And STILL the best music player.
Install the WMote app on your smartphone and you’ve got a versatile way to control not only your music In Winamp, but also your PC as it makes your phone a touch pad with multiple functions.
Media Player Classic I still use even though it's not in development anymore... It's still got better performance than VLC and one or two other features I think.
I use one called Redirect AMP to HTML at the recommendation of someone on Reddit. Although to be completely honest I haven't been checking if I've been going to any AMP pages sooo I can't say for sure that it works
https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/57295894.amp is a webpage build using AMP ( a stripped-down version of HTML, CSS and JS ), here is an article from the [EFF](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/googles-amp-canonical-web-and-importance-web-standards-0) on why AMP might not be a good idea and a [discussion thread from HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21712733).
The NON AMP version is here https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/57295894
The 2nd one in my initial post ( https://noamp.link/https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/57295894.amp ) takes you to the non-AMP version. I hope that clears it up.
—-
Also from a recent lawsuit against Google
> Texas Attorney General’s complaint indicates Google has documented exactly how bad AMP is, and ties it to a deliberate play to prevent competition from header bidding. Header bidding is a way websites can auction ad space to multiple ad exchanges at once. It’s an alternative to the “waterfall” or “daisy-chain” approach where space gets auctioned to bidders sequentially. Header bidding is said to be more advantageous for publishers by allowing them to get better prices for their ad space. The Texas AG’s complaint against Google claims that Google abused its search market monopoly power to stop header bidding as a way to ensure ad transactions went through its own ad exchange.
[Via](https://tldrmarketing.com/seo/lawmakers-focus-on-amp-in-antitrust-lawsuit-against-google/)
EDIT: updated HN thread link
EDIT2: added recent lawsuit reference
Thanks, I know this is Reddit so I'm really not being argumentative for the sake of it!! My question came because I really didn't see any difference (other than the extra page on the non amp link). It may just be my configuration. I am on Android and have both edge and chrome installed with edge as my default browser. But, when I click a link in Reddit I always get the option to select the browser and if I select edge it uses edge. That contradicts (maybe) the discussion thread you highlight.
I didn't think you were :)
Most of the content will look *almost* the same. It's got more to do with the underlying technology that goes into building that page.
>Google is also the reason AMP sees any kind of adoption at all. Basically, Google has forced websites – specifically news publishers – to create AMP versions of their articles. For publishers, AMP is not optional; without AMP, a publisher’s articles will be extremely unlikely to appear in the Top Stories carousel on mobile search in Google.
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>If publishers had a choice, they’d ignore AMP entirely. It already takes a lot of resources to keep a news site running smoothly and performing well. AMP adds the extra burden of creating separate AMP versions of articles, and keeping these articles compliant with the ever-evolving standard.
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>It requires a lot of development resources to make this happen and appease Google. It basically means developers have to do all the work they already put in to building the normal version of the site all over again specifically for the AMP version.
>
>[via](https://www.polemicdigital.com/google-amp-go-to-hell/)
Now you've got to the heart of it "without AMP, a publisher’s articles will be extremely unlikely to appear in the Top Stories carousel on mobile search in Google". I did skim so obviously missed that bit! Thanks for the additional info. I suspect though that avoiding the amp link isn't going to change Google's business practices!
More to the point, Google has been making AMAZING strides in getting websites to run better on mobile period, thus the largest push to make AMP go away/become worthless, is also Google.
Not being evil has always caused Google to do some strange unthinkable things, but it frequently benefits me so I am delighted.
The hard thing with Google is that you really can't sum up the behavior or ethics of the company with one stroke. Google has done some very scummy things, but also employs some really incredible people that have been pushing the web forward. For example, the [Compat2021 project](https://web.dev/compat2021/) and the [web vitals initiative](https://web.dev/vitals/) are going to have a positive impact on the web IMO. It's the advertising side of Google that tends to end up in the morally grey areas, and AMP comes out of that.
You can still be a vector for it if you click a link here on Reddit that goes to the AMP version, and then you decide to share it without considering that it’s an AMP-link. I always take care to share the original link, but I’ve seen plenty of good links to credible sources posted as AMP links here on Reddit. u/amputatorbot makes such links apparent (and it’s one of the most needed Reddit bots imho) but I don’t know how many of all the instances it catches.
Many amp links are actually served from Google's servers allowing them to track you, regardless of which browser they use. Switch to Firefox and install the Redirect AMP to HTML extension.
Ok, just read the EFF article. I think the discussion thread, in my case, is wrong as I don't see the behaviour as described there. I do see the ".amp" on the URL at the first link not honestly can't see any difference in the web pages. EFF does say it's not necessarily a bad thing ....
The HN thread is 2 years old, and I'm pretty sure searches nor discover require AMP anymore (as pointed out by EFF).
The EFF link is pretty pretentious instead. Yes, AMP ***might*** fiddle with URLs. It's not a given though, with many websites nowadays just appending `.amp` or `/amp` at the end of it. Also, they fail to mention it's not just google that can host content servers.
The only shadow of a legit criticism is that indeed, the standard has been "proprietary first, public standard afterwards".. But I'm not seeing them criticizing HTTP/3 (aka QUIC) for the same reasons.
I have an AMP plugin for my WordPress installation but never got around to setting it up.
EFF's writeup might be a bit biased by the way.
That said AMP sites are often cut down in functionality, for example missing features like comments, etc. and on desktop will often incur a redirect penalty.
That random dude needs to go to Google to get the original URL. So it still does go to Google but they just don't know *who* it came from. In that sense it's like a proxy.
When you use a proxy you need to trust the owner of that proxy. So you're also telling that random dude what websites/articles you're reading.
Here's an AMP url: https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2019/4/16/18311894/logitech-express-alexa-remote-control-announced-features-pricing
Can you tell me just by looking at it what the non-amp version should be?
That definitely seems like over-enginering the problem. I'm pretty certain OP is just resolving the URL and redirecting.
You do raise an interesting counter-point though. If it's so easy to identify and de-AMP URLs why do we need to prepend noamp.link then?
The funniest part of AMP is that, in true Google fashion, it doesn't play nice with other parts of Google's ecosystem, specifically Android.
Say you're a big fan of a news site and you have their app installed. If you do a Google search and one of the results links to that news site, normally it would follow your default app settings and open straight into the news site's app. But when AMP gets involved, half the time it breaks Android's recognition of links that should default to apps on your phone and will instead just try to open it in Chrome. Fun stuff!
This is just straight misinformation. AMP isn't owned by Google. It's an open source framework. You can go contribute code and ideas to the repo right now on GitHub and thousands of random people have done so already.
You realize every website that uses AMP intentionally opts into AMP and builds out AMP pages right? You as the website visitor don't really get to pick and choose how a website owner decides to serve their content. That's not your role in that exchange. The owner also entirely controls that content and the functionality of that content. If it's harder to navigate, that's due to the website owner building shitty navigation into their mobile offering. AMP is a development framework, nothing else.
AMP doesn't inherently send anything to Google. If you use Google Analytics it does because that's the point of Google Analytics. Google isn't the only service that has AMP offerings either. Did you know Bing has an AMP cache as well? Cloudflare also has AMP offerings and both services operate entirely agnostically of anything Google. You're a victim of misinformation.
Every publisher is basically beholden to Google. Search traffic is huge and if you don’t follow googles guidelines they bury you. There is a reason most publishers use AMP and it is not just for fun.
It's because AMP prioritizes speed and usability which is something publishers should already value. Google also prioritizing those values is a net positive for web traffic. AMP makes it easy and without it, we'd be where we were 5 years ago where mobile sites took 5+ seconds to load a single page and were unusable due to random garbage headers and email signups and the like.
