I rarely end up in AMP pages on my mobile, but when it happens I immediately feel like I stepped on a turd, and promptly backtrack / close the tab before it hijacks my back button, half the screen, standard controls (including doing something weird to scrolling) and other unpleasantries like banners whose "x" somehow overlaps my browser's bars, and are therefore out of reach (and said browser bars somehow do NOT autohide when scrolling, unlike on normal pages)
Getting AMP results from Google search has been one of the drivers leading me to switch to DDG, so congrats Google, one less customer.
A man can dream.
Apple sells huge amounts of ads, I believe it's the fastest growing part of the business right now. Estimates are $5 billion in advertising revenue in 2021, with one projection of $20 billion annually within 3 years. In addition to this, Google pays them $15 billion to be the default search engine and sell ads.
https://www.ft.com/content/074b881f-a931-4986-888e-2ac53e286...
They're being paid handsomely, by Google:
> In 2020, The New York Times reported that Apple receives an estimated $8-12 billion per year in exchange for making Google the default search on its devices. According to one analyst, Google's payment to Apple in 2021 to maintain this status quo may have reached up to $15 billion.
1. https://www.macrumors.com/2022/01/05/google-pays-apple-stay-...
Apple sells ads on search indirectly via Google. (Google pays Apple to be the default search engine.)
Google’s payment to Apple is bigger than the revenue Apple makes from the Apple Watch.
There is sadly not a version or equivalent on macOS, but Christian has confirmed it is in-development.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amplosion-redirect-amp-links/i...
P.S. Pairs well with PiPifier to bypass YouTube not allowing picture-in-picture or playing in the background without a subscription, and a good ad blocker.
I never understood why AMP gets so much hatred from end-users. I understand why publisher hate it (it takes away control), and I understand the monopoly concerns, but for me, as an end-user, 99% of the times, the AMP version is better: faster, with less of the annoyances you described. As for privacy, these 99% are loaded with Google ads and analytics anyways, so not much of a win there. I don't know what your configuration is, what kind of ad-blockers you are using, but I never met the horrors people make AMP to be.
And sure enough, there are sites that are better than any AMP sites, but these almost never have an AMP version. So for me, AMP makes terrible sites a little less terrible, and good sites unchanged.
But AMP pages are often worse - things like getting cut-down pages with the normal navigation missing or stuff like that. And it breaks URL sharing - if I want to share a link, I just want the regular link, not one with AMP crap in it, but often cutting out the AMP part to try and reconstruct the original URL just doesn't work...
So I've never found it better but only worse, so understandably it just annoys me. If it is just that my tracking and ad blocking is making all the difference, then AMP clearly isn't actually solving the actual issue...
If it did not do that I could care less.
And here lies the problem. Eventually, these two 'annoyances' will become much bigger than that. The biggest threat, imo, is that these will lead to news organization, journalists, and credible publishers to eventually close up shop as they receive less of the share of revenues.
I do agree with your point about AMP sites generally being a much smoother experience. But at what cost?
Multi-Account Containers
Temporary Containers
Sidebery
It is a cliche but you are not Google’s customer. You are their product. If you don’t find AMP compelling they don’t want to serve you ads anyway.
So yes, it is a loss for Google.
Like that time Brave replaced links to a site with their own affiliate links? Yeah, I no longer trust them.
The issue was about address bar input autocomplete for two domains, binance.us and binance.com, along with keywords which all browsers offer several possible autocompletions for, we autocompleted by default not just via dropdown suggestion, with referral code attribute identifying us (not the user) to Binance at end of domain name. We fixed this right away and made nothing off of it. But it was a blunder for sure.
Mozillas effectiveness at diverting/absorbing/stopping other community initiatives that could actually impact google - worth the dollars from google's point of view.
DDG sounds like a promising alternative.
Regardless, it's already in their tool box because they make the browser.
They could be re-writing urls and not showing you, if they wanted to. And as long as no one notices, you can keep doing it.
Unfortunately, switching to a different search engine does not prevent you from ever stepping onto AMP again. For example all links in the mobile version of Twitter used to be AMP until recently: https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/19/22791002/twitter-amp-ios...
I have always suspected that the current Brave CEO Brendan Eich was a victim of a malicious campaign intended to get him removed from Mozilla (which he co-founded, and later become a CEO of), because he would have been more vocal against Google in Mozilla, and wouldn't have been happy to let the Firefox codebase stagnate while everyone in Mozilla was content with the millions of dollars they were getting from Google. (His religious beliefs / political ideology was just an excuse and just made him an easy target).
Edit: I am not endorsing Brave browser either, as there are some questionable privacy issues with it.
