I think that the mobile trend was blown way out of proportion. I very often find myself clicking on the 'Browse desktop version' button when browsing a so-called 'mobile-friendly' version of a site. Is the look of the website really more important than the content and functionality? For me, it's not. This is just another example of a big tech monopoly imposing their highly opinionated ideas on billions of people.
Also, I hate it when a mobile site keeps reminding me to install the app. This is extremely mobile-unfriendly. Google ought to punish those sites.
Ironically, when Apple first launched the iPhone, full-size desktop viewing of websites was a major feature. It's strange that the world has reverted back into making an entirely separate mobile internet.
> I think that the mobile trend was blown way out of proportion
This is an extraordinarily location-specific sentiment. In the country I'm in right now, less than 25% of the population have desktop PCs. Everyone has a smartphone, if not two. Most of the world is like this, especially the developing countries with the most future growth potential.
I think the parent's point is that desktop sites are often good enough even on mobile. Mobile sites, on the other hand, seem to often lack in functionality.
They need you to install their app so they have better control over your device without those pesky browsers with their plugins blocking adds or privacy infringements.
The worst is the "mobile-first" approach which makes the desktop version suffers. Reddit's new redesign looks terrible on a 21:9 screen. Most content is centered on 1/3 on the screen. So much wasted horizontal space.
I'd say the redesign actually makes Reddit usable on a 21:9 screen not the other way around. I mostly browse text based subreddits so entire paragraphs becoming one long line which to read you have to move your head is more annoying. The redesign makes the site usable on more than a 5:4 or 4:3 monitor for which the original version was designed for.
I dont even think people complained about mobile articles being slow. Sure , there are many bad cases where sites autoplay videos etc. but it’s equally bad in their desktop version (where s the amp there?). A few seconds to load an article on mobile is normal, considering that reading the article will take entire minutes. The probability of needing 1-2 seconds per page applies only when someone is skimming through multiple pages for research. The possibility of doing that on mobile is small, and these are users you dont want visiting your site anyway. Imho google built a honeytrap and is going to get away with murder because, when they will be fined for this, it will be already too late.
I hope developers wake up to this reality. Since that is not going to happen, i hope they abuse amp as bad as they abused html , rendering it useless
> Is the look of the website really more important than the content and functionality?
If 99% of people don't agree with this, then why are we wasting time with AMP? AMP's primary sales-pitch to end-users when it first came out was that pages would be faster and content would be more uniform, because site operators wouldn't be allowed to add custom styles and flashy controls or widgets.
99% of the people who don't care about the content are more important than the 1% who do? What if it were 51%? How is it supposed to move, if the standards-setters don't move the passive consumers?
Google intentionally gimps Firefox on Android, by serving an old-school page. Using an addon (which you can on mobile Fx, and not on Chrome), fixes this by editing the UA string when visiting Google.
Getting the "nice experience", however, gives me amp links. And when I click on them, I'm unable to scroll?! It doesn't matter if it loads fast, when I cannot read beyond the fold.
It also breaks the "open in app" I normally have. If the link is a reddit link, for instance, I can press an icon in Firefox to have it open in "Reddit is fun".
There is a bug report [1] that tracks Google serving a second tier search experience for Firefox for Android.
Google has been dragging their feet for years on this one, and it perfectly fits their "oopsies" pattern of behavior [2], which ends up hurting their competition.
This is yet another case where Google probably has minimal to no benefit from doing it, but when produced collectively with other evidence in an anti-trust case will do an incredible amount of damage.
Believe it or not but the web is literally unusable if I use any other browser not based on chrome because:
- The search is degraded (it hides the advanced search menu in Google and most dropdowns in ff)
- Most of the sites use Recaptcha or cloudflare (also an extension of recaptcha) which gives you a low bot score if you're using anything other than chrome and then begins the never ending exercise of identifying cars and traffic lights
- I think web devs are also only testing for chrome nowadays and a lot of big and small sites just won't render properly with FF (the PH menu won't open on ff android for me unless I change the ua). It's not always chrome's fault though as many sites (like dictation.io) insist I use chrome because ff still won't support some web apis.