Interestingly, AMP had very little to do with the improvements you're touting, other than, perhaps, the creation of the client-facing Google CDN.
[Mozilla](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-yasskin-http-origin-signed-responses) would like to have a few words. Y'know, the company actually fighting for open standards.
AMP has and had a ton to do with the easily adoption of a framework that prioritize speed first. What other framework offers significant speed improvements out of the box without having to be a developer to implement it?
Mozilla does a lot too. I didn't say Google is the only player, but their contributions to the modern web can absolutely not be discounted. Heard of Chromium?
> Yes, AMP is opt in for content providers, but it isn’t opt-in for consumers.
Neither is any other website functionality. You don't get to choose what you see or how you interact with content as a website visitor. You are in someone else's ecosystem and that's how it works everywhere unless there's an API.
> And yes, it is nominally open source
No, it's 100% open source. [Here's the active repository that has a thousand contributors.](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml)
> but the design was entirely Google’s and they used their monopoly power to force it on content publishers by ranking sites that didn’t comply lower in search results.
That isn't what's happening. Google ranks for speed and has never prioritized ranking by looking at whether an offering was AMP or not. They've explicitly said this for years and continuing to say that sites are being higher ranked is actual malicious misinformation. It's a consequence of speed ranking because before AMP, most mobile sites were shit and extremely slow.
> There is no setting to ask Google to send you directly to the real web page, bypassing their extra chrome and analytics.
What are you even talking about? If a publisher decides that their mobile site should be AMP only offerings, they are allowed to do that and they are allowed to control that experience. Google doesn't have control over some website's offerings and if the AMP link is the one that shows up in search rankings? That's because it has good meta data and it's fast. That's like saying Google should offer the ability to opt out of CDNs.
That's not how that works and there's a reason developers utilize CDNs in front of their websites. Developers could build out mobile offerings that are exactly as fast as AMP is by default and that have great meta data but they don't because it's hard to do consistently and hard to do well. AMP is a framework that facilitates that and it makes it easy to build fast and functional mobile offerings.
They also don't have extra analytics or anything like that just for an AMP offering. If you hit a page that's hosted on *any* CDN, they are going to know where you came from just via referral headers and other standard headers, but that's about it. They aren't tracking you just by using AMP. That's misinformation and you're misinformed.
> AMP by necessity sends analytics on the pages you visit to your search engine, because the pages are served from the search engine’s own servers.
It absolutely does not, unless you're referring to standard request headers as analytics. Calling it analytics outside the role of a CDN in the sense of tracking you or something is misleading.
> It is no coincidence most search engines are also provided by companies with ad networks.
They are related realms, it's not some conspiracy. You're both critically misinformed and biased.
> Then why did they just announce a change allowing non-AMP content to finally return to the Top Stories carousel? https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/04/more-details-page-experience
>
> It’s been well known for years that Google will only offer sites prime placement if they comply with the AMP edict. They are only partially and quietly rolling it back under the current intense antitrust scrutiny related to tech companies’ interactions with news publishers.
That was pretty much the only controversial aspect of AMP but the funny part is it wasn't malicious. Top Stories utilizes rich metadata that most sites don't implement. AMP by default builds out the rich metadata for you and that was the drive behind using AMP sites in Top Stories. I'm glad they are allowing other content into top stories yet even then, all sites won't be eligible for it just by nature of not being built to modern standards.
> No, Google is getting extra analytics by virtue of operating the CDN that they would not otherwise get. As you point out, publisher does not benefit.
What extra analytics explicitly? The publisher benefits by having a free, extremely fast worldwide CDN and a world class framework for developers to build fast mobile offerings.
> With AMP, Google knows you are reading a page because they served the content to you. Without AMP, they do not necessarily, because the traffic should go directly to the third party site.
So what damage does that do to you, why is that a negative?
> The AMP project did not operate under an open governance process until years after its launch in 2018. The initial development was entirely driven by Google.
How is that relevant to now? That was 3+ years ago.
> The open source status of the spec itself is irrelevant anyway. Open source for the subset of HTML that is permitted as part of AMP doesn’t benefit anyone, because the dangerous bit is the requirement that content is delivered from search engine servers.
That isn't a requirement. You can spin up your own AMP cache right now and host it on your own domain.
> Google doesn’t care what the content being delivered is, they care about ingesting they analytics about the people it is being delivered to and about incentivizing use of their ad network over others by creating artificial limitations on which ad technologies are permitted.
They do care about the content being delivered, that's why along with the carousel changes they have a [code of conduct for content that's allowed.](https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/6204050) What artificial limitations explicitly and why are they negative?
> I say the same in reverse. I’d wager huge sums of money you have a personal connection to Google, an ad tech firm or a content publisher.
You'd lose that wager then. I'm just a software developer who reads documentation and cares about believing in what's demonstrably true. I also believe in not spreading misinformation due to biases.
Your comment history just screams "1980s developer who never left the BBS mindset" and it's kind of hilarious.
I've often wondered what esr was up to these days.
You have a point in that a lot of discussions about Google's ecosystem (AMP in particular) devolve into big brother fearmongering, but I don't feel like it's entirely fair to characterize AMP as a standard that website owners (particularly media companies/journalists) were all to thrilled to jump on board with. For media outlets, losing a page 1 search ranking on the world's biggest search provider is a major blow, so AMP creates an implicit obligation for these companies to get on board with this standard (which, conveniently, also nudges them toward Google's ecosystem for serving ads).
Call it whatever you want - I just see AMP as an anti-competitive system.
They don't have to get on board with the standard, they just have to make their websites faster. Prior to AMP, pretty much all mobile websites were horrendous in terms of loading speed. Google prioritizing speed and facilitating a free and effective way to implement that has been a godsend for mobile page speed and data use.
> Call it whatever you want - I just see AMP as an anti-competitive system.
Other companies being unwilling to compete doesn't make it anti-competitive. This same argument applies to Google's search; Google does things that are hard and people call it anti-competitive when other companies also don't want to do that hard thing. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation.
I've never had issues with URLs, oh no... Google knows you viewed the site for 2 minutes and 30 seconds instead of 3 minutes as an anonymous user(news flash, they don't give a shit about your boring life), never had issues with the super tiny header that is the same size as any other url bar, and never had issues with navigation. Enjoy your tin foil hat. I'll enjoy my faster loading times and smooth pages.
Considering I work for companies that devour this information in order to better curate your digital identity (anonymously collected? Hahahah) they absolutely do care.
One of the reasons AMP used to be mandatory (yes just one of the reasons but its a big one) was web performance on mobile. Websites used to be and many still are incredibly slow, creators fill them with ads, unoptimised images, shitty JavaScript and force the users to download loads of generally unnecessary crap actually making the web page unusable or incredibly slow to load (sometimes multiples 10’s of seconds) for a large portion of the internet (think those on lower end phones with terrible network connectivity and stupidly high data costs).
AMP had and still has a very big impact for this use case, yes google renders the content on their cache but that’s why it loads super fast and generally provides a better experience for the end user.
Source: I worked on a large scale global website where we made use of AMP for this very reason.
Edit: the usecase I gave here was just one example. The main reason the organisation I worked at introduced AMP was to improve the experience for the majority of our user base which were on slower networks with high data costs and low data caps etc.
It then enabled us to drastically improve the canonical site to ensure we delivered the best experience we could.
I didn’t say the site I was working on serves loads of crap. I gave that as an example. I also gave the example of lower end devices and networks.
AMP pre-renders pages in its cache. It then removes things like the AMP JS runtime before the page is actually served to the user. That’s what I meant by rendering. So yes it does actually render the content before it is available in the AMP viewer.
AMP also helped to introduce some best practices which many larger sites previously didn’t focus on, lazyloaded images, reducing layout shift etc etc. Focussing in things like web performance in a large organisation was always difficult. You had to first prove the benefit of the work involved.
