You can't disable Google AMP
productforums.google.comLike the other commenters here, I really disliked amp for a variety of reason such as the bar on top and the inability to easily link the main version of the page. However, I'be come to feel that we've brought this on ourselves as Web developers by making every website incredibly bloated and only possible to use on high speed connections. I've spent the past month in thailand on a much slower connection and the only sites I can reliably use currently are text sites like hacker news and amp pages. I can have a site like reddit even take 30-40 seconds to load and more complicated sites like cnn will load part of the page and then silently fail on me.
AMP is not a great solution, but it is at least _a_ solution, when the industry was not taking steps to fix the problem themselves
What part of Thailand is that? I get around ~50M/s on my phone. I haven't checked my home cable in a while but I stream HD video (Netflix / YouTube) to several computers / TVs at once w/o issue.
> The new preconnect API is used heavily to ensure HTTP requests are as fast as possible when they are made. With this, a page can be rendered before the user explicitly states they’d like to navigate to it; the page might already be available by the time the user actually selects it, leading to instant loading.
I get the impression AMP boils down to that. Google wants to present publisher content in "mobile app" form and has decided to push most of the cost onto publishers. I really wish they would have taken a different approach. They could have just slapped a stamp of approval on sites with good mobile layout and sub 1s load times. Let publishers make their own technology decisions about how to get there.
Also the Google News horizontal scrolling / AMP page scrolling / back button is a clusterfuck. More often than not I have to reload Google News from the address bar as an intermediate step in navigation. If you're going to wreck the web for better user experience then at least deliver better user experience.
I'm near phitsanulok now but had the same experience over the country. It might be because I'm using a tmobile sim through their partnership with local providers as I have seen the locals with much better speed in the city centers. The second you get out of the city and drop down to 3g or whatever the one below that is called, the locals have the same Web experience I have had
The stamp of approval for sub n seconds as a benchmark does sound like a better approach but at this point google is acting like a parent whose told their children to clean their room, or the parent is going to clean the room by tossing everything out. I get the impression that Google only cares about the results when it comes to making the Web faster, and doesn't care about anyone else's costs at this point
> at least deliver better user experience
This is what it comes down to. AMP is failing at that.
> I can have a site like reddit even take 30-40 seconds to load and more complicated sites like cnn will load part of the page and then silently fail on me.
Isn't reddit pretty simple text? Are you running RES at all?
Reddit mobile site. It's some spa thing, but yea it should be mostly text
> the only sites I can reliably use currently are text sites like hacker news and amp pages. I can have a site like reddit even take 30-40 seconds to load.
What about reddit's AMP pages [1]?
That blog reads as contradictory.
It talks about building a SPA, and rendering on the client side using JavaScript. It also talks about being AMP compliant.
Those goals cannot coexist.
I believe they mean something like https://github.com/choumx/amp-pwa.
AMP pages, which link to (and preload) a react-based SPA, which gets its content from AMP pages.
It's sending me to the mobile site, didn't even know they had amp pages, I might be better served by requesting the desktop version but my point still stands about sites just not loading
Oh that damn bar on the top...
At least they seem to have fixed that now (according to the blog post). Once they publish the fix to allow sharing the original URL, I don't see any downsides with AMP.
My issue is that it disappears whens drilling, but slides back in when I stop. I typically continue to scroll as I read, so it constantly gets in the way.
I also don't like that, but I still keep clicking links when they have the flash. Faster loading time beats usability to a certain degree for me, and most web developers are terrible when it comes to that.
I must admit, HN is probably the only more complex page I know (i.e. some interactivity, not just a blog) that loads fast on any connection.
As a user, I've found AMP results to be invariable an excellent user experience on mobile. I will always click an AMP link over a non-AMP link, when on mobile, because I know the AMP link will load quickly and be usable, and the odds are good the non-AMP link will not.
Apparently this is a minority view around here. :)
I completely agree with you. There are so many things that infuriate me about regular sites:
- Images not having defined heights, leading to content jumping up as I'm reading
- Ads loading and unloading, leading to the page jittering up and down erratically, making the content unreadable
- Auto-playing videos: some start playing audio, some have the audio muted but still pause any music I have playing
- Those ads that scroll up across the page (which wouldn't be a problem, but they scroll at a third of the speed that I drag them up at)
- The "Read Full Story" buttons that animate the content downwards, freezing everything for a few seconds while the dumb animation plays
- Web fonts taking an eternity to load, leaving me with no content for ten, fifteen, or more seconds
- Web fonts loading unexpectedly and causing all the text to reflow, destroying my scroll position
There are so many more things.
