It could be the case if AMP grows dominant; given the market share of Google Search, it could be enough to create a controlled (er, "curated") web in a similar spirit.

Fuck AMP. The fact that there is no way to turn it off is one of the main reasons I don't use Google on my phone. DDG often has slightly poorer results, but I often find answers to my questions in Reddit threads and Reddit has a horrible mobile experience. Between AMP and them throwing 15 different popups at me to get their app (why would I want their single tab app?!?!), it's borderline unusable.

I'm still pissed that Mozilla handled the Firefox Fenix transition so badly. I had a perfectly working Redirect AMP to HTML [1] addon on mobile, and now you can only install a set of whitelisted addon for the moment. Until then, the Firefox experience is significantly degraded on Android.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/amp2html/

Unless you keep using the old version of Firefox, which is still available and still works perfectly.

The thing is - will that work longer term ? Mozilla will not maintain the old codebase anymore and unless someone else takes it over (unlikely) tje old version can become insecure & missing new APIs. All that while Mozilla still not providing the missing features for the new version.

Does Fenix let you install userscripts? You could use https://github.com/bentasker/RemoveAMP.

This is what I use on my Jailbroken iPhone.

To be fair, reddit also has a horrible desktop experience. Thank goodness for RES and old version.

There's also https://i.reddit.com for mobile. I personally prefer using the reddio [0] CLI and tuir [1] TUI for Reddit on the desktop.

Ultimately, the best Reddit experience is less Reddit.

[0]: https://gitlab.com/aaronNG/reddio

[1]: https://gitlab.com/ajak/tuir

Reddit has a mobile view that is almost the exact same UI as the AMP page. WHY do they allow Google to run the AMP page instead? I too have switched to DDG solely to avoid Reddit AMP pages.

Because they have a gun to their cold cash craving heads, and will be demoted to lower positions in the results, lose traffic, and lose revenue if they dare withhold their content from the Internet’s biggest gatekeeper?

I've had the best experience ever since I ditched Google for DDG on my phone, and stuck Reddit on (old) desktop mode with a text wrapping browser. Don't miss Google at all, I only now use it to search for programming stuff.

I've done exactly the same thing over the last month and wish I would have made the change sooner. The mobile web is vastly improved with fewer AMP results and new Reddit is just terrible. :shakesfist:

I've done almost the same thing. DDG, reddit in old mode. Google is now just for maps and stackoverflow related searches. Been at it for 4 months.

+1 for DDG.

If you're still using Google and prefer a more technical approach to your inquiries, maybe it's time for to consider a more refined tool?

DDG isn’t that good. It is time to consider something more refined. DDG isn’t it.

I'm in the same boat, except using i.reddit. how come you use the desktop version?

Using Opera browser, the text reflows to always fit the screen on zoom, so nearly all desktop sites become very legible on mobile at a glance when zooming in, without having to scroll laterally. I keep withing for a FOSS browser with that functionality.

They botched that too. On mobile (web), even if I request the desktop site and set it to the old version in my settings, always goes to the redesign. I have to manually change any link's subdomain to old.

The Reddit apps I've tried stick to the meth-addled idea to use fixed floating header bars, which are useless and really annoy me.

Ugh. That's depressing. Reddit used to be almost as lean and mean as HN...

So you're proposing diverting the conversation to a theoretical that has little chance of happening but not discussing the actual example that's happening right now?

App Stores suck. App Stores with no side-loading are even worse. Platforms that are locked down so much that you can't even install your own OS are worse.

We used to bitch about Tivoization on HN all the time, it seems post iPhone, everyone seems A-OK.

> We used to bitch about Tivoization on HN all the time, it seems post iPhone, everyone seems A-OK.

People were not making money by being shareholders, that's why.

The same model dates back to the first game consoles. As much as people love freedom the utility of curated lists of applications that work without issues is a major selling point. I don’t think effectively banning consoles and app stores is a net win for consumers as long as the option exists for a competitive open platform.

You are not forced to buy an iPhone - in fact 85% of the world doesn’t.

In every day life, the number of people who think “App Stores suck” is infinitesimal.

That's the same excuse my employer (Google) makes. Competition is just a click away. You're not forced to use Google, use Bing, use Fastmail. Brand surveys show Google is also one of the most trusted brands, ergo, the number of people who think it sucks is small.

Does that mitigate any of the concerns people have about either company?

This community used to have a strong focus on openness, open source, permission less innovation and the avoidance of checkpoints and tolls, but what it's turned into is often a battle of fanboys, who roll out excuses and lowered standards for their favorites.