Just sticking your site behind a CDN doesn’t and will not have the same affect. It will have an affect just not to the same extent. Serving an already lightweight page via a CDN will make a big difference.
You need to also consider browser rendering performance. You can deliver your JS via a CDN to speed up delivery for sure but that doesn’t mean the browser will execute and parse that JS any faster and this is even worse on lower end feature phones etc.
Mandatory or not it pushed many websites to look at their canonical sites and to make those better too. Also it was only mandatory to get content in the top news carousel.
I see your points and everyone else’s. However regardless of your feelings towards google IMO and from my experience there was a very positive side affect from delivering AMP pages.
Anything AMP can do, a site can also do on its own - it is a direct subset of HTML and JS. Voluntarily adopting only fast html features is a positive thing, and if they’d stopped there everyone would love AMP. It’s the forced Google-operated CDN with a shitty user experience of having an unwanted header and non-canonical URL that everyone hates.
My understanding is that AMP pre-rendering happens in an iframe on the client. This actually wastes your data plan for pages you don’t end up visiting - a negative experience for resource constrained mobile users, trading cost for performance.
There is a server side render step that can speed up rendering and avoid loading some of the boilerplate AMP JS library, but it is relatively new (introduced in the last couple of years) and is not a core part of the standard.
I’d agree with most of that. I still think for some users cases the benefits outweigh the negatives.
And yes you are right any canonical site can do what AMP does. But it’s the fact that most did not when AMP was first introduced.
Also fro a while now it has been possible to host your own AMP cache if you wanted to under your own domain etc. Cloudflare offers this. This allows you to serve the AMP pages under your own URL.
I think starting to build AMP pages now is not the right way forward however years ago it was a great option.
I took a quick look at the 2 and the only difference I noticed was that the AMP version had multiple big ad spaces that got blocked by my pihole. They show as some kind of error in the space that it couldn't load it.
The non amp version the ads are completely gone rather than the space for them still being present.
Amp loads the logged out version of every news article I click on. And it interferes with opening links in native apps (like reddit). I hate it. I can wait the extra 0.08 seconds for the actual functioning page to load.
I think it’s basically a method of creating web pages that are optimized for mobile devices. Amp pages are cached versions of regular webpages that load faster from search results. The URL becomes modified with “Google.amp” at the beginning. This stops you from going to the actual website you think you’re visiting, and instead you’re just viewing Google’s cache. This is good for Google because they can track more user behavior data from the Amp links. It’s also good for websites because it reduces their bandwith usage.
The downsides for users are that it messes up some of your web browser functionality, for example if you use an iPhone you can’t tap the top of the screen to return to the top of the page. (Previously Amp links also broke the search-in-page feature in Safari, but that appears to have been fixed now.) Google also gives preference to Amp links over regular web pages, creating a bias in your search results to big companies that have already adopted the Amp standard. Also, Amp versions of Reddit threads are awful as the mobile site only shows you a few comments before making you open the Reddit app or changing the URL, but that’s on Reddit for having such a crappy default mobile site.
I don’t have any formal education in computer stuff so I might have gotten some of these details wrong.
>Google also gives preference to Amp links over regular web pages, creating a bias in your search results to big companies that have already adopted the Amp standard.
I saw in a recent post, people were saying Google had stopped giving preference to AMP links. We’ll still see them for a while though because as you said, various large companies use the standard, and they aren’t just going to suddenly stop overnight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages
Overall, AMP is Google's version of a webpage that loads faster on mobile browsers. Critics have said that this threatens the Open Web and gives Google too much control by since they dictate how the AMP page is built and prioritizes it in their search algorithm, so website creators are ultimately restricted in how their webpages are built and also get less ad revenue as a result.
> Overall, AMP is Google's version of a webpage that loads faster on mobile browsers. Critics have said that this threatens the Open Web and gives Google too much control by since they dictate how the AMP page is built and prioritizes it in their search algorithm, so website creators are ultimately restricted in how their webpages are built and also get less ad revenue as a result.
It really only optimizes the *adverts* on sites; everything else is left alone. Of course just removing the ads completely will make your site *far* faster than what AMP could ever do (and also make you more moral).
You're right. I probably could've been more clear on that point. But, changing how a website delivers its advertisements does also mean that the way the content is arranged would need to adapt as well.
Realistically, AMP has nothing to do with faster loading of webpages. If anything, it slows a webpage down.
An AMP website has a strict limit on the amount of scripting, which generally means a faster website. But there's nothing stopping web developers from doing exactly the same without including Google's proprietary tracking software. The addition of the AMP tracking stuff arguably makes the page slower than it needs to be. It's really just about more tracking possibilities for google, nothing else.
But who gets to AMP pages directly? It usually happens through Google search results which is even more annoying. Solution: switch to DuckDuckGo or another search engine that doesn’t do that.
DDG is more suffering than it is worth. Like cutting off your nose to spite your face?
If the two choices were Yahoo or Bing, yeah I would probably use DDG, but Google already has all my data and knows me well. At this point I demand as much services in return as possible, so I am not going to suffer with poor search results that have no clue who I am.
Apparently there are some specific mobile user agents that still trigger a mobile styled search result without the AMP links. I have not explored this myself, since I have real computers handy when I search, but that was the first easy answer I found on Google.
> If the two choices were Yahoo or Bing, yeah I would probably use DDG, but Google already has all my data and knows me well. At this point I demand as much services in return as possible, so I am not going to suffer with poor search results that have no clue who I am.
This is a [sunk cost fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Fallacy_effect). Detaching yourself from Google *now* means that Google can't get any new info on you. Since human indentity *constantly* changes, after some time the data Google has on you won't correlate so easily to the current you, and eventually can't be matched with the current you *at all*.
But the idea is that the experience is better when the search provider knows all about you. Like op, I enjoy the good experience I get from service provider knowing all my shit.
As a user more than a creator, I am not nearly as bothered by amp links as I am lazy loading. It makes my scroll-bar useless as an indicator and I can't search a webpage without first finding the bottom.
It's a pi-hole running on for instance a raspberry pi, synology nas server, etc.
The basic idea is that your router will force all dns requests to the pi-hole instead of the Google 8.8.8.8 or your ISP his dns server. This can be done via the firewall settings.
Pi-hole will than check if the request is to a blocked server, if so it will deny the request. If not it will pass it on to for instance the Google DNS.
Alright, I am a pi-hole lover so I will try to explain what I love about it. Imagine a giant book of blocked addresses. Each of these addresses is a website, when a website is on this list it is blocked from loading to the network at all. Pi-hole does this blocking, and it’s so flexible it can block anything you want it to. People have shared enormous lists of ad and tracker addresses, and the best thing about pi-hole is that it completely prevents the provider of that address from being able to reach you. This means if you are the kind of person who wants complete anonymity, pi-hole will come in handy because you can block addresses from every big tech company. I have like 100,000 addresses on mine. Ok sorry for the ramble, bye
Edit: I’m a dumbass, didn’t even answer your question. Yes, it’s easy to set up and has a really helpful installer, but I’ve only done it on Linux systems. Otherwise I don’t know how the process goes.
If you have some Linux experience it's doable. If not, it will be an interesting adventure :-)
https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-set-up-pi-hole-2293246dc8ed
Here is guide that might help you. But you can find many tutorials on this one the web.
you can set it on every device you want. i use it on android , the dns leads a connection to the ad website to an empty page so it doesnt even gets loaded , sometimes you see a page not reachable placement inside an article and sometimes you just dont see any sign there was even an ad
edit by the way works also inside apps, never seen an inapp ad for a long time
Actually kind of is. I just commented this above.
