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Google AMP Issue: Links to visit the site currently not working
- mtarnovan 7y ago<tinfoil> What if it's not a bug, but Google testing user response </tinfoil> (assuming Google is not stupid so Hanlon's razor may not apply)
- tobr 7y agoNot unreasonable, but then they would probably A/B test it rather than just break it for everyone. Although I guess they might be A/B testing and I’m just in the same group as OP.
- mtarnovan 7y agoWould they? Cause that would obviously give away that the break was intentional. If they break it for everyone they can still just blame it on an unintentional mistake.
- loudtieblahblah 7y agoI don't think it's an unreasonable thing to ponder.
- SCHiM 7y agoYour post remined me of this twitter thread from one of mozzilla's developers: https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871240432660480 https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871240432660480 Downthread: """ And every time, they’d say, “oops. That was accidental. We’ll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks.” """
- mtarnovan 7y agoI remember that thread now. Well, looks like standard Google behavior then.
- mtgx 7y agoNo tinfoil required. When in doubt about such issues think about whether or not the "bug" or "error" that people found in Google's solutions benefits Google. If it does, then it's much more likely than not that the "bug" was intentional. At best they wanted to test user reaction, or at worst, they were hoping it wouldn't be discovered (see Wi-Fi scanning, Safari cookies block bypass, tracking Android users' location at all time, even when "disabled", etc). Don't attribute to stupidity what can easily be explained by profit incentives (did I just invent a new saying/law?!).
- mtarnovan 7y agoLooks like capitalism has blunted Hanlon's razor :-)
- egberts 7y agoMy pythonized /etc/hosts now blocks them. Enough said.
- SiempreViernes 7y agoI don't know anything about AMP, so I'm genuinely amazed that one could create bugs in it that just downright break hyper references. I though links was a pretty important part of HTML, and so people took care to ensure they work?
- piecu 7y agoNot for google. They want to kill links.
- b3kart 7y agoWhich would be ironic, given their whole business has been built on following links and keeping track of what links to what.
- jakeogh 7y agoMore accurately, they want to keep you in their garden. Not knowing it's happening would be advantageous for the goog.
- Moxdi 7y agoWait what? What did I miss?
- piecu 7y agoSample link: https://www.wired.com/story/google-wants-to-kill-the-url/ https://www.wired.com/story/google-wants-to-kill-the-url/
- ehnto 7y agoWhat do they intend to replace them with?
- splatcollision 7y agoJavascript!
- justicz 7y agoYes! I’ve been having this issue for days but assumed it was just me. It is particularly frustrating for sites like Reddit where the AMP version is too aggressively cached and misses most of the recent comments.
- ehnto 7y agoIt feels like a solution to a problem no one was having, and now it's breaking the internet for people who never asked to use it.
- loudtieblahblah 7y agoReddit mobile is ridiculously slow in a browser. But they did it to themselves. i.reddit.com is fast as hell. m.reddit.com loads 100x the Javascript. Thus Amp fixes a probme they created bc reasons.
- ehnto 7y agoExactly, I am of the opinion that users and sites should figure it out. Google as a middleware for your entire user experience is a crazy idea for so many reasons. Most of the JS is part of the different ad tech networks anyway. Hell, maybe that's their drive? Making it harder to have competiting ad tech?
- petepete 7y agoIn almost all situations, I prefer the mobile web over apps. But reddit's mobile offerings are _so bad_ compared to Reddit Sync. I know at some point Reddit will pull the plug on third party apps, and that's when I stop using Reddit.
- loudtieblahblah 7y agoThey made it bad intentionally so you'd install their app
- mattmanser 7y ago
- godelmachine 7y agoMay I ask what screen recording app is he using?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- baloki 7y agoIt’s built into iOS nowadays, you can add it to your control centre via settings.
- josefresco 7y agoI just discovered this, after my daughter told me about it. You need to set it to show in your control center first.
- dhruvrrp 7y agoiOS has screen recording built in which stores the video in your photos. It's the circle on the bottom right in the first frame of the video.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dgellow 7y agoInteresting, I didn't even consider that could be a bug. I just assumed that was how AMP was supposed to behave and moved to Duckduckgo for mobile search.
- raverbashing 7y agoOh look another "completely innocent mistake" by Google
- luckylion 7y agoYou're getting downvoted, presumably because "they wouldn't be evil", but I find the alternative just as problematic: a superpower tech company with a budget larger than many nation states hiring the best and the brightest and paying them unbelievably well so they do their best.. breaking fundamental features in widely used software and not realizing it themselves (they wouldn't ship the update otherwise, I believe). What's happening there? And the follow up thought: "move fast and break things" suggests that we should think twice before relying on these companies for anything close to critical infrastructure.
