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Safari in iOS 11 Turns Google AMP Links Back into Original Web Links When Shared

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Apple has made a subtle tweak to Safari in iOS 11 to ensure the browser automatically strips out Google AMP URLs when a web page is shared or copy-pasted on an iPhone and iPad (via The Verge).

The discovery was made yesterday by MacStories' Federico Viticci when he tried sharing an AMP article viewed in Safari to iMessage and Reading List.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open source publishing format that was made by Google to strip online articles of extraneous page furniture and improve their loading speed. AMP results are built into the company's mobile search engine results (for example, in the carousel in the Google News app).

Very nice: when sharing AMP pages to iMessage or Reading List, iOS 11 Safari automatically removes AMP's crap from the URL. Go Apple 👍 pic.twitter.com/aHgSMcofUv - Federico Viticci (@viticci) August 23, 2017
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However, the format has come in for heavy criticism from several developers because of the way it obfuscates the canonical web URL that the content is gleaned from. Most AMP pages remove any URL link to the original publication and often strip out branding along with advertising and internal links, which also cedes control of web page analytics data to Google.

Apple's decision to have iOS 11 serve original links appears to be a willful rejection of Google's publishing format, which differs from Apple News links in that AMP links don't require an installed app in order to function. It's not certain this decision will be reflected in the final version of iOS 11, but we'll know soon enough - the public release of Apple's new mobile OS is due sometime next month.

Article Link: Safari in iOS 11 Turns Google AMP Links Back into Original Web Links When Shared
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/08/24/ios-11-safari-amp-links-revert-original-sharing/
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Google AMP is utter garbage. It interferes with Safari in more ways than one. Normally the URL bar gets smaller as you scroll down a page, but that never happens with AMP pages. On my old 4S, some pages wouldn't even scroll at all. I had to manually scrub the URLs. But hey, at least they load 1.524623 seconds faster. Thanks, Google!
 
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darkarn said:
Did Apple just... AMPlify their war with Google?
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Considering that it was Google that made the request to implement this behavior... no. (The article should probably note this as well)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15086192

Jynto said:
Google AMP is utter garbage. It interferes with Safari in more ways than one. Normally the URL bar gets smaller as you scroll down a page, but that never happens with AMP pages. On my old 4S, some pages wouldn't even scroll at all. I had to manually scrub the URLs. But hey, at least they load 1.524623 seconds faster. Thanks, Google!
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I'm conflicted about AMP but in the cases where I've seen positive improvements; it sped up various sites I've pages rather significantly, all the while preventing a silly amount of "assets" from loading in the background. Think sites like The Verge, back before their redesign, where you had a disproportionate amount of resources that were being loaded to display a short article.

The way that AMP works could definitely be better - especially in terms of the UI, such as with the Back button not breaking, for one.
 
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Wow - if Google can do this with URL - just imagine what they could do with actual websites. Change content? Modify comments so you see them but nobody else does? Possibilities are endless. I guess you could always change your default search engine to Bing or Duckduckgo and leave the google universe behind.
 
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benj4min said:
Thank God! AMP was a terrible idea. I absolutely hate it. It doesn't really benefit the publisher, anyway. Only benefits Google.
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Got a source for this?

One of the original goals for the project was to deincentivize the use of ad-blockers because of shoddily developed sites - this would result in benefitting both the publisher and Google. How does your idea follow?
 
Good. I wish there was a way to disable or block AMP from being used. I will purposely try to go to a website manually rather than selecting the amp search result. It’s a tad bit quicker but I can’t use “find in page”, the back button breaks all the time, usually can’t tap at the top of the screen to scroll to the top and if the website has a comment section, it rarely loads. I wish Google would allow us to log into our Google accounts and disable amp.
 
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