the fact that Google is reviving it really bothers me.
The only losers in this are those seeking to "curate" the user experience (UX) on their sites, and personally I lump them in with malicious ad peddlers -- to hell with them.
Personally I'm using Google search more because AMP makes things faster for me. It's a win-win for me.
It really does make google search feel broken. Many of the top results no longer "work right".
Ignoring all the other issues of who is in control and whether it's a walled garden and all that other stuff… On iOS it's a terrible user experience. That ALONE would make me hate it.
If anyone gave a shit about Chrome for Android before, AMP might not be necessary.
I think the frustration here is seeing the decay of the open web and the rise of AOL-esque walled gardens in which your Facebooks and your Googles own the access methods, and every other third party is subordinate to them.
These guys at Google are abusing the web in order to prevent you from navigating away from google hosted content (I'm a technical user and it still took me way too long to find that menu in the corner), in much the same way that Facebook apps make it hard to escape their respective walled gardens.
No one's complaining about AMP the web framework — which is the part responsible for the performance and responsiveness.
Unless I am mistaken this parasitic cruft only serves Google, not end users.
Below is quick and dirty program to filter out the above. Replace .com with .cctld as needed.
Requirements: cc, lex
Usage:
curl -o 1.htm https://www.google.com/search?q=xyz
yyg < 1.htm > 2.htm
your-ad-supported-web-browser 2.htm
flex -Crfa -8 -i g.l;
cc -Wall -pipe lex.yy.c -static -o yyg;
%%
[^\12\40-\176]
\/url[?]q=
"http://www.google.com/gwt\/x?hl=en&u="
"&"[^\"]*
%%
main(){yylex();}
yywrap(){}
amphtml does look great in a text-only browser that does not load iframes automatically.
The web as we know it was killed when you couldn't link to a news site because it'd serve ad interstitials (Forbes) or full screen pop-over ads (basically everyone).
I think the real problem is journalists rely on advertising income to do their job. That model requires them to rely on Apple/Facebook/Google for their livelihood, and to focus on sensationalist headlines and quantity over quality (to get ad impressions). One of the most shocking things for me was seeing Buzzfeed have some of the better written pieces in the last year -- all of those stupid "10 best/worst/funniest" type lists provided the ad revenue to do actual journalism that other publications didn't have the budget to do. But it's not clear to me how to break this dependency; for example, UBI might come with strings preventing the publication of pieces critical of the government.
On a more serious note it is extremely frustrating. Everything about the AMP UX on iOS is broken.
For webshops where product discovery is really important and having a fast google search result could (I dont have data to back this up) really drive users to use your webshop instead of the competitors. AMP style pages force developers to focus on what is actually important on the page.
That's pretty much the point. The web was supposed to free us from those kinds of practical constraints - why let Google keep them alive for grubby commercial reasons?
Practical constraints and solutions stem from real world problems. AMP is an attemp to fix broken thing. Yes, internet was created for very different use and with different motivations than what it stands for today. I truly understand the concern of having a big tech behemot take control over the content for monetary gain but I dont really see the problem as a technical one. Whether you use Bing, Google or even DuckDuckGo you rely on someone else to find you stuff and thus give them the control to feed you information they think you want.
The bigger issue is the legistlation and how basic economy works, especially in the states where companies probably yield the most power over the government than in any other place in the world.
This is very welcome. My biggest gripe with AMP was that there was no way out of it.
Wait. I don't know of this feature. For example I attempted to tap my addresss bar on iOS but it just goes to change the address. How do I use this feature?
As Gruber mentions, this works on almost anything that scrolls vertically, not just the browser.
It is a single tap in most other apps though.
I'm curious... What are you basing this on? Is this proven?
Besides, do you really think short term cash is the only thing that publishers should optimize for?
Google ads of course.
Don't you think it's a funny coincidence that this project to "speed up the web" also results in giving more ad revenue to Google?
I honestly don't know this: how exactly are AMP pages monetized? Weren't there articles recently that publishers who went with AMP or Facebook's version saw steep declines in revenue?
I seem to recall that publishers who used the Facebook version saw a decline in revenue, so I think you're right about that point. I don't know about AMP, though.