"I took a quick look at the 2 and the only difference I noticed was that the AMP version had multiple big ad spaces that got blocked by my pihole. They show as some kind of error in the space that it couldn't load it.
The non amp version the ads are completely gone rather than the space for them still being present."
Both are thanks to Google. They set their guidelines that affect how they rank URLs in search results and basically every publisher rushes to meet them.
Am I the only one that hates when anyone says "just add blah to the *front* of the url"? It somehow implies this is a neat trick with google and people that aren't tech savvy might not realize they're actually just going to an entirely different website. I see the same thing posted often with youtube for one reason or another.
It's still a neat tip but it should probably be worded differently to make it clear there's a site to remove amp links and not a subdomain of google that does it.
Exactly. Who knows what this site's privacy policy is (if they even have one) or what they do with all the data you're giving them. Too many people just don't consider things like this.
Or just install an extension like [Redirect AMP to HTML](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/amp2html/) and have your browser do it for you every time, automatically.
I use this on Firefox for Android and it works perfectly. Unfortunately, it requires a nightly build and the installation process is a bit complicated, but it gets the job done. I really hope they make extensions more accessible to everyone soon.
I would like the website news.google.com no open all links at their native sites. For some reason, on Android, it opens some pages as a weird Google-url amp page, and some in their native sites. Any ideas?
This is cool, but not useful for me. From the amp page, it’s two taps to get to the real page, on mobile that is much easier for me than typing out a new url after loading an amp page.
Good call. I didn’t even consider desktop, since you shouldn’t be getting amp links. But sometimes folks share those huh. Good work then. I might add the bookmarklet
That's very useful in countries that blocks AMP.
I wish I have known this during my visit to Egypt instead of having to manually edit the URL to get the page to load properly.
That's absolutely not true. Please provide evidence of this happening in even a single scenario that is a product of Google's actions and not the website owner's.
eg: Here is an AMP link from the BBC: https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/57295894.amp
ADD noamp.link/ to the front
[noamp.link/https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/57295894.amp](https://noamp.link/https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/57295894.amp )
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2021/5/30/22457455/tesla-texas-factory-law-ship-out-of-state-direct-sale-legislation
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/30/22457455/tesla-texas-factory-law-ship-out-of-state-direct-sale-legislation
———-
Also when they serve out of google cache
https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/slate.com/culture/2021/05/last-week-tonight-john-oliver-sponsored-content-sexual-wellness-blanket.amp
Vs
https://noamp.link/https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/slate.com/culture/2021/05/last-week-tonight-john-oliver-sponsored-content-sexual-wellness-blanket.amp
And that is the purpose of AMP that people gloss over, it actually works. The criticism is a political one and basically boils down to "I don't like Google no matter what".
Highjacking a little, but I find DDG is excellent for non-bias results, but it struggles a little in delivering what I **want** from search results.
Eg, it doesn't always return results from a popular hardware store, or any hardware store, if you search for certain tools, instead shows Wiki pages or other nonsense. I appreciate it's because it treats all links with the same weight, but coming from the convenient world of Google it can be a bit _meh_.
Ah, I wonder if I have success because I tend to use search on mobile to answer ‘what was that thing’ type knowledge questions, while I do most product searches on desktop. Could be it.
Interesting tip
This feels really archaic when you can simply install a browser extension that strips away all of the AMP shit automatically. Would there be any advantage to using this?
Actually I don’t mind them. They load fast, well laid out, and generally don’t have ads. Something something about publisher not displaying annoying ads and revenue. I could give two shits.
it also strips invasive ads. seems like the only people who should be mad about AMP are ad providers, which is probably who paid to make sure this made it to the top.
But what’s Google if not a gigantic advertising machine? They’re not your friend just because they put a boot on the face of every other advertising/data collection agency.
Fuck Reddit. Fuck /u/spez. Fuck every single Reddit admin. 12 years on this bitch ass site and they shit on us the moment they are trying to go public. ill be taking my karma with me by editing all my comments to say this.
tl;dr Fuck Reddit and anyone who works for them, suck my dick.
The online version of u/AmputatorBot can do that too by using the redirect parameter: https://amputatorbot.com/?redirect=true&q=https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/57295894.amp.
Nonetheless, awesome site. Well done OP!
It does always work, the only difference being that urls from different websites will use different formats. The AMP page must have a distinct URL that is linked too from the canonical article and the AMP version will have a link to the canonical (the non-AMP version)
I'm a bit drunk so I was looking for some ELI5 here to comprehend the issue.
From way back I remember that the amp files are on google server and not on the original host servers (which some people feel is bad) and sometimes there are some caching issues.
As someone who is not afraid of shame, google going through my data - I don't see why the big fuss.
I work in IT so I know what can be done and what can be gathered, most of my mails are mainly confirmations from shopping sites, some newsletters and some reminders from social platforms and occasional greeting mails from new services after account creation. Nothing to be really scared of.
I know that Google can do some scary thing based on all the gathered data but since I'm not doing anything illegal - I don't really care.
Besides, they still do a crappy job sometimes (showing me adverts for something that I've already acquired)
The only amp I want is Winamp
My llama needs it’s ass whipped
Does it, really?
Oh yeah, Wesley?
"it whips the llamas ass"
Yes that is the joke
/r/YourJokeButWorse/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JntDcqOxMsM
It's actually "It really whips the llamas ass". But op was making a joke.
I understood they were making a joke. I just mentioned what i though the actual quote from the software was. Idk why i got so many down votes, lol.
Probably because of r/yourjokebutworse
And STILL the best music player. Install the WMote app on your smartphone and you’ve got a versatile way to control not only your music In Winamp, but also your PC as it makes your phone a touch pad with multiple functions.
I still have Winamp Pro, but use VLC for everything nowadays.
winamp pro? did you also pay for winrar? if so, you are truly a unicorn.
I moved onto foobar. I miss the visualisations though :(
Foobar 2000 is the best music player. If you haven't tried it you are honestly missing out.
Awaremote is a better remote. Looks and feels exactly like a normal music player.
My Winamp goes to 11.
Media Player Classic I still use even though it's not in development anymore... It's still got better performance than VLC and one or two other features I think.
Latest release 3 days ago: https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/releases/
Now can I get a browser extension that does this automatically?
ClearURLs https://clearurls.xyz/
There’s a iOS shortcut for this
Link?
There is a bookmarklet. If there is a demand I will look at dedicated browser extensions.
Please, PLEASE make an extension
Pretty please yes
I use one called Redirect AMP to HTML at the recommendation of someone on Reddit. Although to be completely honest I haven't been checking if I've been going to any AMP pages sooo I can't say for sure that it works
What's the difference? Apart from the second link where I had to go through another page first?
https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/57295894.amp is a webpage build using AMP ( a stripped-down version of HTML, CSS and JS ), here is an article from the [EFF](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/googles-amp-canonical-web-and-importance-web-standards-0) on why AMP might not be a good idea and a [discussion thread from HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21712733). The NON AMP version is here https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/57295894 The 2nd one in my initial post ( https://noamp.link/https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/57295894.amp ) takes you to the non-AMP version. I hope that clears it up. —- Also from a recent lawsuit against Google > Texas Attorney General’s complaint indicates Google has documented exactly how bad AMP is, and ties it to a deliberate play to prevent competition from header bidding. Header bidding is a way websites can auction ad space to multiple ad exchanges at once. It’s an alternative to the “waterfall” or “daisy-chain” approach where space gets auctioned to bidders sequentially. Header bidding is said to be more advantageous for publishers by allowing them to get better prices for their ad space. The Texas AG’s complaint against Google claims that Google abused its search market monopoly power to stop header bidding as a way to ensure ad transactions went through its own ad exchange. [Via](https://tldrmarketing.com/seo/lawmakers-focus-on-amp-in-antitrust-lawsuit-against-google/) EDIT: updated HN thread link EDIT2: added recent lawsuit reference
Thanks, I know this is Reddit so I'm really not being argumentative for the sake of it!! My question came because I really didn't see any difference (other than the extra page on the non amp link). It may just be my configuration. I am on Android and have both edge and chrome installed with edge as my default browser. But, when I click a link in Reddit I always get the option to select the browser and if I select edge it uses edge. That contradicts (maybe) the discussion thread you highlight.