But here's the thing: there are no ad-blockers for Chrome on Android. I can't turn this crap off. And overwhelmingly, I can't just pay someone money to make it stop. I would gladly hand over fifty bucks or more every month to read news in peace, but there's no centralized way to do that.
AMP, at the very least, gets rid of these problems for me. Top bar and URL issues aside, clicking an AMP link is infinitely less frustrating than clicking a non-AMP link.
Even more annoying: when the entire article loads, I read the first couple paragraphs, THEN it hides everything behind the "Read Full Story" link! It's infuriating!
AMP gives a great user experience on mobile, at least speed-wise. I haven't had any real complaints as a user. (Disclaimer: I work for a non-Google Alphabet company.)
> Disclaimer: I work for a non-Google Alphabet company.
I.e. you work for Google, but not in advertising. The attempted rebranding has been awfully heavy-handed lately.
My paycheck doesn't say Google. Call it rebranding if you like.
I work for Google Cloud and I wouldn't call that advertising nor a "non-Google Alphabet company". So GP's distinction is useful and yours isn't.
My bad -- I forgot that Google was also in the shared hosting business. What is a useful dividing line between "Google" and "Alphabet"?
Alphabet is a holding company that trades under GOOG and GOOGL. Alphabet itself doesn't do a whole lot aside from allocate capital to its subsidiary companies.
Aside from Google, Alphabet owns Calico, DeepMind, GV (formerly Google Ventures), CapitalG (formerly Google Capital), X, Google Fiber, Nest Labs, Jigsaw, Sidewalk Labs, Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences - my company) and Waymo. These things are all "Not Google".
Google is everything that's owned/done by Google Inc. This includes Search, Ads, Chrome, Android, Google+, Google Cloud Platform, GSuite (GMail/Docs/Sheets/Slides/etc), and tons of other stuff.
Thanks. I would have expected that Google was either profit or surveillance, while Alphabet (i.e. not-Google) was the rest. It seems more like Google is "mostly not burning money," while not-Google is the rest.
> there are no ad-blockers for Chrome on Android
I use AdGuard [1] (which is a system-wide ad-blocker for Android that doesn't require root privileges) along with Brave [2] set as a custom tab provider in Chromer [3] to get rid of pretty much all ads in both apps and websites (regardless of browser).
[1] https://adguard.com/en/adguard-android/overview.html
[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.brow...
[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=arun.com.chrom...
Firefox on Android has full support for extensions, including uBlock Origin. I was surprised and very happy to discover this. Unfortunately it is a little less integrated.
I've been using Firefox on Android for pretty much exactly this reason. I have just one extension installed (uBlock Origin) which makes most sites perfectly readable. Once I got over the minor UI differences, I haven't missed Chrome since.
My desktop is the opposite, but that's because my desktop has Chrome extensions.
My specific gripes around AMP as an iPhone user:
1. Scrolling momentum is very different, making it feel non-native
2. The URL bar doesn't hide normally. Scroll down in portrait mode and it doesn't hide.
3. The URL bar doesn't un-hide normally. Switch to landscape mode and scroll up, the URL bar does not reveal itself.
4. Safari Reader mode often doesn't work.
5. Scrolling before the page is done loading can make it look like there's less content then there actually is.
6. Some dynamic sites misbehave (e.g. reddit does not show me as logged in).
7. Copying the URL results in some Google thing instead of the real URL
8. Relationship between AMP X close button and Back button is confusing
I am curious which of these you experience, which you don't notice, and which you don't experience at all if you are an Android user?
> 7. Copying the URL results in some Google thing instead of the real URL
This is exceptionally annoying, I agree. As a tip though, if you tap the 'sharing' widget, and scroll, you'll see a 'request desktop site' option that will give you the 'proper' URL.
As an iPhone/iOS 10 user, I cannot corroborate all of your claims.
1. Scrolling seems native to me. I just tried it again, maybe it seemed off for a moment. It's hard to tell. I don't find that the scrolling is broken as it is on many websites, and it's not difficult to achieve with -webkit-overflow-scroll: touch in one's CSS, i.e. they could fix this if it's not native already.