AMP has an ad component.[1] It seems to have gotten a lot of ad network participation now, but it was pretty limited (i.e. effectively no money via AMP views) last year when I was working for a major content publisher. It's undoubtable that the company lost a lot of ad revenue in exchange for protecting its position in Google search results.
[1]: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/extensions...
Google, which would gain the most benefit from AMP, deserves criticism for potential abuse of their power. Online media, which serve pages with poor performance, deserve criticism for its reluctance to improve their poor UX. AMP, however, hardly deserves criticism, through a perspective of user experience and news distribution.
AMP may look intimidating to the open web philosophy, be tepid approach from a technological point of view. But we need more experiment as it stands: everyone can become a media with the Web, old media is still playing a valuable role in society, online media lack prospects for the future to be profitable enough to invest in journalism. Fighting for the open web is good, but fighting for it without caring about anyone but technological principle is no good.
What does the Javascript file do? Is there an open-source equivalent? If it transmits data to Google, could you instead collect the data server-side and send anonymized data with a cron job once-a-day to Google's endpoint to reduce the slowdown and privacy issues?
It looks like AMP bans all Javascript except for the one Google-provided Javascript file, which provides common UI components:
https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec
"While it does allow styling the document using custom CSS, it does not allow author written JavaScript beyond what is provided through the custom elements to reach its performance goals."
Unless Google's library includes everything, even a simple 'Delete' button requires Javascript if you want to use the right HTTP verb. I'd worry about using anything that leads me into a corner like that.
People loading just 100-200 kbs of fonts to serve 10kb of original content.
If it was implemented in this manner, you could keep your existing URL structure and not be forced onto Google's domain. I'm sure many more developers would be okay with AMP if this was the case.
"Oh, we open source it, you know", seems the common answer.
If an initiative is rolled out from the innards of one of the tech giants, and there are a bunch of other tech giants contributing to the initiative because it is open source, and most of the contributors and maintainers just accidentally happen to be also be employees of the tech giants, then stop and wonder about it for a while. And then reject it. That is, don't participate in the initiative.
Here is why: at the moment, the cost of open sourcing is minuscule for the giants but the benefits are enormous, and surprisingly often leads the entire tech sector down the path of greater oligopoly (Android being an excellent example). Another way to put it is, given none of the tech giants directly compete with each other in their respective core profit centers, open source is becoming a nice little platform (intentional or unintentional) for extending oligopolies.
There is no realistic chance that the open source code can be used by a competitor against the one who proposes the initiative (if you know of a counter-example, I would be happy to hear about it). But, there is every realistic chance that an initiative like AMP could extend a heavy toll on a genuine but small competitor in terms of code compliance (e.g. DuckDuckGo) and put them out of business.
But then, don't we all benefit from the nice byproducts of their technical innovations? In sum total, once you see the reduction in privacy, competition and decentralization of the web, probably not.
Is anyone working on a competing standard?
I care about page weight and have mine render quickly without AMP and without being in Google's clutches. In particular I try to have the page sensibly renderable with the first 10kB or so of content down the wire.
And I try not to have anything critical depend on JavaScript.
If you don't put 12 megs of JavaScript on it and five auto playing video ads… you'd be surprised how fast web pages can be.
This isn't a problem that "needs" solving. It's not like it's impossible or even difficult to make a fast loading pages with the existing technologies. The people who didn't care before or just outsourcing it to someone else who doesn't care about them and everyone's losing in the process.
In theory, someone else could create another standard and write browser extensions to put an icon on links that meet that standard.
The HTML standard doesn't help with this, not by itself, anyway.
> The HTML standard doesn't help with this, not by itself, anyway.
True. But it also doesn't CAUSE it which some people almost seem to be arguing from, as if fat HTML pages are a fait-accompli.
There's probably another factor involved: The people who actually build the sites rarely have final say on their content. They usually report to a VP of marketing who is non-technical and who doesn't care about load time but does want as much bling and ad revenue as possible.
Is that what was happening. It just felt like scroll was spazzing out. Usually I was just trying to push a button near the top of the screen.
I don't really do web dev anymore, but if I was I think I'd be happy about using it.
Maybe a content creator feels differently but I don't have any experience with that.
AMP webpages are fast and responsive. Publishers that don't use AMP now have to make their webpages fast. Competition is good for the user and the web.