Yours is an easy position to maintain, until you have invested a lot of money and work in an app which gets booted from the App Store, or because Apple decides to shake you down for even more money.

Apple fans simultaneously say Apple has a small marketshare, but also brag that earn the majority of all smartphone industry profits. If the latter is true, it means that anyone wanting to make money on mobile software has no choice but to publish on the App Store, ergo, effectively a monopoly.

And your employer is correct. We don’t need the government to protect people from their own decisions.

I’ve made the same argument about Google, FaceBook, Apple, and Amazon (even before I started working for AWS).

This community used to have a strong focus on openness, open source, permission less innovation and the avoidance of checkpoints and tolls, but what it's turned into is often a battle of fanboys, who roll out excuses and lowered standards for their favorites.

Did the open source community whine about mean old Microsoft or did they create alternatives to the point where even Azure runs more Linux VMs than Windows VMs? They went out there and built something better. They out competed.

Every single one of the big tech companies got there through better execution.

> We don’t need the government to protect people from their own decisions.

Citation needed. Many parts of our government do just that (FDA, EPA). We need these because many decisions would otherwise be uninformed. If you don't know what is in your food, how can you make informed decisions? If you don't know what is in your drugs, or what the side effects are, how can you make informed decisions?

Yes because taking bad drugs which you can’t know that they are bad without multimillion dollar drug trials and stopping a corporation from polluting is the equivalent of typing in a url bar to choose an alternate search engine or choosing an alternate phone.

Are you really saying that Google doesn’t have the capital or reach to better market the “openness” of Android?

A lot of people who would have a problem with it are also convinced they have no power to affect its existence, so you never hear from them.

Right “the silent majority”.

AMP isn't enforced though. You can say 'not yet' or 'it's kind of the same' but that applies for a lot of standards.

It's enforced through visibility / rankings in Google Search results.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/about-amp

Isn't there a term for using dominance in one market to compel behavior in another?

Your link doesn't say that Google forces AMP on publishers. It shows that Google displays an icon next to AMP results for mobile searches to indicate the page is mobile friendly. Bing does the exact same thing: https://blogs.bing.com/Webmaster-Blog/September-2018/Introdu...

This is not enforcing AMP on publishers in the results, and the argument that it is by using icons falls under the 'it's kind of the same' category.

It says they use site speed in ranking, and, well, I'm sure it would come as no surprise if Google's (largely) having served a page/site increases the speed just enough.

If you can beat AMP load times, you will likely rank higher than AMP pages from the speed factor.

This is how you do agnostic search results, and it is not putting the thumb on the scale as you're implying.

There is a term for that.... I think it's either it's "abuse of dominance" or "anti-competitive behavior"

to put it as plainly as possible, it's absolutely hilarious that tech people buy into these insane myths about AMP, there's a reason why no serious antitrust person brings it up, it's fighting on Google's territory - it's a wide open standard, used throughout the industry, formed in response to proprietary solutions designed to tax suppliers by Facebook and Apple, immediately and fully shared with competitors.

We're closer than we have been in a long time to something like Google deciding to license Blink or Chromium. There are some good reasons that couldn't happen (yet), but what a world that would be.

They can't retract the open source license that already exists for Chromium. Maybe Google could start adding proprietary features to Chrome and close-source those bits, but the code that's out there is already out there.

This is basically what happened to Android as they moved an increasing number of essential features to Play Services.

To be fair, these are mostly integrations with other Google services. I wouldn't expect this to be an OS-level package.

Ironically, this is an example of where it is crucially important Oracle-Google case swings Google's way.

Currently, there are alternative implementations of Play Services that can be installed to replace Google's. However, if it is not fair use to use even the bare bones of an API definition without permission, then we can't even create a compatible implementation of such an API without the copyright holder's permission. In which case, we cannot replace Google Play services with anything else.

Actually, Google already has closed source features in Chrome that are totally not related to Google accounts and/or sync. Take for example Android app support in ChromeOS. It is closed source even though both Chromium and Android are open-source.

I can't picture this happening due to the sheer size of the Electron ecosystem. Do you think there's any precedent for this?

John Deere saying you can’t work on your own tractor? 50 years ago this would have been an insane proposition.

I know it’s not the same but something feels similar to me.

Is there any reason Electron couldn’t switch to, say, Firefox?

Electron is really 100% Chromium. I can't see them switching from it (though it would be nice to have a Firefox-base version).

A Firefox based Electron was tried: Positron. It was scrapped for some reason or other (lack of traction?): https://github.com/mozilla/positron

Why would that matter to anyone but Microsoft?

AFAIK Firefox still exists as does KHTML.

Firefox is down for the count with the recent layoffs. It’s Google’s web to lose in the near future.