Even more privacy-respecting options like Vivaldi make their money from search deals, and as much as they try to build their model to be privacy respecting, Brave is still an ad agency.
Next to no one is actually building browsers for a subscription or some other model in that vein. It'd be really hard to get an appreciable userbase that way.
I'm not a fan of them adding this and switching it on, but it's easily disabled...
> Click on the hamburger menu and then select Settings
> Click on Privacy and Security in the sidebar and scroll to Address Bar — Firefox Suggest
> Select or deselect the checkbox for contextual suggestions to turn the feature on or off
> Select or deselect the checkbox for “occasional sponsored suggestions”
Features that should come out on Mozilla will instead come out of Brave...
There are still things about brave that confuse me... like the browser feature that allows giving crypto to content providers...
but as someone who loathes AMP... I support this feature.
Brave sells ads. They get $X normal money from it. The ads are delivered from a local catalog downloaded in bulk (the same way safe browsing blocklists are, for example) and matched on device.
If you opt in to see Brave's ad popups, you get a cut from the revenue those popups generate.
Brave gives this cut as BAT - they buy the coins from the open market.
Brave has a built-in tipping service where you can tip people with BAT. If you do, Brave transfers BAT from your wallet to the tippee (and Brave takes a cut from the transaction).
Tippee has BAT that they can sell because there's at least one buyer of BAT on the market: Brave.
It seems like a sensible system overall, but my specifics may be wrong.
Google removed ClearURLs from the chrome add-ons store because (I wish I were making it up) the extension's description was too detailed: https://www.ghacks.net/2021/03/25/the-curious-case-of-clearu...
Brave implementing this, while nice, is basically a nothingburger.
Extensions can certainly deliver this type of functionality in large part, but you have to [run an extension]. You need to ran an extension process (with its additional overhead). You need to make sure Google doesn't swoop-in with breaking changes between manifest versions. Then you have to make sure the extension is permitted in the Web Store, and not removed over something as silly as a detailed description.
By delivering this functionality natively, Brave offers a more reliable and efficient solution to the problem of AMP.
They've actually been pushing to confuse that boundary even more since 2019, with their Signed Exchanges specification[0][1]. In essence, when you (unintentionally) visit an AMP page from Google Search, the URL typically starts with google.com/amp/websiteyouwantedtogoto.com. Signed Exchanges is essentially a way to drop the "google.com/amp/" bit, as demonstrated by one of the animations on [0].
Even Cloudflare supported this and rolled it out on their free tier[2].
[0]: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/04/instant-lo...
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/16/18402628/google-amp-url-p...
The new system adds verification that the content is exactly what was intended by the original site, despite being served through a cache, so the user agent is no longer lying about which website the user is visiting. Sure, the data was fetched from Google, but that's not the important part. It's been verified to have originated from the server shown in the address bar.
I am pretty skeptical, however, given the way Google will (ab)use this.
If you do introduce such signals into your search ranking in the future, should we assume you have bad intent?
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amplosion-redirect-amp-links/i...
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.
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.
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.
Any news on that?
I don't know WTF they're doing to render but they tried to be too clever.
Google has 500+ staff working on that codebase. When they finally annoy Google and they decide to rewrite the license for future versions, will Brave be able to keep up?
[1]: It was a little more complicated than just "money grab": https://freedomben.medium.com/centos-is-not-dead-please-stop...
[2]: Pre-empting the inevitable "but the GPL", Red Hat goes above and beyond the requirements of the GPL and could make it way harder to build. Also a huge important chunk of the distro is BSD/MIT/Apache/etc. Without that the GPL'ed only stuff would never be a feasible distro anyway
So the fact Chromium is (mostly) open source (Chrome is most certainly not) is certainly not charity or the goodness of their hearts. It is the work of idealistic individuals like Lars Knoll who gave us this among other things like Qt.
This is also true for a lot of other Google projects like Android.
This isn't remotely true. Most of Chromium code is BSD-3-Clause.
> have been notorious in close-sourcing bits when they are able (like the DevTools WebAssembly debugging tools
I'm not a fan of that either, but to be fair it's a Chrome extension[1], not part of Chrome.
> and a ton of other stuff).
Like what? The trend has generally been the other way. Flash was removed, PDFium was released. Video codecs? But they've always been that way.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cc%20%20-devtools-...
So... they "standardised" it.
Hilariously, OOXML as generated by MS Office is not the standard version by default. The standard version has different XML namespaces and even slightly different capabilities. You can choose this format in Save As, but nobody does.
https://wptavern.com/amp-has-irreparably-damaged-publishers-...
amp.dev does make a tiny out of context mention at the bottom of the page, that Google runs the AMP CDN.
