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Comment by nomilk | Hacker News Reader

My main gripe with AMP may seem pedantic or even petty, but it's the way it messes with the URL. Copying and sharing or saving a URL is fundamental to web, and AMP makes me have to mess around to get that standard URL. It's about as small as first world problems get, but it's annoying all the same.

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This bothers me greatly too and is my biggest gripe. I understand it's hard to build something like amp without that, but I think it will have unfortunate reverberations for many years to come. Especially if at some point Google pulls the plug on Amp. Will all those amp links suddenly die?

It's neither pedantic nor petty - I find it so annoying too. It's like a car wash operator placing an unwanted sticker on my windshield.

Google doesn't want you to use URLs. Google wants you to use Google. Makes sense.

It's about as small as first world problems get, but it's annoying all the same.

This logic needs to stop. We may as all well live in mud huts. Then we can have "real problems". You can presume privilege is your problem, or, we can continue to strive for better conditions always as a culture. Low standards will lead you exactly where you belong, your mud hut.

[Google employee, opinions are my own]

This was 'fixed' by Signed Exchanges[0] which sites can implement. This is (imho) a cool new web tech that got drowned out in the AMP noise.

[0] https://web.dev/signed-exchanges/

Last I checked, this feature is paywalled behind specific certificate authorities.

Any news on that?

I don't work in this space and hadn't heard of it this. A quick search suggests LetsEncrypt and Mozilla are intentionally not implementing support: https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/cansignhttpexchanges/153...

Thank you for the reply, I was kindof expecting that this would play out as such. I am very excited for the future of browsers and web protocols, but some of them are so exclusive and heavy-handed by Google that I worry.

Google needs to continue their developer relations efforts. I think they want to be on the same team as "us", from a technology perspective. Perhaps if only for the sake of adoption.

Google wanting things, (ab)using their position as the most popular browser to get an implementation out there before there is a standard, then getting surprised that others don't want it. FLoC all over again.

It's a thing only Google wants, so it'll be an interesting flex of their monopoly powers if it goes anywhere

Very similar to what they tried and failed to do with FLOC

I suspect Google is solidly in too many anti-competitive crosshairs around the world to be able to pull anything like this off.

PS: AMP is such as ludicrous over-reach by Google that I think it'll be one of the key pieces of evidence used to demonstrate the need to break up Alphabet into separate companies.

Maybe you should reach out internally and ask if it's really worth it?

There's always a point where the Government steps in. Don't think you're immune. Don't think that just because you've gotten away with it thus far that anything you do will be tolerated by the public forever.

Doesn't sound petty to me.

Even without AMP, Chrome is dedicated to hiding URLs from users.

My main gripe is that it just simply fails to render things. About half of the time I'll be scrolling down a page and the text will just stop rendering, it becomes a blank white screen.

I don't know WTF they're doing to render but they tried to be too clever.

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