None of those are true in my experience using Firefox or Safari. I don’t know if you are using extensions or something like Tor but it might be worth trying again in a clean install.
The amp problem I have on Firefox for Android is that AMP links to TomsHardware articles never load. I have to re-write the URL to replace "amp" with "www" to be able to read an article.
Can you place share how you find a Tom's Hardware AMP page? I work at Mozilla and would like to test this. Google Search in Firefox for Android just returns regular www URLs. If I manually change "www." to "amp." (reversing your fix), I get a 404 page, not an AMP article.
Edit: I copied an AMP URL (https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.tomshardware.com/...) from Google search in Chrome. I posted email it into Firefox and it redirected to a www. page on tomshardware.com that loaded successfully.
YouTube's management UI's performance in Firefox has been terrible since the Polymer migration (a baffling choice since Polymer was already clearly a failed initiative when they undertook that migration) and looks like it will never be fixed.
Hangouts-in-Gmail has had a memory leak in Firefox for more than a year eventually freezes its tabs.
When you're a monopoly, you can get away with a lot.
I've published AMP only sites and regular optimized sites. My niche is usually large informational sites. Minifying and removing unused CSS and inlining everything has resulted in better indexing than similarly positioned AMP sites.
The resulting pages are smaller than their AMP equivalents and load with less requests.
On my non-news sites I can say that I get more traffic without AMP.
I have to give it to Google for such brilliant scheme to make use the current web clutter to its advantage, but we all know the dangers of this if left unchecked.
The web doesn't need AMP to be fast, it needs common sense which has left the building once ads and tracking became the goal.
I have no trouble getting websites with good web performance to rank above AMP results. I like to think I have beaten them even when I'm slightly below them, because they trap their visitors in the AMP silo, while I am offering them a full site with probably better performance overall.
The only reason to offer AMP is to get into the news caroussel.
I'm going to make a rare exception to my usual hating on Google, and say that AMP is great for users.
I'd like to see a move back to a document-based web rather than a web-application-based web: CSS and JavaScript have not been good for users. A document-based web allows users to pull down content and render it on their machines using programs users control. Coupling content with CSS and JavaScript means that users must use a website's CSS and JavaScript to render the content, which means that users must give up control of how the content is rendered. The results are predictable: most websites have crap accessibility, run a bunch of malware[1] that has nothing to do with rendering, and have user interfaces are all over the place (every website is different so you have to learn a new interface every time you visit a new website, even if they're presenting the same kinds of content).
Why should we let websites determine how content is rendered? I can pull down an AMP page and view the content the way I want to view it, so this gives me as a user a lot more power.
Sure, the most common case right now is that Google renders it on their page, and that gives power to Google. But that's just trading one evil (Google) for another (content providers who package content with malware)--as a user that's not really a net gain or loss. But having content shipped in a more document-based format is a big gain for users.
[1] Code which runs on my computer to show me ads is adware. Code which runs on my computer to send data about me to companies is spyware. If these were written in Python and packaged with a desktop program everyone would call them adware and spyware, but if they're written in JavaScript and packaged with a web application they're ubiquitous and accepted.
Website authors opting in to letting another server serve content "as" their own domain isn't anything new: it's what CDNs do. The Signed Exchanges standard is actually a huge step up because the website authors get to cryptographically sign their content. With normal CDNs, if the CDN is malicious or gets hacked, the CDN is free to serve modified content on the original domain.
I'm confused. The title of this article isn't at all supported by its content. The entire thing can be summarized as:
> Google rolled out a new feature that allows AMP to use server-side rendering (SSR), boosting performance for sites that adopt the technology across their entire domain.
Followed by a dozen paragraphs arguing why AMP is bad, with no further mention of server side rendering or why it "shows how [AMP] can infiltrate every corner of the internet". Is there anything new here, or is this just another rehash of the same arguments we've been having about AMP since the day it was released?
Is there any irony in this? SPAs are often the pages which are excessively heavy. Not saying it can't be done well. Just that these pages are frequent offenders.