2. The URL bar does indeed remain visible. This is normal behaviour when you disable overflow scrolling on the root/body element and enable it on a child element instead. There are a couple of reasons to do this: if you want to size your page relative to the viewport and don't want that size to change when the user scrolls up and down, i.e. you don't want that size to change due to a disappearing/reappearing URL bar, you can force the URL bar to stay visible, thereby forcing a constant height, by doing what I described.
3. This definitely doesn't happen to me.
4. I have yet to encounter an AMP link that didn't work with Safari Reader. I would blame the author of the specific AMP page before blaming AMP as a whole if it works most of the time on other websites.
5. seems like a hazard with most dynamic websites.
6. I cannot say I have experienced, but I do not use Reddit, so maybe that's why.
7. is true. Can't avoid that, regrettably — the whole point of AMP is to serve the site from Google's CDN (and to use AMP components to follow best practices for loading assets). However, I wouldn't call it a disadvantage.
8. I do not find it confusing.
I think 2/3/8 are parts of a bigger and more general problem. The AMP bar simply isn't necessary. It's part of Google's system of control around their AMP pages. AMP should just be an optional way to display pages, there shouldn't be this whole sub-app experience of flicking between AMP articles once an article has been selected from the Google SERP.
It's a nice idea and everything, but what they should have done is implement a similar thing to the Safari reading list, where you're suggested the next article at the bottom of the one you're reading, rather than having an ugly ass navigation bar occupy 10% of the screen.
For one thing, this breaks the gestures for going backwards and forwards in navigation history in iOS Safari, which I would expect to be the first and foremost complaint by any iOS Safari user grappling with AMP.
> Scrolling momentum is very different, making it feel non-native
Is it different from other web pages, or from scrolling a native app? At the end of the day, an AMP site is HTML.
It totally is a great experience. The page loads fast without too much crap.
But it's also sad that something not-quite-open is taking over an important part of the web. AMP is this Google-wrapped version of a part of the web that tries to keep you in Google's land rather than allowing you to browse the site you visited.
As a user, I like clicking on AMP links. But in a certain way, it's like eating candy. I know it's not good for the web and openness over the long term. But in the short term, it's just so nice.
And this is why I dislike AMP. Instead of doing the right thing and rewarding good sites, Google instead is using the opportunity to push everyone into their ecosystem. The better solution is to encourages sites to think about their design and reward them accordingly.
I find the idea of the largest search engine repackaging others content without even hitting the content owner's site to be frankly rude. These sites pander to be ranked and get hits and then Google turns around and pulls this.
AMP is an opt-in thing that publishers have to implement. If you go out of your way to get google to display your AMP content, it's hardly "rude", nor is google "pulling something" on the sites.
A valid critique is that publishers might feel forced to offer AMP whether they want to or not in order to still get traffic and pagerank, but even then, it's not like they're being tricked. It's still opt in.
The sites are implementing AMP. Google gets the HTML and assets for its CDN cache by crawling the sites. Publishers are aware of this.
Amp loads fast. News pages are so bogged down with extraneous bullshit these days it feels like internet speeds are moving backwards. Also, I'm getting access to the Financial Times through Amp, I've never been able to read it before.
I don't think it's a minority view. At least in my case, I'm fine with clicking on an AMP link, but I'm always aware of:
* How difficult it will be if I want to share the link with someone (because I don't want to share an AMP link).
* How difficult it is if I want to go exploring around the site that has the thing I am reading.
We are working on a direct path from AMP pages loaded from Google Search to the canonical to fix the link issue & sharing will use the canonical link where technically possible.
How about a similar lightning bolt for sites with < 1s loading time and no popups that just show the content?
In that case it should be relatively easy to provide an AMP version of the page. If you already offer a lean page, it's not much to change.
Adding AMP will actually make the pages heavier in many of these cases.
It seems counter-intuitive to slow a page to get a lightning bolt.
While you're at it, why not add "straight links" to normal Google results so they can be copied as well? The current situation having everything be a Google referral link is a pain in the neck and users go out of their way to avoid copying those.
As a user who's often on a moderate-bandwidth 3G connection in Australia I can't say I've had any problems with AMP so far.
What I find annoying is that searching Google on a desktop or laptop still returns a lot of AMP results. They're supposed to be Accelerated Mobile Pages, it would be nice if they'd filter them out when searching from a standard PC.
What browser are you using? You see results marked as AMP when searching from desktop?