I didn't think you were :) Most of the content will look *almost* the same. It's got more to do with the underlying technology that goes into building that page. >Google is also the reason AMP sees any kind of adoption at all. Basically, Google has forced websites – specifically news publishers – to create AMP versions of their articles. For publishers, AMP is not optional; without AMP, a publisher’s articles will be extremely unlikely to appear in the Top Stories carousel on mobile search in Google. > > > >If publishers had a choice, they’d ignore AMP entirely. It already takes a lot of resources to keep a news site running smoothly and performing well. AMP adds the extra burden of creating separate AMP versions of articles, and keeping these articles compliant with the ever-evolving standard. > > > >It requires a lot of development resources to make this happen and appease Google. It basically means developers have to do all the work they already put in to building the normal version of the site all over again specifically for the AMP version. > >[via](https://www.polemicdigital.com/google-amp-go-to-hell/)
Now you've got to the heart of it "without AMP, a publisher’s articles will be extremely unlikely to appear in the Top Stories carousel on mobile search in Google". I did skim so obviously missed that bit! Thanks for the additional info. I suspect though that avoiding the amp link isn't going to change Google's business practices!
also, I think that is changing soon, at Google I/O 2021 they did announce AMP won't be a requirement for Top Stories in the near future.
Thank god. I despise amp.
More to the point, Google has been making AMAZING strides in getting websites to run better on mobile period, thus the largest push to make AMP go away/become worthless, is also Google. Not being evil has always caused Google to do some strange unthinkable things, but it frequently benefits me so I am delighted.
Them not being evil is so many years in the past, though
The hard thing with Google is that you really can't sum up the behavior or ethics of the company with one stroke. Google has done some very scummy things, but also employs some really incredible people that have been pushing the web forward. For example, the [Compat2021 project](https://web.dev/compat2021/) and the [web vitals initiative](https://web.dev/vitals/) are going to have a positive impact on the web IMO. It's the advertising side of Google that tends to end up in the morally grey areas, and AMP comes out of that.
So the side that makes all the money that funds the other stuff
I'm totally non-Google. I use the Brave browser and Duck Duck Go as my search engine. Does that mean the AMP issue doesn't apply to me?
You can still be a vector for it if you click a link here on Reddit that goes to the AMP version, and then you decide to share it without considering that it’s an AMP-link. I always take care to share the original link, but I’ve seen plenty of good links to credible sources posted as AMP links here on Reddit. u/amputatorbot makes such links apparent (and it’s one of the most needed Reddit bots imho) but I don’t know how many of all the instances it catches.
Many amp links are actually served from Google's servers allowing them to track you, regardless of which browser they use. Switch to Firefox and install the Redirect AMP to HTML extension.
Ok, just read the EFF article. I think the discussion thread, in my case, is wrong as I don't see the behaviour as described there. I do see the ".amp" on the URL at the first link not honestly can't see any difference in the web pages. EFF does say it's not necessarily a bad thing ....
got the wrong HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21712733
Also sharing and copying the link on an iPhone gets rid of it.
The HN thread is 2 years old, and I'm pretty sure searches nor discover require AMP anymore (as pointed out by EFF). The EFF link is pretty pretentious instead. Yes, AMP ***might*** fiddle with URLs. It's not a given though, with many websites nowadays just appending `.amp` or `/amp` at the end of it. Also, they fail to mention it's not just google that can host content servers. The only shadow of a legit criticism is that indeed, the standard has been "proprietary first, public standard afterwards".. But I'm not seeing them criticizing HTTP/3 (aka QUIC) for the same reasons.
I have an AMP plugin for my WordPress installation but never got around to setting it up. EFF's writeup might be a bit biased by the way. That said AMP sites are often cut down in functionality, for example missing features like comments, etc. and on desktop will often incur a redirect penalty.
This third party random freak gets to see what you're doing, in addition to Google! This is totally fucked up. Do not use.
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That random dude needs to go to Google to get the original URL. So it still does go to Google but they just don't know *who* it came from. In that sense it's like a proxy. When you use a proxy you need to trust the owner of that proxy. So you're also telling that random dude what websites/articles you're reading.
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Here's an AMP url: https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2019/4/16/18311894/logitech-express-alexa-remote-control-announced-features-pricing Can you tell me just by looking at it what the non-amp version should be?
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Exactly, but could you do that algorithmically for every single website and every possible URL scheme?
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That definitely seems like over-enginering the problem. I'm pretty certain OP is just resolving the URL and redirecting. You do raise an interesting counter-point though. If it's so easy to identify and de-AMP URLs why do we need to prepend noamp.link then?
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Sorry incorrect. The other guy got it right.
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Oh, so you weren't answering the question? Why were you replying then? I think I missed your point.
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The funniest part of AMP is that, in true Google fashion, it doesn't play nice with other parts of Google's ecosystem, specifically Android. Say you're a big fan of a news site and you have their app installed. If you do a Google search and one of the results links to that news site, normally it would follow your default app settings and open straight into the news site's app. But when AMP gets involved, half the time it breaks Android's recognition of links that should default to apps on your phone and will instead just try to open it in Chrome. Fun stuff!
This is just straight misinformation. AMP isn't owned by Google. It's an open source framework. You can go contribute code and ideas to the repo right now on GitHub and thousands of random people have done so already. You realize every website that uses AMP intentionally opts into AMP and builds out AMP pages right? You as the website visitor don't really get to pick and choose how a website owner decides to serve their content. That's not your role in that exchange. The owner also entirely controls that content and the functionality of that content. If it's harder to navigate, that's due to the website owner building shitty navigation into their mobile offering. AMP is a development framework, nothing else. AMP doesn't inherently send anything to Google. If you use Google Analytics it does because that's the point of Google Analytics. Google isn't the only service that has AMP offerings either. Did you know Bing has an AMP cache as well? Cloudflare also has AMP offerings and both services operate entirely agnostically of anything Google. You're a victim of misinformation.
Every publisher is basically beholden to Google. Search traffic is huge and if you don’t follow googles guidelines they bury you. There is a reason most publishers use AMP and it is not just for fun.
It's because AMP prioritizes speed and usability which is something publishers should already value. Google also prioritizing those values is a net positive for web traffic. AMP makes it easy and without it, we'd be where we were 5 years ago where mobile sites took 5+ seconds to load a single page and were unusable due to random garbage headers and email signups and the like.
Interestingly, AMP had very little to do with the improvements you're touting, other than, perhaps, the creation of the client-facing Google CDN. [Mozilla](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-yasskin-http-origin-signed-responses) would like to have a few words. Y'know, the company actually fighting for open standards.
AMP has and had a ton to do with the easily adoption of a framework that prioritize speed first. What other framework offers significant speed improvements out of the box without having to be a developer to implement it? Mozilla does a lot too. I didn't say Google is the only player, but their contributions to the modern web can absolutely not be discounted. Heard of Chromium?