AMP as a standard is great: limit javascript to a known set of behaviors, ensure images/etc all have defined sizes so content doesn't jump around... but google's using the benefits of this standard as a trojan horse to route even more web traffic to their servers, enabling them to get better and better analytics and insights to your browsing behavior. (Now all the things users do on your site are visible to google too, even after they've "left" the search results).
The whole thing sets off alarm bells and indicates an overall strategy that's aimed towards moving the web into a google walled garden. There's all sorts of dystopian futures we could imagine here: promote search results that are AMP, while users appreciate the speed benefits, and become less likely to click any non-AMP links, and suddenly every web publisher has to get on the train or lose viewership... so that they can monitor yet more of what we do online, widening their competitive moat, etc.
It's scary stuff and there needs to be a CLEAR separation of the benefits of AMP as a standard, from what google's doing with it.
Keep in mind, AMP pages on google aren't just fast because you're not using bloated javascript, they're fast because:
- The JS that is used is CDN cached and shared with all other AMP sites
- You're loading the content from the same origin (google.com) so no need to establish a new TLS connection, or look up DNS, etc
- Google's servers/networking/etc stack is very fast, faster than what is in reach of most sites
- The new content is loaded into the existing DOM of the search page, which can be much faster
And probably the most damning:
- Google will eagerly-load the contents of the first few results, making them not just fast but 100% instant.
What choice do sites have?
Offer better experiences on their websites and apps, the technology is available but publishers choose to shovel crap in with food and call it beef tenderloin. Now Google is offering something better.
What did you expect Google to do when Apple News Format and Facebook Instant Articles are creeping up? Both offer impressive experiences and this isn't even nearly as impossibly mind-boggling.
AMP is an open standard that any publisher and any search engine can implement and if all search engines get on board then users win so much -- pages load faster, they require much less network bandwidth, they're easier to read. Nobody, absolutely nobody, will have sympathy for publishers after all the bullshit we're being forced to experience both now and historically.
I'm running my own sites, no ads, mininal content.
How do I get the preferred treatment in the Google sesech that AMP pages get again?
(My pages are all tested on a Huawei Ideos X3 on 64kbps GPRS internet. They always load consistently faster than AMP pages)
The only controversial thing here is this: publishers' content is being cached and re-hosted on a platform outside of their control. This is a non-issue because publishers are opting into this system.
Stop supporting AMP, and use something other than Google Search and Chrome today.
AMP HTML uses some stupid Unicode emoji character:
<html >
^ HN filtered out the voltage symbol, bravo.
> AMP HTML is a subset of HTML for authoring content pages such as news articles in a way that guarantees certain baseline performance characteristics.
Source: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec
Basically you have your website serve up your content within a subset of HTML so that your pages have to load faster. JavaScript is permitted but with limited functionality (again, the intent is your website loads quickly).
Also, Google will host your webpage on their servers after crawling your website. When a user clicks on an AMP link from Google's search results, the content will be served up from Google's servers and thus the page will load much faster.
That genie is out of the box, when you decided that you didn't mind a company gatekeeping which software you can install on "your" devices you opened that can of worms, the one where any company can gatekeep anything they want as long as it is "convenient" for most people.
Well, yes. It really is.
Software is ubiquitous now, and that tend to make it more important than basically everything else. It is also a means of expression (not the only one of course, but still). Finally, how software is build can alter how you read the news (start with profanity filters, then block Tienanmen or something).
Google, by contrast, has a far larger share of the search engine market than Apple has of the mobile device market. That means it's more of a concern by default.
However they ship it, they'd still be in an arms race against google to keep AMP pages hidden from Safari users. That doesn't seem like a productive use of anyone's time.
If we are talking about search, you can stop using google by typing bing.com or duckduckgo.com in your url bar any time you want, and every major browser supports changing the default search engine, even Chrome.
You might have valid reasons not to use AMP but Gruber's are merely that he ends up sharing google.com URLs on twitter, it's Google, and it does its own scrolling on iOS.
I'm not sure why your dismissive of the scrolling thing. Having something breaks the feel of the web browser is a really bad idea.
Additionally he's completely right that it breaks other platform conventions that users expect to use. You can't use the share button, you can't tap at the top of the article to jump back to the top.