Firefox 51.0 for Windows, with the default user-agent, I get amp.google.com links scattered through my search results. Seems extra prevalent when I'm searching for news items, a lot of TV news station articles will come back with AMP URLs.
AMP is absolutely infuriating. I constantly share links via iOS extensions, for example Slack, and AMP gives me this ridiculous google.com link.
I've thought about building an adblock style blocking mechanism for these links. But it seems I'd end up blocking an increasingly large percentage of the search results.
No joke, it became enough of an issue for me that I ended up switching to DuckDuckGo on mobile. It's been around 3 months now.
Google really really really needs to fix amp links.
I switched to iOS this christmas. One of the first things I did was try to google something, get infuriated by the crappy AMP user experience, get even more infuriated there was no way to disable it anywhere, and switch to DDG.
Instead of blocking them you could automatically redirect them to the non-AMP version, which is linked with rel="canonical".
The top bar in google AMP results is super annoying (and hidden url's are cherry on that, making it difficult to share url's correctly).
That said rendering speed of AMP is quite noticeably faster than navigating to the actual site - or at least for more popular tech oriented news type sites.
Hard to say what's better - but I say to hell with AMP and just let us see raw websites.
This AMP "feature" caused me to switch my entire search engine on mobile. In other words, you have to disable it by not using Google.
Great idea. To which search engine did you switch?
I use DuckDuckGo [1] instead of Google. The search results are nearly identical and the bangs [2] are very handy.
For what it's worth, you can get this same functionality in desktop chrome in slightly fewer keystrokes using the custom search engines. Doesn't work on mobile, or at a public machine though.
I can understand how the aspect of the control Google has over AMP isn't ideal but you can't deny AMP sites are a great user experience on mobile. Pages tend to load for me in less than 0.5 seconds even on my mobile connection. For other sites, pages can take 10 to 30 seconds to load, have pop-ups, image loading causes the page the jump up/down etc.
Making sites with small download sizes and quick rendering is a very involved process. Google have made a tool and set of guidelines that force developers to use current best practices in a way you're just not going to get by hoping all developers everywhere do it themselves. It's also a much easier sell to management (i.e. "Is our site AMP compatible?") compared to trying to push for each individual best practice to be followed which can individually only have a small benefit.
The problem that AMP is trying to solve is definitely real. But pushing sites to add another layer on their system is the wrong way to do it, IMO. Why don't they just start rewarding systems that load fast, instead of pushing people into another google system?
> Why don't they just start rewarding systems that load fast, instead of pushing people into another google system?
This system is easy to follow and validate though. Is it AMP compatible or not AMP compatible?
But couldn't they just have a "Here's why we won't rank you higher" check instead?
Maybe it's easy for Google to validate it this way? So AMP has a lot of limitations and if you're AMP compatible Google knows you're meeting certain base guarantees. If Google have to rate arbitrary sites and advise how to restrict them maybe it's harder to rate the performance guarantees.
I agree your approach would have a net benefit as well but Google's AMP approach of making you build your site with performance in mind from the ground up might be more effective than nudging existing poorly performing sites towards being more performance minded.
Yes, but some of the things that cause issues e.g. eager loading of JS and images are the result of internal priorities in the browser
What if instead of forcing sites to re-implement themselves using a set of custom JavaScript components they actually changed they way browsers behaved e.g. via meta tag / header etc.?
I would agree, but most of the time I click on an AMP link, it spins and doesn't load. I think it's usually reddit links, but still, that's not okay.
My SO is a non-tech user and she hates the AMP bar so much that's fixed and covers significant screen space (on iphone 6) and it reverts to google search page when she clicks X button because she thought it'll hide that bar.
Going by this ticket, it seems it was not supposed to be a fixed element.
The place to complain about AMP isn't Google... it's the sites that AMP-enable their content. If enough people tell publishers "I've stopped reading your site because of AMP" maybe they'll take notice.
The sites who enable AMP are strong-armed/baited by Google, because they rank AMP sites differently.
This is just the beginning guys. It shows the BS business Google Search has become. Either comply to Google Internet™ or get lost.
If Google collapsed tomorrow, nothing of value will be lost and I'm awaiting eagerly for that day to come.
How many supported AMP because the wanted to? Google has way to much control over the modern web, they're approaching abusive monopoly status.