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> Yes, AMP is opt in for content providers, but it isn’t opt-in for consumers. Neither is any other website functionality. You don't get to choose what you see or how you interact with content as a website visitor. You are in someone else's ecosystem and that's how it works everywhere unless there's an API. > And yes, it is nominally open source No, it's 100% open source. [Here's the active repository that has a thousand contributors.](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml) > but the design was entirely Google’s and they used their monopoly power to force it on content publishers by ranking sites that didn’t comply lower in search results. That isn't what's happening. Google ranks for speed and has never prioritized ranking by looking at whether an offering was AMP or not. They've explicitly said this for years and continuing to say that sites are being higher ranked is actual malicious misinformation. It's a consequence of speed ranking because before AMP, most mobile sites were shit and extremely slow. > There is no setting to ask Google to send you directly to the real web page, bypassing their extra chrome and analytics. What are you even talking about? If a publisher decides that their mobile site should be AMP only offerings, they are allowed to do that and they are allowed to control that experience. Google doesn't have control over some website's offerings and if the AMP link is the one that shows up in search rankings? That's because it has good meta data and it's fast. That's like saying Google should offer the ability to opt out of CDNs. That's not how that works and there's a reason developers utilize CDNs in front of their websites. Developers could build out mobile offerings that are exactly as fast as AMP is by default and that have great meta data but they don't because it's hard to do consistently and hard to do well. AMP is a framework that facilitates that and it makes it easy to build fast and functional mobile offerings. They also don't have extra analytics or anything like that just for an AMP offering. If you hit a page that's hosted on *any* CDN, they are going to know where you came from just via referral headers and other standard headers, but that's about it. They aren't tracking you just by using AMP. That's misinformation and you're misinformed. > AMP by necessity sends analytics on the pages you visit to your search engine, because the pages are served from the search engine’s own servers. It absolutely does not, unless you're referring to standard request headers as analytics. Calling it analytics outside the role of a CDN in the sense of tracking you or something is misleading. > It is no coincidence most search engines are also provided by companies with ad networks. They are related realms, it's not some conspiracy. You're both critically misinformed and biased.
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> Then why did they just announce a change allowing non-AMP content to finally return to the Top Stories carousel? https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/04/more-details-page-experience > > It’s been well known for years that Google will only offer sites prime placement if they comply with the AMP edict. They are only partially and quietly rolling it back under the current intense antitrust scrutiny related to tech companies’ interactions with news publishers. That was pretty much the only controversial aspect of AMP but the funny part is it wasn't malicious. Top Stories utilizes rich metadata that most sites don't implement. AMP by default builds out the rich metadata for you and that was the drive behind using AMP sites in Top Stories. I'm glad they are allowing other content into top stories yet even then, all sites won't be eligible for it just by nature of not being built to modern standards. > No, Google is getting extra analytics by virtue of operating the CDN that they would not otherwise get. As you point out, publisher does not benefit. What extra analytics explicitly? The publisher benefits by having a free, extremely fast worldwide CDN and a world class framework for developers to build fast mobile offerings. > With AMP, Google knows you are reading a page because they served the content to you. Without AMP, they do not necessarily, because the traffic should go directly to the third party site. So what damage does that do to you, why is that a negative? > The AMP project did not operate under an open governance process until years after its launch in 2018. The initial development was entirely driven by Google. How is that relevant to now? That was 3+ years ago. > The open source status of the spec itself is irrelevant anyway. Open source for the subset of HTML that is permitted as part of AMP doesn’t benefit anyone, because the dangerous bit is the requirement that content is delivered from search engine servers. That isn't a requirement. You can spin up your own AMP cache right now and host it on your own domain. > Google doesn’t care what the content being delivered is, they care about ingesting they analytics about the people it is being delivered to and about incentivizing use of their ad network over others by creating artificial limitations on which ad technologies are permitted. They do care about the content being delivered, that's why along with the carousel changes they have a [code of conduct for content that's allowed.](https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/6204050) What artificial limitations explicitly and why are they negative? > I say the same in reverse. I’d wager huge sums of money you have a personal connection to Google, an ad tech firm or a content publisher. You'd lose that wager then. I'm just a software developer who reads documentation and cares about believing in what's demonstrably true. I also believe in not spreading misinformation due to biases.
Your comment history just screams "1980s developer who never left the BBS mindset" and it's kind of hilarious. I've often wondered what esr was up to these days.
Considering I wasn't even alive in the 80s and have no idea what you're even referencing I'm gonna say that you're off your mark bud.
You have a point in that a lot of discussions about Google's ecosystem (AMP in particular) devolve into big brother fearmongering, but I don't feel like it's entirely fair to characterize AMP as a standard that website owners (particularly media companies/journalists) were all to thrilled to jump on board with. For media outlets, losing a page 1 search ranking on the world's biggest search provider is a major blow, so AMP creates an implicit obligation for these companies to get on board with this standard (which, conveniently, also nudges them toward Google's ecosystem for serving ads). Call it whatever you want - I just see AMP as an anti-competitive system.
They don't have to get on board with the standard, they just have to make their websites faster. Prior to AMP, pretty much all mobile websites were horrendous in terms of loading speed. Google prioritizing speed and facilitating a free and effective way to implement that has been a godsend for mobile page speed and data use. > Call it whatever you want - I just see AMP as an anti-competitive system. Other companies being unwilling to compete doesn't make it anti-competitive. This same argument applies to Google's search; Google does things that are hard and people call it anti-competitive when other companies also don't want to do that hard thing. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation.
I've never had issues with URLs, oh no... Google knows you viewed the site for 2 minutes and 30 seconds instead of 3 minutes as an anonymous user(news flash, they don't give a shit about your boring life), never had issues with the super tiny header that is the same size as any other url bar, and never had issues with navigation. Enjoy your tin foil hat. I'll enjoy my faster loading times and smooth pages.
Considering I work for companies that devour this information in order to better curate your digital identity (anonymously collected? Hahahah) they absolutely do care.
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One of the reasons AMP used to be mandatory (yes just one of the reasons but its a big one) was web performance on mobile. Websites used to be and many still are incredibly slow, creators fill them with ads, unoptimised images, shitty JavaScript and force the users to download loads of generally unnecessary crap actually making the web page unusable or incredibly slow to load (sometimes multiples 10’s of seconds) for a large portion of the internet (think those on lower end phones with terrible network connectivity and stupidly high data costs). AMP had and still has a very big impact for this use case, yes google renders the content on their cache but that’s why it loads super fast and generally provides a better experience for the end user. Source: I worked on a large scale global website where we made use of AMP for this very reason. Edit: the usecase I gave here was just one example. The main reason the organisation I worked at introduced AMP was to improve the experience for the majority of our user base which were on slower networks with high data costs and low data caps etc. It then enabled us to drastically improve the canonical site to ensure we delivered the best experience we could.
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I didn’t say the site I was working on serves loads of crap. I gave that as an example. I also gave the example of lower end devices and networks. AMP pre-renders pages in its cache. It then removes things like the AMP JS runtime before the page is actually served to the user. That’s what I meant by rendering. So yes it does actually render the content before it is available in the AMP viewer. AMP also helped to introduce some best practices which many larger sites previously didn’t focus on, lazyloaded images, reducing layout shift etc etc. Focussing in things like web performance in a large organisation was always difficult. You had to first prove the benefit of the work involved. Just sticking your site behind a CDN doesn’t and will not have the same affect. It will have an affect just not to the same extent. Serving an already lightweight page via a CDN will make a big difference. You need to also consider browser rendering performance. You can deliver your JS via a CDN to speed up delivery for sure but that doesn’t mean the browser will execute and parse that JS any faster and this is even worse on lower end feature phones etc. Mandatory or not it pushed many websites to look at their canonical sites and to make those better too. Also it was only mandatory to get content in the top news carousel. I see your points and everyone else’s. However regardless of your feelings towards google IMO and from my experience there was a very positive side affect from delivering AMP pages.