Readit News
Also, I hate it when a mobile site keeps reminding me to install the app. This is extremely mobile-unfriendly. Google ought to punish those sites.
This is an extraordinarily location-specific sentiment. In the country I'm in right now, less than 25% of the population have desktop PCs. Everyone has a smartphone, if not two. Most of the world is like this, especially the developing countries with the most future growth potential.
I hope developers wake up to this reality. Since that is not going to happen, i hope they abuse amp as bad as they abused html , rendering it useless
If 99% of people don't agree with this, then why are we wasting time with AMP? AMP's primary sales-pitch to end-users when it first came out was that pages would be faster and content would be more uniform, because site operators wouldn't be allowed to add custom styles and flashy controls or widgets.
Getting the "nice experience", however, gives me amp links. And when I click on them, I'm unable to scroll?! It doesn't matter if it loads fast, when I cannot read beyond the fold.
It also breaks the "open in app" I normally have. If the link is a reddit link, for instance, I can press an icon in Firefox to have it open in "Reddit is fun".
Google has been dragging their feet for years on this one, and it perfectly fits their "oopsies" pattern of behavior [2], which ends up hurting their competition.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=975444
[2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3389882/former-mozilla...
- The search is degraded (it hides the advanced search menu in Google and most dropdowns in ff)
- Most of the sites use Recaptcha or cloudflare (also an extension of recaptcha) which gives you a low bot score if you're using anything other than chrome and then begins the never ending exercise of identifying cars and traffic lights
- I think web devs are also only testing for chrome nowadays and a lot of big and small sites just won't render properly with FF (the PH menu won't open on ff android for me unless I change the ua). It's not always chrome's fault though as many sites (like dictation.io) insist I use chrome because ff still won't support some web apis.
Edit: I copied an AMP URL (https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.tomshardware.com/...) from Google search in Chrome. I posted email it into Firefox and it redirected to a www. page on tomshardware.com that loaded successfully.
Hangouts-in-Gmail has had a memory leak in Firefox for more than a year eventually freezes its tabs.
When you're a monopoly, you can get away with a lot.
The resulting pages are smaller than their AMP equivalents and load with less requests.
On my non-news sites I can say that I get more traffic without AMP.
The web doesn't need AMP to be fast, it needs common sense which has left the building once ads and tracking became the goal.
The only reason to offer AMP is to get into the news caroussel.
I'd like to see a move back to a document-based web rather than a web-application-based web: CSS and JavaScript have not been good for users. A document-based web allows users to pull down content and render it on their machines using programs users control. Coupling content with CSS and JavaScript means that users must use a website's CSS and JavaScript to render the content, which means that users must give up control of how the content is rendered. The results are predictable: most websites have crap accessibility, run a bunch of malware[1] that has nothing to do with rendering, and have user interfaces are all over the place (every website is different so you have to learn a new interface every time you visit a new website, even if they're presenting the same kinds of content).
Why should we let websites determine how content is rendered? I can pull down an AMP page and view the content the way I want to view it, so this gives me as a user a lot more power.
Sure, the most common case right now is that Google renders it on their page, and that gives power to Google. But that's just trading one evil (Google) for another (content providers who package content with malware)--as a user that's not really a net gain or loss. But having content shipped in a more document-based format is a big gain for users.
[1] Code which runs on my computer to show me ads is adware. Code which runs on my computer to send data about me to companies is spyware. If these were written in Python and packaged with a desktop program everyone would call them adware and spyware, but if they're written in JavaScript and packaged with a web application they're ubiquitous and accepted.
That's a very interesting definition of modern browser.
> Google rolled out a new feature that allows AMP to use server-side rendering (SSR), boosting performance for sites that adopt the technology across their entire domain.
Followed by a dozen paragraphs arguing why AMP is bad, with no further mention of server side rendering or why it "shows how [AMP] can infiltrate every corner of the internet". Is there anything new here, or is this just another rehash of the same arguments we've been having about AMP since the day it was released?