But overall it's obvious that the AMP Project trying to hide it's Googleyness by being "Open JS Foundation", which itself is a corporate trade group hijacking the word "Open".
Here's a good sample set (AMP posts on Reddit, sorted (roughly) by popularity):
Think websites that do news, celebrity gossip, music, games and movies.
"AMP HTML documents MUST...contain a <script async src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script> tag inside their head tag" [1]
Meaning, "Your content must load and run some Google controlled javascript, that does who-knows-what to your content and end users".
In the past, that's included injecting a big header that pushes your content down, hijacking swipe events on your page, an [X] button that looked like it would delete the AMP banner header, but instead navigated away from your page back to google, etc.
[1] https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/learn/spe...
The only difference is that it doesn't pass Amp validator, which is necessary for the Bing search result icon. Developers have requested the feature for the Amp validator to include self hosting but it hasn't been added yet (or have any plans to AFAIK).
[1] https://gist.github.com/mdmower/b56e94f0dc36beafb825b0c5e31f...
When I found out about this a few months ago this was the quickest purchase I have made on the App Store in a long time. I despise AMP and how Google has infected the internet with it.
Told all my friends about it, even offered to pay for it for them if they wished. Anything to help AMP die.
Edit: not sure why I got downvoted. I'm asking a genuine question because I'm always looking for google alternatives, and firefox has been disappointing lately.
Brave does come with Brave Rewards, and optional component which enables users to participate in privacy-preserving advertising (ads are matched locally, on your device). Users who opt-in receive 70% of the associated revenue for ads they see. Rewards are delivered in the form of BAT (and ERC-20 token), which can be kept, or gifted to content creators across the Web as a means of support.
The other 30 percent goes right to Brave's pockets. In other words, they directly profit off of showing you advertisements.
> Rewards are delivered in the form of BAT (and ERC-20 token), which can be kept, or gifted to content creators across the Web as a means of support.
*only if those creators have an ERC-20 wallet. Many creators (like Tom Scott) have had their likeness appropriated without their consent to advertise this monetization scheme, despite the fact that they have no intention of ever using the service. As such, Brave dangles their ad revenue over their head, refusing to pay out in anything other than their own altcoin. It's a scummy design, arguably many times worse than the act of advertising in the first place.
I hate ads, and I go to extreme lengths to stop them and the scummy behavior they inspire. That's why I can't support Brave in good conscience.
Since then networks & phones got faster, a lot faster, and the difference maybe isn't worth the cost anymore. Also I think the amp restrictions have greatly relaxed, making amp just as slow? But "single worst thing"? Hardly. At launch it delivered and big time, the UX experience was night & day.
SXG and WebBundle basically help map that trick out into the browser's domain, rather than some nasty restrictive JS library. It allows eliminating the whole megabyte-sized supersystem of JS nonsense that makes up the AMP library and having just plain ol' regular HTML/JS, while still netting most of the performance benefits of the old approach.
Mobile networks may have improved but the speed of light has not, and so these techniques still have a place in contemporary networking.
If AMP is genuinely a way to enhance online user experiences, then make it opt-in, instead of the current no-way-to-opt-out.
- Users who are concerned about AMP can use Brave to bypass Google's infrastructure
- Users for whom AMP is a benefit can continue to use it
- Everybody wins
Your thought experiment is equivalent to "What happens when Google no longer indexes the open web," and I think the answer is "Bing takes Google's place."
"Google falsely told publishers that adopting AMP would enhance load times, but Google employees knew that AMP only improves the [redacted] and AMP pages can actually [redacted] [redacted] [redacted]. In other words, the ostensible benefits of faster load times for cached AMP version of webpages were not true for publishers that designed their web pages for speed. Some publishers did not adopt AMP because they knew their pages actually loaded faster than AMP pages."
"Google also [redacted] of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one second delays in order to give Google AMP a [redacted] [redacted] slows down header bidding, which Google uses to turn around and denigrate header bidding for being too slow."
And of course, the reason they did all this:
"Google also designed AMP to force publishers to route rival exchange bids through Google’s ad server so that Google could continue to peek at rivals’ bids and trade on inside information. Third, Google designed AMP so that users loading AMP pages would make direct communication with Google servers, rather than publishers’ servers. This enabled Google’s access to publishers’ inside and non-public user data. AMP pages also limit the number of ads on a page, the types of ads publishers can sell, as well as enriched content that publishers can have on their pages."
https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...
If a publisher simply uses Google Amp on their own site to display websites, then it can be slower.
They slowed the non-AMP ads because they didn't want loading them to interfere with the content the user was interested in reading.
I may be switching browsers.