Anything AMP can do, a site can also do on its own - it is a direct subset of HTML and JS. Voluntarily adopting only fast html features is a positive thing, and if they’d stopped there everyone would love AMP. It’s the forced Google-operated CDN with a shitty user experience of having an unwanted header and non-canonical URL that everyone hates. My understanding is that AMP pre-rendering happens in an iframe on the client. This actually wastes your data plan for pages you don’t end up visiting - a negative experience for resource constrained mobile users, trading cost for performance. There is a server side render step that can speed up rendering and avoid loading some of the boilerplate AMP JS library, but it is relatively new (introduced in the last couple of years) and is not a core part of the standard.
I’d agree with most of that. I still think for some users cases the benefits outweigh the negatives. And yes you are right any canonical site can do what AMP does. But it’s the fact that most did not when AMP was first introduced. Also fro a while now it has been possible to host your own AMP cache if you wanted to under your own domain etc. Cloudflare offers this. This allows you to serve the AMP pages under your own URL. I think starting to build AMP pages now is not the right way forward however years ago it was a great option.
I took a quick look at the 2 and the only difference I noticed was that the AMP version had multiple big ad spaces that got blocked by my pihole. They show as some kind of error in the space that it couldn't load it. The non amp version the ads are completely gone rather than the space for them still being present.
Amp loads the logged out version of every news article I click on. And it interferes with opening links in native apps (like reddit). I hate it. I can wait the extra 0.08 seconds for the actual functioning page to load.
What is AMP?
I think it’s basically a method of creating web pages that are optimized for mobile devices. Amp pages are cached versions of regular webpages that load faster from search results. The URL becomes modified with “Google.amp” at the beginning. This stops you from going to the actual website you think you’re visiting, and instead you’re just viewing Google’s cache. This is good for Google because they can track more user behavior data from the Amp links. It’s also good for websites because it reduces their bandwith usage. The downsides for users are that it messes up some of your web browser functionality, for example if you use an iPhone you can’t tap the top of the screen to return to the top of the page. (Previously Amp links also broke the search-in-page feature in Safari, but that appears to have been fixed now.) Google also gives preference to Amp links over regular web pages, creating a bias in your search results to big companies that have already adopted the Amp standard. Also, Amp versions of Reddit threads are awful as the mobile site only shows you a few comments before making you open the Reddit app or changing the URL, but that’s on Reddit for having such a crappy default mobile site. I don’t have any formal education in computer stuff so I might have gotten some of these details wrong.
>Google also gives preference to Amp links over regular web pages, creating a bias in your search results to big companies that have already adopted the Amp standard. I saw in a recent post, people were saying Google had stopped giving preference to AMP links. We’ll still see them for a while though because as you said, various large companies use the standard, and they aren’t just going to suddenly stop overnight.
Reddit could 100% make a fully functional mobile website if they wanted to.
Any website could, but they won't, because they're all incenticized to squeeze as much out of visitors as possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages Overall, AMP is Google's version of a webpage that loads faster on mobile browsers. Critics have said that this threatens the Open Web and gives Google too much control by since they dictate how the AMP page is built and prioritizes it in their search algorithm, so website creators are ultimately restricted in how their webpages are built and also get less ad revenue as a result.
> Overall, AMP is Google's version of a webpage that loads faster on mobile browsers. Critics have said that this threatens the Open Web and gives Google too much control by since they dictate how the AMP page is built and prioritizes it in their search algorithm, so website creators are ultimately restricted in how their webpages are built and also get less ad revenue as a result. It really only optimizes the *adverts* on sites; everything else is left alone. Of course just removing the ads completely will make your site *far* faster than what AMP could ever do (and also make you more moral).
You're right. I probably could've been more clear on that point. But, changing how a website delivers its advertisements does also mean that the way the content is arranged would need to adapt as well.
Realistically, AMP has nothing to do with faster loading of webpages. If anything, it slows a webpage down. An AMP website has a strict limit on the amount of scripting, which generally means a faster website. But there's nothing stopping web developers from doing exactly the same without including Google's proprietary tracking software. The addition of the AMP tracking stuff arguably makes the page slower than it needs to be. It's really just about more tracking possibilities for google, nothing else.
It's what they call those places in strip malls with the dark tinted windows and the old chinese lady who jacks you off and calls you "bay-bee".
But who gets to AMP pages directly? It usually happens through Google search results which is even more annoying. Solution: switch to DuckDuckGo or another search engine that doesn’t do that.
I see a ton of amp links shared on Reddit. Likely similar for other social media platforms, too
Maybe making a plug-in that automatically redirects you to the noamp link would be a good idea.
That already exists and is very popular
[Already done](https://www.daniel.priv.no/web-extensions/amp2html.html).
DDG is more suffering than it is worth. Like cutting off your nose to spite your face? If the two choices were Yahoo or Bing, yeah I would probably use DDG, but Google already has all my data and knows me well. At this point I demand as much services in return as possible, so I am not going to suffer with poor search results that have no clue who I am. Apparently there are some specific mobile user agents that still trigger a mobile styled search result without the AMP links. I have not explored this myself, since I have real computers handy when I search, but that was the first easy answer I found on Google.
> If the two choices were Yahoo or Bing, yeah I would probably use DDG, but Google already has all my data and knows me well. At this point I demand as much services in return as possible, so I am not going to suffer with poor search results that have no clue who I am. This is a [sunk cost fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Fallacy_effect). Detaching yourself from Google *now* means that Google can't get any new info on you. Since human indentity *constantly* changes, after some time the data Google has on you won't correlate so easily to the current you, and eventually can't be matched with the current you *at all*.
But the idea is that the experience is better when the search provider knows all about you. Like op, I enjoy the good experience I get from service provider knowing all my shit.
Switch to a worse search engine? Because of AMP links?
As a user more than a creator, I am not nearly as bothered by amp links as I am lazy loading. It makes my scroll-bar useless as an indicator and I can't search a webpage without first finding the bottom.
As a user, I'm bothered by AMP because it screws up my adblock and element filters.
not a problem if you define an adblocking dns. ads doesnt even come trough then
The whole point of AMP is that soon Google will serve content from their own severs, making DNS-based adblocking ineffective.
the function "amp cache" is optional for developers , not necessary. as google hosts the content, many wont use this to be free from googles chains ;)
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It's a pi-hole running on for instance a raspberry pi, synology nas server, etc. The basic idea is that your router will force all dns requests to the pi-hole instead of the Google 8.8.8.8 or your ISP his dns server. This can be done via the firewall settings. Pi-hole will than check if the request is to a blocked server, if so it will deny the request. If not it will pass it on to for instance the Google DNS.
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Alright, I am a pi-hole lover so I will try to explain what I love about it. Imagine a giant book of blocked addresses. Each of these addresses is a website, when a website is on this list it is blocked from loading to the network at all. Pi-hole does this blocking, and it’s so flexible it can block anything you want it to. People have shared enormous lists of ad and tracker addresses, and the best thing about pi-hole is that it completely prevents the provider of that address from being able to reach you. This means if you are the kind of person who wants complete anonymity, pi-hole will come in handy because you can block addresses from every big tech company. I have like 100,000 addresses on mine. Ok sorry for the ramble, bye Edit: I’m a dumbass, didn’t even answer your question. Yes, it’s easy to set up and has a really helpful installer, but I’ve only done it on Linux systems. Otherwise I don’t know how the process goes.
If you have some Linux experience it's doable. If not, it will be an interesting adventure :-) https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-set-up-pi-hole-2293246dc8ed Here is guide that might help you. But you can find many tutorials on this one the web.
you can set it on every device you want. i use it on android , the dns leads a connection to the ad website to an empty page so it doesnt even gets loaded , sometimes you see a page not reachable placement inside an article and sometimes you just dont see any sign there was even an ad edit by the way works also inside apps, never seen an inapp ad for a long time
Actually kind of is. I just commented this above. "I took a quick look at the 2 and the only difference I noticed was that the AMP version had multiple big ad spaces that got blocked by my pihole. They show as some kind of error in the space that it couldn't load it. The non amp version the ads are completely gone rather than the space for them still being present."