As many other people, I've also had my fair share of issues with AMP. On top of the ethical issues, the thing to finally make me fed up with it was the fact that I couldn't even load 20% of the search results on my iPhone being connected to a 1000/300 landline connection via wifi.
Kind of a self-defeating thing that they claim to make the web universally better and then force everyone to use technology that is clearly broken on so many search pages and then actively try and prevent you from using the old, actually working links.
Needless to say, I'm currently using DuckDuckGo on all of my mobile devices and am considering switching to it on my computers as well. It baffles me that Google gets away with the things they've been doing recently. I used to be really happy they exist, now I kinda wish they had tougher competition and weren't in many de-facto monopolistic positions. Other than the fact that they barely support anything they offer, be it "free" or paid products, they change and shut down projects almost monthly.
They are slowly turning Chrome into a walled garden going so far as to remove your own, manually installed extensions when they don't like what you're using. They ruined hangouts, which was a really great, even standout VOIP platform that offered not only the convenience of being browser-based, but all these plugins that would come in handy while producing content (like volume adjustments on participants and an export feature, for podcasting or D&D) or drawing boards or group YouTube video playback. They messed up mobile search with AMP, in an effort to dominate the web even more. They shut down Panoramio. They promised to fix Android for years and even 6 years after it became mainstream, the experience is noticeably less smooth than the competition, etcetcetc.
Using a Google product is only recommended if you're not planning on investing into a long-term future it seems.
Unfortunately, however convenient it was to rely on a single platform, for now I think possible solution is to look for alternatives and show our dislike by hitting them where it hurts: their install base.
To be clear, this is referring to the client side--that is, from the perspective of mobile web searchers, you can't ask Google to hide AMP results from the results page.
To my knowledge, publishers still have to opt into participating in Google AMP, and I assume they can opt out? That was my fear in reading the headline--that publisher participation in AMP is irrevocable, which would be bad.
If you stop doing AMP, won't all of the non-canonical/duplicated/evil amp.google.com URLs users have now shared and linked to your content going to break, meaning that once you go AMP you are effectively trapped?
Good question. I don't know.
Or maybe, once Google has a hosted copy of an AMP page, it will never remove it.
AMP was the thing that finally got me to stop using Google on my phone. Quite the accomplishment.
Perhaps AMP would improve my browsing experience if it actually worked, but I've only ever gotten a blank page when clicking on an AMP link.
I've always wanted a browser extension, perhaps built on Decentraleyes[1], which replaces the amp code with code that drops ads and trackers and just shows text and images. For bonus points you could look at httpseverywhere[2] and transform the google.com cached urls back to the originals.
Alas, it's rare to find a phone browser that supports extensions.
The thing about AMP is that it takes work. You cannot just install an AMP plugin and expect your existing website to suddenly serve AMP.
However, with certain CMS's, that's exactly how things are marketed. So what we're seeing is people go off and buy themes or whatever to make their website look the way they want, then they install some plugin and say "done". And then they are taken by surprise when, on mobile, their site either doesn't load at all, or looks nothing like the "premium theme" they paid for.
FWIW, I'm glad I moved my blog to AMP. I feel like it loads pretty well instantly on and I feel somewhat future proofed.
Would I encourage a less technical user to go through this? Not really.
Also, I wish Google would work better with integrating their own tooling. Getting lower scores on Google Pagespeed after enabling AMP because of the AMP CDN configuration is somewhat absurd.
The question then of course is: why is the non-AMP version of your blog slower, and could you have improved that with the same effort? Or is it just that people coming there via Google get Googles CDN which is faster?
The easy answer is that AMP forces you to do things like always declaring image height and width. And yes I could do that without AMP, but the moment you're not forced to do something, the path of least resistance is to not bother.
I certainly never would never have bothered setting up a build process to inline CSS previously.
AMP preloads the content before you click, which your own web site can't compete with.
from Google results, yes. That's only one specific (but for many admittedly important) situation, and sounds more like "AMP because that's the hoop Google has you jump through to get preloading", not "AMP because it makes the site faster".
> I feel somewhat future proofed.
Until Google deprecates it in July.
I'm glad they fixed this. It has been driving me insane.
I also wonder in general when they have canonical links set up what the statistics will look like on interactions with them. I understand what AMP is trying to achieve with site performances, and its great for some mediums specifically the simple reading of news, but it's dummying down the internet. Personally I hope that people get bored of the AMP experience and click to the more feature rich website experience(that obviously don't have terrible site performance).