- otabdeveloper3 7y agoWhy would you want to visit sites that aren't Google (c)? They're probably very unsafe and full of very annoying ads!
- tobr 7y agoArguably this means that Google is breaking point 11 of their own AMP Cache Guidelines [1]. If I ran any AMP pages, I would be quite upset. 1: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-cache-guidelines.md https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-c...
- rangerpolitic 7y agoWhen you have the power to write the rules, you can break the rules. Google is too powerful.
- mtgx 7y agoI think Google is only going to play this "incompatibility" card more and more now that Chrome is the dominant browser. We need more pushback against Google doing stuff like this, even when at first glance what they push for seems "positive."
- plibither8 7y agoPoint 11: No obstruction of the contents, branding or attribution of the original AMP document.
- krn 7y agoThe AMP links to visit the original site are working fine for me on Brave (based on Chromium) on Android: clicking on the "(i)" icon shows the URL. The easiest way to to get rid of all AMP pages in Google search results is to disable javascript on www.google.com/*.
- tobr 7y agoDoesn’t work on iPhone Safari for me, I get the same translucent gray overlay regardless of where I tap.
- krn 7y agoCould it be an iOS/Safari-specific bug?
- luckylion 7y agoThe tweet says it's Chrome on iOS.
- madeofpalk 7y agoWhich is still actually Safari/Webkit as foreign rendering engines are not allowed to ship on iOS.
- seieste 7y agoI don’t think you can disable AMP if you’re not signed in.
- macintux 7y agoQuite a few Google features to help you manage the level of intrusiveness they can exhibit are only available if you log in.
- firasd 7y agoWhen AMP was introduced I assumed the actual content would be loaded from the canonical URL anyway. This whole in-between caching layer G introduced is very weird. Also, I think what AMP was pitted against--Facebook instant articles--no longer exists, or at least doesn't particularly matter (now that FB is several pivots beyond the whole 'newsfeed is full of articles' stage).
- jefftk 7y agoOne way to think of AMP is as a solution to "When people click on links from search the pages often load very slowly. Can we make this instant?" Any preloading based solution has to involve caching, because otherwise sites could learn that they had shown up in your search results without you having clicked on then. (Disclosure: I work at Google, not on AMP, and I'm only speaking for myself)
- firasd 7y agoPreloading in the browser? I guess... my understanding was that the major benefit of AMP is the stripped-down markup. eg. in AMP you can't have a giant background video, or a bunch of JS email opt-ins driven through live A/B tests... all the random stuff that slows down sites these days.
- iforgotpassword 7y agoWhile this might have been one of the reasons, most likely from the (sometimes rather native) perspective of devs, I still attribute mostly malice to this whole thing and hope it gets them good in the whole antitrust issue. Even if it were just that, trying to tackle slow loading pages out of selflessness on Google's side, I can only say: None of your ducking business. Make sure your pages load fast, and then that's it.
- jefftk 7y ago> trying to tackle slow loading pages out of selflessness on Google's side I'm not sure where you're getting "selflessness". The faster pages load from search the better people's experience of using search is. This directly benefits both Google and people who use search.
- xupybd 7y agoJust came to say I hate amp. If I want to go to a site I want that site not a google cache of it. It’s not a better experience. It just means another click to get to where I was going. Stop the madness Google kill amp.
- OskarS 7y agoI don't think I've ever seen anyone on HN defend AMP. We all hate it. It's a pox on the modern web.
- dmitriid 7y ago> I don't think I've ever seen anyone on HN defend AMP I present to you AMP tech lead: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=cramforce https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=cramforce
- logicallee 7y agoHaha, even they: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16171735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16171735
- logicallee 7y agoNot sure why anyone would downvote me. In the linked comment this user says that Google isn't nearly agile enough for the AMP team to respond to suggestions - or did I misread what I linked?
- a254613e 7y agoDepends on who you mean by "we", people working directly on implementing/supporting AMP? Anti-google crowd? Sure, you're probably right. But as someone who's just an end user, and not working on frontend development who likes AMP, I don't bother commenting when the opinion is extremely skewed to one side. I love AMP. The website loads faster, feels a lot snappier, and is overall positive experience for me. That's what I care about. I don't care how it got to that point, I want usable and fast loading website - and AMP gives me that. Can this be speed and mobile friendliness be implemented without AMP? Yes. Is it implemented without AMP? Very rarely. Of course there's the argument with google trying to get a tighter grip on web and while that is not a good thing the truth is that I, and huge majority of average consumers, just don't care if it means better results for me.