I'm mostly happy with Firefox but not entirely. I used brave years ago but wanted to support an open web by supporting competitive software. I've been looking at brave more recently because the web doesn't care and Firefox has made some questionable decisions lately (like pocket and suggested results from sponsors and the turning red ad... which is a good movie but a terrible move by Firefox). I use brave on my phone and I'm pretty happy with it and I hate amp links. This is a compelling change for me.
It only continues to exist as long as Google deems Chromium based browsers a viable means of eliminating worries of antitrust legislation, as only Google employees make direct code contributions.
The same argument can also be made for Firefox since a sizeable portion of their funding comes from Google, but at least they're developing a separate rendering engine.
That is more conducive to a "open web" built on "competitive software" than everyone using Blink and the standards being driven by Googles whimsy.
>what if AMP is actually a good thing?
People said this when AMP was first announced too.
Good for people with lives comfortable enough to be so off-guard that this didn't set off any alarm bells; but businesses are not your friends.
Thankfully with the benefit of time and hindsight the Texas Attorney General has documented some of the catches for us: https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...
I remember previously that when I was visiting an AMP link (example: https://www.google.com/amp/s/woodworkersworkshop.co.uk/amp/v...) it was taking me to google.com and displaying a bar on top of the page. Right now google's servers return HTTP 302 redirection and redirect me to the actual page. I'm located in Switzerland. Did something change recently?
Sometimes here in Iran AMP is a lifesaver for us. Almost every single useful website/service is banned here due to government’s mass censorship (unbelievably, including tech news websites, some wikis, some regular Linux repos, tweeter, FB, YouTube, and even DuckDuckGo!) and AMPs might help you visiting a webpage in case your VPN doesn’t work properly.
PS: Google services are not filtered here.
AMP is presented as "the web on a diet", and AMP's speed advantage supposedly achieved by its clever and enforced constraints. Protecting us irresponsible web developers from coding slow pages. Sounds believable, sounds good.
Problem is, that's not at all the reason AMP is fast. It's fast because as you scroll through Google's search results on mobile, AMP pages are preloaded as you scroll by them. Then you click one and its instantly there, because it was preloaded.
Which is something Google does not do for non-AMP pages, for "privacy reasons". Which is quite rich when you force users of a publication to consume it via Google in the case of an AMP page. Anyway, this is why an AMP page has a 3-5s head-start compared to any other non-AMP page.
As more and more people notice the blatant lie that is AMP "performance", here comes the next manipulative tactic. They show some vulnerability.
"OK OK, maybe this wasn't the proper 'standard' way to do it, but we were in a rush to solve the performance crisis".
The performance "crisis" for which there seems little internal Google consensus, as every single fucking of their own products violate best practices or actively contribute to it (Google tag manager), yet never get a ranking penalty, but I digress.
This next part is a stroke of genius. What really happened here is that Google failed to fully trick the user. They want the user to believe they are on domain.abc whilst in reality they are on google.com. They tried all kinds of hacky glitchy methods to conceal reality but could never make it water tight.
So by admitting to some error and promising to improve their game, they'll now use the standardized approach: signed exchanges.
Good guy Google "listened" to criticism by now implementing a standard that allows them to FULLY trick the user, as it's built right into the browser. So they'll be back.
So whenever Google tries to sell something as good (speed, web standards), know how full of deceit they are. The other tactic is "open source", as if that means anything.
You know what the real disappointment is though? The complete lack of regulation. How on earth can a company that is a monopolist in search, browsers, analytics AND advertising do an obvious power grab like this in the open and just fully get away with it, not a care in the world?
We need modernized digital regulation, drastically.
It's a publicly traded company (which makes rich people richer AND funds our retirement plans). It's simply optimizing its feedback loops. Any publicly traded company gets more and more evil as it extracts more and more value.
To change this, we'll have to recognize how ubiquitous of a utility for all walks of life the internet has become. And begin thinking about certain aspects of it in the same way we do other public utilities.
^(.+\.)?amp\..+\.com$
^(.+\.)?ampproject\.org$
The banality of evil
Such a lot of wasted talent.
Brave is also fighting another fight with Google, this time with the Brave for Android browser, where Google has decided that all users want to have Tab Groups. The latest status is that users of the Brave browser for Android still can't get the old Cascade Layout back yet.
More on https://community.brave.com/t/add-tab-cascade-layout-back-to...
https://apps.apple.com/de/app/amplosion-redirect-amp-links/i...
Where AMP could impact things is for the publisher. Publishers are able to verify their domains/properties, and receive BAT contributions from Brave users visiting their content. If that publisher is having their content served through Google's domain, that would impact their ability to receive support from visitors.
Another reason why I'm happy to use Brave both on desktop and especially on mobile.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/woodworkersworkshop.co.uk/amp/v...