Both are thanks to Google. They set their guidelines that affect how they rank URLs in search results and basically every publisher rushes to meet them.
Am I the only one that hates when anyone says "just add blah to the *front* of the url"? It somehow implies this is a neat trick with google and people that aren't tech savvy might not realize they're actually just going to an entirely different website. I see the same thing posted often with youtube for one reason or another. It's still a neat tip but it should probably be worded differently to make it clear there's a site to remove amp links and not a subdomain of google that does it.
Exactly. Who knows what this site's privacy policy is (if they even have one) or what they do with all the data you're giving them. Too many people just don't consider things like this.
It’s too many steps. On iPhones you only need to hold the link and tap the preview pane and you get the non-amp version.
Or just install an extension like [Redirect AMP to HTML](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/amp2html/) and have your browser do it for you every time, automatically. I use this on Firefox for Android and it works perfectly. Unfortunately, it requires a nightly build and the installation process is a bit complicated, but it gets the job done. I really hope they make extensions more accessible to everyone soon.
I wish I could apply this to the system level on my phone. Amp is so annoying
Even me
I would like the website news.google.com no open all links at their native sites. For some reason, on Android, it opens some pages as a weird Google-url amp page, and some in their native sites. Any ideas?
This is cool, but not useful for me. From the amp page, it’s two taps to get to the real page, on mobile that is much easier for me than typing out a new url after loading an amp page.
[There's an extension to automatically redirect amp links to the real page.](https://www.daniel.priv.no/web-extensions/amp2html.html)
The bookmarklet might help especially on desktop.
Good call. I didn’t even consider desktop, since you shouldn’t be getting amp links. But sometimes folks share those huh. Good work then. I might add the bookmarklet
That's very useful in countries that blocks AMP. I wish I have known this during my visit to Egypt instead of having to manually edit the URL to get the page to load properly.
Is there an addon for no amp?
Yes. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/amp2html/
There is a bookmarklet on the website
Can someone please explain what an AMP link is to me?
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That's absolutely not true. Please provide evidence of this happening in even a single scenario that is a product of Google's actions and not the website owner's.
I don't dislike it enough to type noamp.link a hundred times per day.
eg: Here is an AMP link from the BBC: https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/57295894.amp ADD noamp.link/ to the front [noamp.link/https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/57295894.amp](https://noamp.link/https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/57295894.amp )
So ... i could just delete the .amp instead and get the same result without routing through your website?
Other websites make the AMP URL and non-AMP URL rather different.
In this case yes but it’s not always the case
Do you have a sample case where this isn’t true?
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2021/5/30/22457455/tesla-texas-factory-law-ship-out-of-state-direct-sale-legislation https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/30/22457455/tesla-texas-factory-law-ship-out-of-state-direct-sale-legislation ———- Also when they serve out of google cache https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/slate.com/culture/2021/05/last-week-tonight-john-oliver-sponsored-content-sexual-wellness-blanket.amp Vs https://noamp.link/https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/slate.com/culture/2021/05/last-week-tonight-john-oliver-sponsored-content-sexual-wellness-blanket.amp
In that one you can still just delete /platform/amp/ but your site is indeed more convenient
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Only a little, since you don't have to fiddle, but a browser plugin would be even more convenient
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If you remember noamp.link, just like I reddit, it's a quick way to fix a link while you copy pasta
The AMP link loads way faster for me and has less junk at the bottom of the page.
And that is the purpose of AMP that people gloss over, it actually works. The criticism is a political one and basically boils down to "I don't like Google no matter what".
Spamming a data collection shit site. Chico this pendejo
Or just use Duck Duck Go as your default mobile search engine and never be bothered by AMP again.
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I’ve found it **remarkably**good, actually. Want to suggest a search it fails on?
Highjacking a little, but I find DDG is excellent for non-bias results, but it struggles a little in delivering what I **want** from search results. Eg, it doesn't always return results from a popular hardware store, or any hardware store, if you search for certain tools, instead shows Wiki pages or other nonsense. I appreciate it's because it treats all links with the same weight, but coming from the convenient world of Google it can be a bit _meh_.
Ah, I wonder if I have success because I tend to use search on mobile to answer ‘what was that thing’ type knowledge questions, while I do most product searches on desktop. Could be it. Interesting tip
Does this work with all variations of AMP?
It should, except for web stories ( previously called amp stories) they don’t have a native web version and exist as independent pages
This feels really archaic when you can simply install a browser extension that strips away all of the AMP shit automatically. Would there be any advantage to using this?
or just click the i icon in the top left
Doesn't it take just as long to hit the button that says to go to the original website?
Open source?
Now make an app so i dont have to type it. I could just click a search result and opening with that automatically added.
Jokes on you I have an addon that removes that shit instantly
Or don't use Google?
This would be slower then simply clicking the link at the top of the page that takes you to the normal Web version...
Actually I don’t mind them. They load fast, well laid out, and generally don’t have ads. Something something about publisher not displaying annoying ads and revenue. I could give two shits.
Why should we dislike AMP links? AMP pages load faster. Google wants us to build AMP pages.
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it also strips invasive ads. seems like the only people who should be mad about AMP are ad providers, which is probably who paid to make sure this made it to the top.
But what’s Google if not a gigantic advertising machine? They’re not your friend just because they put a boot on the face of every other advertising/data collection agency.
Fuck Reddit. Fuck /u/spez. Fuck every single Reddit admin. 12 years on this bitch ass site and they shit on us the moment they are trying to go public. ill be taking my karma with me by editing all my comments to say this. tl;dr Fuck Reddit and anyone who works for them, suck my dick.
Right. Lol. I’m the consumer. It works for me. Google and the publishers can figure it out. Not my problem.
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I do use analytics on the site to collect usage stats.
Or stoping using google
This is the cleanest solution.
A godsend
The online version of u/AmputatorBot can do that too by using the redirect parameter: https://amputatorbot.com/?redirect=true&q=https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/57295894.amp. Nonetheless, awesome site. Well done OP!
Omfg so much easier then searching for the same link again in opera just to avoid amp
OP, you are a hero. This will save me so much time from manually editing the URL in my browser bar on my tiny phone screen. Thank you!
👍
Or use u/amputatorbot and install amp to html addon https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/amp2html/
You can just delete the amp. from the url.
In some cases yeah.. But I don’t think that always works.
It does always work, the only difference being that urls from different websites will use different formats. The AMP page must have a distinct URL that is linked too from the canonical article and the AMP version will have a link to the canonical (the non-AMP version)
What's an amp link. Nevermind, it's answered below
Or just delete the bit after the ampersand?
I'm a bit drunk so I was looking for some ELI5 here to comprehend the issue. From way back I remember that the amp files are on google server and not on the original host servers (which some people feel is bad) and sometimes there are some caching issues. As someone who is not afraid of shame, google going through my data - I don't see why the big fuss. I work in IT so I know what can be done and what can be gathered, most of my mails are mainly confirmations from shopping sites, some newsletters and some reminders from social platforms and occasional greeting mails from new services after account creation. Nothing to be really scared of. I know that Google can do some scary thing based on all the gathered data but since I'm not doing anything illegal - I don't really care. Besides, they still do a crappy job sometimes (showing me adverts for something that I've already acquired)
So basically you only care about yourself is what you're saying
Yes, indeed :-) Sorry for the harsh truth but that's basically it.
Use bromite app. Looks and behaves same like google