Some days it really feels like there is nothing new under the sun.

Still looking for a Firefox plugin to make sure I don't connect to amp versions of anything

I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/

But to fight the wrong fake news this is what they are going to have to do.

Then it becomes what they think is real and fake. There is no "true" standard for what is real and fake.

Yes, I know some things seem "obvious" but it's a sliding scale per person... and, well that's the slippery slope.

How? The publishers publish AMP pages, and multiple link aggregators (including Bing) consume them. I could see an Apple News style system being controlled like that because it forces the publishers to directly integrate with a single link aggregator.

Yeah I'm really lost about the AMP doomsaying. The fact google has a standard that anyone can use that lets pages be delivered faster and shows an icon on results that do that really doesn't seem like the sort of thing to get worried about. It's weird that this gets treated not only negatively but on par or worse than closed garden platforms.

It gives Google more control over basic functionality of the internet. They already have _far_ too much control in the form of the biggest browser and the biggest search engine. Anything they do to expand or capitalize on that deserves a _lot_ of scrutiny.

> It gives Google more control over basic functionality of the internet.

How? Google controls neither the AMP specification nor the third party implementations like Bing's.

Ppl still use Google for searches?

Mind.blown.

I have DDG as my search portal, and pretty much every single search is followed by another with !g on it. The results are terrible. So please recommend something better.

I've been trying to use DDG for over a year now and it's not all roses either. Very frequent !g's.

Overall it feels a little bit like self-flagellation which I'm hoping is for the greater good, that DDG's algo will improve with use and eventually I won't need !g anymore.

Maybe DDG needs a browser extension that let's you seamlessly provide feedback with every !g to teach them what you were actually looking for.

>Maybe DDG needs a browser extension that let's you seamlessly provide feedback with every !g to teach them what you were actually looking for.

You are calling it seamlessly providing feedback because it is DDG. If this was about Google or Facebook, it could have sounded closer to 'tracking users'.

Yup, I hate DDG at this point. While having it as my main search on every browser/device. If there are better alternatives I'd love to know about them.

At the very least, you could use !s (for StartPage) to get Google’s results without the tracking.

My experience is DDG results are ok, I only use g! on porn searches sometimes. I dont miss google search at all.

Yes and people still watch TV.

Did you think your feigned ignorance was insightful? Google has 86% market share.

I think you're onto something. Why is it that anyone can write a program for PC, but we failed to prevent a system from rising up that wouldn't let us do the same on mobile.

I was thinking the same at first, then I realized: if Microsoft had created a secure OS, that worked quite well all the time, that did what people wanted, and that didn't NEED 3rd party anti-virus software just to be secure, then I wouldn't mind buying all my Windows software through the Windows app store for $1-$20 with 30% going to Microsoft. But they didn't, they had a crap platform and we had to rely on sketchy shareware apps from virus-laden uncertified 3rd party websites, and the anti-virus software became indistinguishable from the ransom-ware it was supposed to prevent, and the platform was so hard to develop for that most commercial software cost $50-$500, so it got pirated, and on and on.

Instead, Apple invented a new computing platform and a new model to pay for it, it just worked, people were willing to pay for that, and we liked it.

Even worse. Imagine millions of people knowing this and still buying these inferior phones.

A more stable, frequently updated platform with decent hardware offerings and the fastest chips on the market does not amount to inferior phones.

I'm not sure about any of that. Android phones are ridiculously diverse, from overpowered "gaming" behemoths to tiny ones like Unihertz Jelly.

But in the end I guess what matters more is whether you want a single person to control what you view or not, like when they banned James Joyce because of an illustration of a man skinny dipping.

Your comment doesn't really disagree with theirs. One major reason Android feels so fragmented is all the different devices. My last Android phone was an LG G3 (yeah I know I'm out of date nowadays). It had a really good camera (for the time) with a fast laser autofocus. Turns out no app used the proper APIs to take advantage of laser autofocus. If I wanted to take a picture with an app, I would have to take a picture with the camera app, and then upload it. Except certain apps like Instagram didn't allow you to upload photos from your camera roll, so any instagram photo I took was not in focus.

In my opinion iOS was far better when there were fewer different devices released every year, but it's still better today than Android.

Android phones don't suffer from this as much, though weird rejections from the Play Store do happen not infrequently, if HN front page can be trusted, and getting non-technical people to be comfortable with sideloading must be a huge security liability. Getting updates for the lifetime of my device and especially security patches, finding a phone with a decent user experience not marred by badly implemented manufacturer shells, that's still really hard though. Those have been significant problems for me with my Android phones, much more significant than not being able to sideload. I'd say it's not so black and white, both platforms have grave problems, with no immediate fix in sight.