I can tell you as someone who uses mobile Safari, AMP is incredibly infuriating. It's gotten to the point where I actively avoid AMP search results.
Google has single-handedly broken the way it's search results feel for a number of top sites on iOS, and doesn't seem to care. Further, there is NO OPTION to turn it off.
I would LOVE to have a way to tell mobile Safari not to render the AMP version of the page. Then I could use Google easily again.
And yet, noone cared enough to fix it until now. It's really really hard to sympathize with publishers when they brought this upon themselves by turning their pages into giant autoplaying video infested places.
Instead they invented their own thing which caused you to stay on Google sites using Google services to read other peoples content… and said they did it to speed things up.
It feels like that was either justification after the fact or that was with the original engineer had in mind but was not the point of the project once it got approved.
All those horrible infested pages? That's why I run an ad blockers, use RSS, and stopped reading a lot of sites. As every publisher got more and more aggressive other people were going to start doing it too. Eventually, I think it would've had an effect.
This feels a lot more like when Birders (or was it B&N?) outsourced their web sales to Amazon. Remember how well that went? Outsourcing a key part of your experience to another company it's a bad idea, especially if they like being in control of everything.
There already is a penalty for slow-loading pages, but you make a good point that the penalty could be increased to the point where publishers would be forced to adapt accordingly. However, outside of the news ecosystem, that would end up penalizing a much larger base of content creators who don't have the means and infrastructure to handle this.
To say that "well users who have good content should also get their shit together" rings a bit hollow, especially on HN, where technical/deep/interesting articles get upvoted to the front page only to crash from the traffic. If authors of those articles/sites can't do it, then it's a problem for most folks.
The problem is that Google took this in such and embrace-and-extend direction that seems to benefit them and give them a lot more power than they had before. And I already think Google is way too powerful.
Their solution annoys me and creeps me out more than the problem did. By a large factor. I don't like them being so deeply involved at this kind of level. If they are going to do something, I can't think of something I would like for them to do other than just tuning the penalty.
A small penalty devalues gaming the way google measure the speed.
I had to worsen JPEG image quality to get good score for a website in Google's PageSpeed tools [1] because our management believes it affects search rankings.
That tool is awful. I would never follow Google's recommendations on my own site. The compressed versions of images it suggests one should use have visible artifacts.
AMP does the same thing. Many sites don't have resources to convert their content to AMP pages and they will get worse positions in search results.
Sure it is, but no one has been doing it and if it wasn't for AMP, it would've stayed a slow hell for users, if not getting even worse. If you've got a better suggestion to motivate all these news sites to spend thousands rewriting their website from scratch and optimizing it, go for it. But right now, this is the best we've got.
It's not perfect, but it has actually been making huge strides in solving common issues over the past year.
You say it's been solving problems, but for me it's only been causing them. It's made it significantly harder to use Google search on iOS. Also the slow pages? Reader mode on safari has worked fantastically on them for years. Slow pages wasn't even a problem for me because of reader mode. Not only were they faster they were also easier to read because they didn't have crazy styling applied to them.
I kind of wonder if this whole thing is an accidental android/iOS litmus test. People who use android don't seem to have problems with it because the experience sounds good there.
That's NOT my experience using Mobile Safari. I have a literally considered switching my search engine over it. I've dug through all the Google account settings looking for a way to turn it off. If someone put some sort of content blocker in the App Store that would disable AMP? I buy it in a heartbeat.
Works well enough on Android Chrome. Irony is, AMP, Android, Chrome and Google Search are all Alphabet (Google) products. I am personally all for platform portability, but certainly it's been Apple who have been pushing for One Closed Ecosystem since the introduction of iPhone, and Apple users have been very happy about it and playing down the vendor lock-in issue - some even as far as claiming it desirable that The One Benevolent Vendor control everything (note that real Chrome is not available on App Store simply because Apple has decided that iOS users should only use the Safari rendering engine!)
Now that there's a shard in the walled garden, another player seemingly using the very same tactics as Apple, it's frustrating to see the same users complain about how much it sucks to be disenfranchised from modern computing because they use a different vendor - only this time Apple is the "other" vendor.
Should Google succeed to marginalize iOS (assuming this is intentional and not just a bug in Safari), I bet many of these folks will soon be writing about how great it's that Google controls everything, how Material embodies the latest hip in UX and how the new Pixel has become so integral to their daily life.
