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> Sometimes I get blank pages.

I got them very frequently (as a user). This coupled with the inability to turn off AMP finally pushed me to use DDG as the default search engine.




Google actually deliberately makes the page blank with an 8 second animation to show it again. They remove this animation in JavaScript.

https://www.ampproject.org/docs/fundamentals/spec/amp-boiler...


I guess this is there as an “avoid showing unstyled content at any cost” thing. But really, WTF?


"Let's make the web fast and light! Users will love it!" "Also let's artificially hide content so it feels like it loads slower. Users will love it!"

The aversion to flashes of unstyled content is so absurd sometimes...


Is that right? What's the purpose of having an 8 second blank page animation?


Prevent FOUC? Punish users who block third party scripts? Who knows.


> Punish users who block third party scripts?

Yes, probably that. I get the 8 second delay because I block all 3rd party scripts by default.


I've been using duckduckgo exclusively for a year now on all my devices and I'm loving it.

The whole point of a search engine is to give you what you're looking for, and ddg delivers. If I ever need to Google something, I'll use !g query. You can make it look really nice also by changing it from the Default theme to Basic.


I didn't realize you could do this on Android until I read this. I've been using DDG on desktop for a year or so. The trick is to visit DDG before you try to change your search engine. Otherwise, it's not listed as an option.


For me the "killer app" of Google search is location based searches. DDG is great but when I want to find a Petco nearby I don't want to use Yelp.


I always open Google Maps in this case; not the browser. Just my habit, I suppose.


If you put "!g" at the start of your search, DDG automatically redirects you to the search result in google.

I've been using DDG as my search engine for about 2 1/2 years now, and I find absolutely no reason to go back to Google other than location search, and DDG proxies that easily.


I don't have any problem with just searching strings such as "coffee shop [city name]", etc.


Right. If I want to add that location based context it is up to me as a user, and not automatically assumed.


Then why does Google constantly think I'm a city over? If their killer app is location search they suck at it.


Thus explaining why I'm mystified by what everyone is complaining about. For at least the last couple of years (whenever iOS allowed DDG as default search engine) I've used pretty much nothing but DDG. I'm guessing I've probably never seen an AMP page (certainly not that I've noticed).


For several months AMP regularly (70-80%) caused pages to fail to load from Google News through a Chrome browser on Android M. Often after several reload attempts it would work, but sometimes not. Loading through Firefox was always a work around, but URL copy and paste was annoying.

I figured it was just tehGoog reminding me to pay attention to other human beings rather than staring at my phone. Then they fixed it with some update, when they realized I was incorrigible (actually I never figured out why).


So that's what has been happening! I've been so confused lately as to why Google links would fail to forward me to the website I clicked on, leaving a blank page and a massive google.com query string in my address bar. Sometimes refreshing the page has not worked, forcing me to manually copy and paste the address off of the search results. Someone should write a browser plugin that uses the little green URL instead of the <a> in all Google links.


There's an excellent chrome extension called Skip Redirect that does this universally. Whitelisting is really simple too if it causes any problems. It decodes urls like "https://out.reddit.com/t3_747gsgju?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsitelin... and strips out the tracking strings and other nonsense and sends you straight to (in this example case) "https://sitelinked.tld/page.html"


AMP also pushed me to switch to DDG as my default search engine.


Same here. AMP is Google's own walled garden, and that plus Google's pervasive tracking finally pushed me to DDG. Enough is enough.


That's really interesting. I wonder if @yegg knows about this. Might be another nice marketing topic he can explore.


You'll be happy to know that I've been using DDG for a couple of years now and have no idea what this thread is about.


Me too, on a Sony Xperiea. Got a new phone and the problem went away




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