- hexo 7y agoSimple. Don't use it. It doesn't make any sense anyway.
- tannhaeuser 7y agoSure if it's your site, you don't use AMP - it just indicates disregard for basic web usability and competence. But what about the (rare) site using AMP with you having no control? Hmm ... ok thinking about it I don't know any site using AMP worth reading. I guess using AMP, like script-heavy content, is just a negative marker for quality content.
- geofft 7y agoHow do you do that? The broken feature is the exact feature that lets you not use it....
- graeme 7y agoAMP links are a major reason I switched to duckduckgo on mobile. Google seems to be shortsighted in doing this. Yes, only a tiny minority of technical users will know what amp pages are and switch search engines to avoid them. But, a larger group will likely find the amp pages annoying, even if they can't precisely articulate why. This weakens google's hold on the market.
- michaelmior 7y agoWhy do you think a larger group will find AMP annoying? I know I'm in the minority, but I generally like AMP in my search results.
- graeme 7y agoIf it breaks things. For example, I had a common issue where reddit links in search didn't have comments and I had to click through to get to them If the amp page displays what you expect, it works well. It it makes you click through, it doesn't. Of course, users may or may not realize amp/google are the reason a site is broke. Dunno how many people have issues like this though. Reddit was the main one for me, plus a few random sites having issues.
- michaelmior 7y ago"broken" and "requiring an extra click" seem like two different things to me. Although I understand that you're not getting what you expected, so my judgement here is subjective.
- graeme 7y agoIt may not be obvious to users why their site is broken. Of course, at that stage they may blame the site unless they know why the site appears that way in the first place. But it isn't always obvious how to get to the site from an AMP page.
- 7y ago
- granshaw 7y agoI hope AMP is the straw that breaks the camels back in googles antitrust suit - its the most blatant and shameless abuse of their position, IMO
- sexy_seedbox 7y agoUse Kiwi Browser, it has built-in AMP removal.
- seieste 7y agoThis seems to be a way for Google to make revenue from news sites and is a clear abuse of monopoly power. When I click on an AMP news link, I see a “carousel” at the top that shows multiple news articles. I can go to various articles on a topic by swiping left or right, all without going back to the news site. But now that Google has removed the link to visit the site, it is clear they don’t want you to visit the actual news site but do everything through Google. This means that only the Google ad network will be allowed, so they stand to benefit from this arrangement, and news sites can have no hope of receiving any traffic.
- ec109685 7y agoNo, multiple ad networks (100+) are allowed in google amp, so publishers are free to chose what monetizes best: https://marketingland.com/google-says-100-ad-networks-support-amp-releases-3rd-party-technology-support-234579 https://marketingland.com/google-says-100-ad-networks-suppor...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dgellow 7y agoMaybe an obvious or stupid question, but that's worth asking: As a user, do we have a way to disable AMP?
- robin_reala 7y agoUse DuckDuckGo instead? There’s no switch in Google.
- ComputerGuru 7y agoNot a dumb question at all! The answer is no, but there are workarounds like playing with the user agent or using an unsupported browser.
- eska 7y agoWhen I attended the Drupal Europe 2018 conference I had the opportunity to talk to Barb Palser of the AMP global relations team. I asked her in an intentionally innocent way: "I thought AMP is supposed to replace RSS, but from the presentation it seems like it's trying to be a better HTML?" to which she replied yes. I acted all optimistic, so she wouldn't be defensive, but this conversation sent chills down my spine and I remember it to this day.
- gowld 7y agoWhy? AMP was promoted as a better HTML (a "good parts" subset plus a tiny extension) from day 1. It never had anything to do with RSS.
- ec109685 7y agoWhat would it even mean to be better RSS? The idea is sites can preload an AMP page safely so that when you click on it, it can display to the user instantly. In that specific case, isn’t Barb correct, no chills needed?
- UweSchmidt 7y agoThe fundamental change is that now the content comes from Google's servers. Google is hosting the Internet. Of course Google can't host illegal content on their service, right? And won't host content that goes against a future AMP user agreement... From there they can tighten the screws against competitors, or future attempts at privacy, or basically anything they get away with.
- lern_too_spel 7y agoYour concerns don't give them any more power than controlling the search results already gives them. They are free to deindex anything.
- joshuamorton 7y agoDo you also think that CDNs are bad, since you end up accessing content from the first parties?
- vortico 7y agoIsn't AMP blatant copyright infringement? If so, how does a website owner demand the infringement to be taken down?
- bluetidepro 7y agoThe sites themselves are opting into AMP, I believe. Google isn't just converting the site to AMP automatically. The owners of the site themselves have to add code to their site for it to work with AMP...