I don't think they're actually are a lot of Apple fan is claiming that the one benevolent company should control everything as you posited earlier your post.
I'll also tell you this: I was an Apple user long ago. I would back to the platform in the early 2000's, years before the iPhone came out. I distinctly remember what it was like to be on the minority platform that no one bothered to support. In many ways, OS X is still like that today.
I don't think you'll get a bunch of people switching over to the "winning" side and claiming google is better just because it's "winning".
I see a lot of problems with what they're doing, outside of simple issues of my personal taste.
Also, you can complain about whatever you don't like about Apple, but they NEVER tried to break the web. If anything they did a huge service by making a browser that was not IE6 extremely important and drastically hastening the demise of flash.
Google can do whatever it wants on android, my problem is that they can use the web to force people into the rest of their ecosystem that's removing the one big open thing that made it possible to use Apple computers back in the "bad old days" of having a little software. By the mid to thousands people use the Internet enough that switching to a Mac wasn't a big deal because so much of what you wanted to do involve the web browser. If google "fixes" that, they now have a very heavy hand over all of computing .
Not of course directly, as that would sound obviously fanatical, but the walled garden is almost universally cited as the "best thing" about iOS compared to more open platforms like Android.
This recent article in MacWorld invokes it at least five times, saying it makes iPhone more secure, more private, more user-friendly, more uniform, more polished etc:
http://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/iphone/iphone-vs-android-5...
Those are all magnificent adjectives, and unquestionably makes the Apple user's life great. (And surely then, if Google wants to make life great for Android users, they are perfectly entailed to it as well.)
But from 3rd party developer's perspective, I can assure the more open platform is better. Google is enhancing the experience for stock Android users, but if you don't like it you can write and publish a competing search engine or browser. On iOS, you don't have a chance to replace the browser, and I bet had Apple actually developed a search engine of their own, like Microsoft with Bing, you'd never been even able to use Google on an iPhone..
I'm not sure that follows.
But anyway, if being more open is a good thing then Google purposefully trying to shove everyone into their various products and ecosystems seems precisely the opposite of "open" to me.
I was never really a big fan of chrome but when you Google released it and the web started getting a lot better that was fine with me, it was even nice. Same thing with many of the other things they've done.
Now it seems to me like they often try and corral or cajole users into using other parts of their ecosystem by making other people stuff broken in unnecessary ways when you try and use one of their "open" products. It's starting to look very 90s Microsoft to me with a different spin on it. And that worries me. And they're big enough/powerful enough that they can get pretty far and do a lot of damage before it becomes extremely obvious to a lot of people.
True, of course. But I think many like the fact that Apple is not an advertising company, that Apple has a transparent business model, that Apple (for now) defends its users' privacy.
Obviously its not a third party native plugin, so it should output some kind of HTML5 content to play in browsers, even if it was just a canvas view.
Also it's been there since iOS 1.0 so quite a while now.
iOS is FULL of handy little things like that, but I'm not sure many of them are ever explained. You just have to stumble across it or read about it somewhere like reviews of the new versions of iOS.
Did you know in mail (and many other places) you can swipe table rows left or right for quick actions? Marco Arment recently changed Overcast to make features more visible because it seems many people, including power users, weren't even aware that gesture existed.
Now that I have an iPhone 7 re force-touch stuff can be very handy. But I forget it exists for weeks on end because I went so many years without it and it's totally hidden.
Plus it's a bit fiddly.
So that's what that was all about. I noticed the changes because for me they reduced the usability of Overcast massively. The features I used the most were resuming the current podcast, playing a different podcast, and setting a sleep timer. All of these things now take double the taps they did before, with much smaller controls that are hard to hit in the car. You tap a podcast and some miscellaneous options jump out. Ugh, when I tap a podcast I want it to open and start playing! The sleep timer durations move around, so it takes 7 presses and some squinting to set a 25-minute timer. By this time my retinas are seared because the UI for that is white even in night mode.
I know full well about swiping in tables and I'd love the old behaviour to be an option. The author could probably make some good coin by making it available as an IAP.
My personal experience demonstrates that the latter statement is not the case. People are indeed not making performant HTML5 without Google's help. It might be physically possible, but it's not actually happening.