Well, could it possibly be that people really don’t care about side loading apps?

That's a little silly as an example because AOL was exactly like this back in the day and had curated channels. You could still access external sites if AOL was your ISP as well but anything inside of the AOL application was reviewed by AOL.

Also, the web is not even a great analogy period since it wasn't created by a private company. Apple created their phones, their App Store, they maintain it, and they provide the infrastructure for it. That's nothing like the internet.

Yeah but this is as if you bought an AOL computer that did nothing but AOL. And AOL had absolute authority on what you could do on your computer.

I know, I know, people who bought iPhones knew what they were buying into.

Actually, I don't think most people who buy iPhones have any idea what they're buying into. They're buying a phone. In some cases, they're buying an iPhone to access things like FaceTime. if they want to communicate with their friends then they must buy an iPhone.

Apple leverages user ignorance to create their demand-side app store monopoly. That's the entire point.

Right, because it couldn’t possibly be that most people don’t care about side loading apps?

My dude, my entire point is that most consumers don't care so it reinforces the monopoly.

So that kind of kills that whole “consumer harm” argument doesn’t it?

Sure... ignorance never harmed anyone... right?

If only the alternative operating system to the iPhone was owned by a company that had a popular website where they could educate consumers.....

Actually, I bought iPhones for my parents precisely because of the walled garden and consistent experience. Back when I made this change (3 years ago), the Android App Store was just a cess pool of privacy violating trash apps. Between that and the inconsistent ways to do everything across manufacturers, I just determined android flexibility is not worth hours of support for non-techies.

So yes, lots of people buy iPhones exactly because if Apples iron grip.

You're conflating different things under the header of "Apple's iron grip" here. It is beneficial to your parents that Apple prevents spyware better than Google does. It is not beneficial to your parents that they obsessively seek and destroy any way developers might get a single dollar from an iPhone user without giving Apple 30¢.

I’m sure my 75 year old parents don’t really care about in app purchases in Fortnite....

It doesn't matter whether your parents care. My point is that they are separate practices with different pros and cons, so using the benefits of one to justify the other doesn't make sense.

>they obsessively seek and destroy any way developers might get a single dollar from an iPhone user without giving Apple 30¢.

That's incredibly disingenuous and you're either being dishonest or ignorant. The 30% is for sales made on Apple's platform. Developers can absolutely make sales without giving Apple a cut as long as they don't use Apple's infrastructure or platform. You can have people purchase things for your app as long as you don't attempt to offer in-app purchases that circumvent the App Store.

Isn't Apple's objection to what Epic did here the fact that these purchases didn't use Apple's infrastructure and platform? Unless by "using Apple's platform," you mean "done by an iPhone user," in which case that's what I said in the first place.

How are developers supposed to not use apple's payment platform when they are explicitly prevented from circumventing it? Your last two sentences dont make sense when put together.

They're not. In-app purchases have to go through Apple. You're allowed to sell things outside of the App Store so long as you don't try to use that to circumvent purchases available within it. For example, you can watch videos in several streaming services that you purchased or entered digital codes for. You can't however make a new purchase within the app without hitting an Apple server. Apple logs those purchases and backs them up to your account and hosts the servers that the actual app sits on along with the content for those in-app purchases. That infrastructure allows customers to use one account to download it and nearly guarantee no malware while also giving a platform for people to give feedback on that app.

No... that's not the same thing at all..?

It would be like you using AOL and only being able to view the channels that AOL offered (which is exactly what it was). Apple has no authority to tell you what you can do with your device once you've purchased it but you also don't have the authority or the right to demand that Apple service your device if you jailbreak it or mod it.

This is literally the exact same situation as Xbox and PS4. Xbox doesn't allow people to play PS4 games on an Xbox. Is that anti-competitive? Is that anti-consumer? Is that Xbox having absolute authority over what you can do on your Xbox? Get out of here with that nonsense.

You mean like people buy game consoles instead of gaming PCs?

Hence the word 'Imagine', I guess GP mean't walled garden but that's the point. Also, GP didn't say anything about the internet.

It's not silly at all. Until 1995 home internet access was too expensive and AOL didn't offer support for http or any kind of internet access - only services provided by them. If they had the foresight they could of crushed the early internet and prevented it from ever happening. A 100% firewalled and paid service that wouldn't look much different than the cable companies at the time. People don't realize how lucky we are that the potential the internet provided flew under the radar for so long.

You are trying to divert the topic to something that's likely never going to happen from something that gets HNers triggered all the time, even if it's just remotely related to Microsoft.