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoI'm surprised I haven't seen more discussion on the actual bug in the comments. In the screen capture the user shows, the AMP header shows the link icon in the upper right corner, and when you click it it should show the real URL and let you navigate through (but that's not happening, hence the bug). However, in my experience the header is totally different. There is an (i) icon in the upper left corner that shows the link when tapped, and the upper right corner shows the share icon and tapping it opens the share dialog. Note this changed for me recently (I used to get the link icon like the poster). So Google is clearly testing different behavior, which probably led to the bug. In any case, I'd note the version I got that I think the (i) is much less clear than the link icon, and I'm sure the end result is people clicking through to the source site less often. Fuck Google and their aggressive attempts to hijack the web even more than they already have.
- geofft 7y agoWhy should a community of highly skilled engineers provide free debugging labor to a giant corporation to fix a bug in a product that only exists because Malte Ubl wanted to get promoted?
- kunday 7y agoI think in general anything about amp receives a bit of attention to put it mildly. I'm curious if anyone from amp/google is lurking around to give a perspective. It is reproducible on all my devices now. I remember it working at least yesterday...
- SimeVidas 7y agoA reminder that AMP results don’t show up on Google Search if you use the mobile version of Firefox ;)
- robin_reala 7y agoYet…
- bluetidepro 7y agoIt's ironic to me that AMP is a problem we all brought upon ourselves, really. It's almost (jokingly) a Prisoner's dilemma [1]. Had no one ever opted into it, it probably would have just been swept under the rug by Google, and a win-win for us all. But since a competitor of yours (probably) opted into it to get ahead of you, you now have to opt into it also, to compete and get the same SEO "power juice" it gave them. The fact that everyone now adds the code to their site to make it work with AMP is the problem. Google gave us the rope. And then all the SEO managers/marketers/specialists hung us with it. Ha [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
- etrma 7y agoYou think SEO specialists give a shit about AMP? They just care about how high your page ranks in Google--if anything, they'd love it if the web was more Google-centric.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nurettin 7y agoThis is sadly true. There is no universe in which e-commerce would not wholly try to swallow something that google recommends in order to increase their chances of ending up on the front page.
- laumars 7y agoAgreed. Further to your point, AMP was only ever needed because we made our pages so artificiality heavy in the first place
- jhabdas 7y agoIt's okay to use more data. But it's important to respect users on faster mobile networks who pay by quota. Getting to the top of Google isn't at all difficult if you know how to build a fast website. And that doesn't require AMP at all.
- onesmallcoin 7y agoChromium on mobile has always had issues with AMP for me, I've just come to acept it I think it's wrong for a monopoly to take control of what another entitys site looks like. It's a we can take care of EVERYBODY feature: we were fine without it and will be fine when it doesn't exist anymore
- kerng 7y agoGoogle's power abuse with AMP is really upsetting. Hopefully this is being looked into and AMP canned before its spread via monopoly is irreversible. It's bad for all, but Google.
- ycombonator 7y agoHappens in iOS Safari too
- sn_master 7y agoI also absolutely hate how it lets you zoom out but not zoom in. Have to reload the entire page to get it to the original size :/
- vbsteven 7y agoSo many people in this thread complain about AMP being forced on them as an end user. Nobody forces you to use Google... Just use another search engine like DuckDuckGo. It is sufficient for over 90% of my searches and I haven’t seen an amp page in ages. AMP for SEO is another discussion, in that case it is kind of forced on you if you want to rank high on the Googlenet.
- ckuhl 7y agoThe problem is that _everyone else uses Google_. Even though I don’t use Google for search, my friends do and they’ll gladly share AMP pages with me.
- ndiscussion 7y ago"Weird, what web site even is that?"
- CDSlice 7y agoFirst of all, I'm not a web developer, so I may not get all the problems with AMP. I actually love AMP on mobile. Every site I've used(1) that has an AMP version loads faster and works better even with some ads than the normal version on Firefox mobile with uBlock Origin. Given that it's possible for people to host their own AMP cache (like Cloudflare does), I really don't see the problem with AMP itself. (1) Other then Reddit, but considering how much of a dumpster fire their normal mobile site is I honestly think that it's broken on purpose to try and make people use the app.
- gjs278 7y agowhy do people on HN insist on making (1) references to their comments for no reason. just type like a normal person. oh and amp sucks.
- ycombonator 7y agoTry this https://phys.org/news/2019-06-mass-anomaly-moon-largest-crater.html https://phys.org/news/2019-06-mass-anomaly-moon-largest-crat... on iOS safari. The source link does not open.
- OnlyRepliesToBS 7y agoAMP is anti-competitive behavior