Nothing should be doing its own scrolling. Everything should let the native scroll do its thing. Computers work for me and should work the way I expect. I expect the default native scroll.
Apple's response was (surprisingly) to make the default scrolling like the overflow scrolling. So, with the next Safari release all pages will scroll like AMP pages. Hope Gruber is happy then :)
So, whenever I've seen AMP, I've just clicked on the link to get the hell out of it.
But technically, you can download the source and/or write your own code, compile and install on your iOS device without jailbreaking or going through the AppStore. It's a hassle, sure, but doable.
Security is becoming EXTREMELY important, although it was already pretty important.
Apples very strict (occasionally draconian) app model on iOS is one of the reasons it has so few problems with the software destroying the system or viruses or other such things. There's a reason Microsoft is eyeing it jealously for Windows. That kind of heavy sandboxing makes exploit much much more difficult.
Of course, it also makes good business sense for both Apple and third party developers as it keeps piracy to a minimum (though I'm sure a subset of 3rd party developers might find skipping the 30% Apple cut valuable)
Depends on how you define noteworthy and large. The xcode backdoor thing was in 500.000.000 downloads.
Also, don't forget the whole xcode backdoor fiasco happened because people were installing side-loaded xcode distributions instead of getting it from the mac store. So even where sideloading is and should remain allowed - on the mac - people will click big red "I know what I'm doing" buttons without knowing what they're doing. And that's for people who really should know what they're doing - developers!
Gruber, not Scott. He's not talking about the original writer, but for the guy that quoted him.
This is where he says his argument is rubbish because he supports iOS.
Seems legit.
First of all, that's an ad hominem. If publication independence is important, then it remains important whether Gruber is hypocritical about it or not.
Second, one might want apps to be curated (for the better experience), but stand for independence from control and censorship when it comes to journalism and personal commentary.
And indeed, one can think that "newspaper publication independence" is really far more important than software publication independence. The main difference being of course that Apple controlling apps is a huge inconvenience to those being rejected, but not so much to the users (especially with 1.5 million other apps to chose from). Whereas someone controlling the news is bad for the readers.
>That genie is out of the box, when you decided that you didn't mind a company gatekeeping which software you can install on "your" devices you opened that can of worms, the one where any company can gatekeep anything they want as long as it is "convenient" for most people.
Actually there's nothing (no law of physics or history for example) to force someone being ok with the one (company control of its walled app store) to be ok with other (company controlling content publication). You can be angry and/or stop and/or speak against any combination of the two.
Not all people are good. And not all smart people argue logically.
Which is precisely the case here.
Still, I understand the point of those who consider news publishing independence to be more important than software publishing independence. But I think they may be missing the bit of irony (regardless of AMP) that Google is still the search engine they use to find those news, Google may as well delete a full domain from their search results and make a site disappear into oblivion. But at least Google-search has been forced -in some cases- to keep some level of neutrality there. Apple is just freely deleting and adding whatever they want to iOS/App-store, with some of their apps having access to APIs no other app can (e.g. Safari), which is as monopolistic as software gets.
"That genie is out of the box, when you decided that you
didn't mind a company gatekeeping which software you can
install on "your" devices you opened that can of worms, the
one where any company can gatekeep anything they want as
long as it is "convenient" for most people."Essentially, any time a public figure says something, there's an implicit, "I have been truthful before, I am being truthful now," leading the statement. If someone's opinions are self-inconsistent, it's important to know that one can discount that implied statement.
I agree! It's a poison in the well lazy people use to discredit something they don't like without thinking about it.
However, in this particular instance it raises questions of whether or not Gruber is arguing in good faith. It lends credence to accusations that editorial independence might not be his overriding concern.
Technically it's an argument from hypocrisy, more commonly known as "Tu Quoque".
Sorry, just get a bit anal about people confusing different fallacies because it makes it hard for some people to understand =P
The previous submission was older than the threshold to be considered a duplicate, which is why it went through on its own.
People have been criticising AMP for all of the reasons mentioned in this pointless article for many months prior.
But he has a link blog, he saw a article he wanted to share, and he added his thoughts as he always does.
And if people listen this time now that we've all had experience of AMP being around for a while ? Sounds good to me.