On Google
Last month I ranked Google fourth in my dropping tech giants list. My love/hate relationship boils down to: for all the cool tech they make, they're an advertising company first and foremost.
As a long time reader of Google News I've grown more frustrated with their AMP lock in of late. You click a link, but you're not taken to the actual website, you're still in the Google ecosystem. An open web that is not. So now I'm a Bing News user. The first time I've consciously chosen a Microsoft product in more years than I can remember.
Former Google employee Tim Bray wrote a blog post this morning that sums it all up rather well.
I'm still broadly in sympathy with Google's efforts on the Internet, which have mostly made it better. And they're so easy to understand: They want everyone to be online all the time to see ads, ideally on a Google property where they don't have to divvy the take.
Autonomous vehicles? Online while driving. Google Glass? Online while walking. Blogspot? Gmail? Maps? YouTube? Whatever you're doing, do it here please.
I read about the AMP links not leaving Google. I think it's a shame they decided to make this change. I will have to give Bing News a try. I use their app on my phone for various searching.
Yeah AMP is a real pain in the arse to be honest.
AMP is driving me crazy. I know you can get around those links to to have to think about it sucks. For the most part, I need the actual link because I'm trying to use it in a blog post or tweet or whatnot. I don't want to link to AMP versions.
Yeah, you can get around it but it's a pain isn't it? Have you noticed that the AMP pages break 'scroll to top' in Safari on iOS as well? I guess because the lock in wasn't annoying enough by itself?