Developer Christian Selig has come up with what looks to be a very popular new iOS extension that aims to rid the Safari browser users of Google’s AMP links and pages.
The app, Amplosion, that is open source with code available on GitHub, works by redirecting AMP pages and links back to their rightful place – the domain of origin, which Google had previously rerouted to its own servers and cached through the AMP system.
There is obviously a market for this type of extension, since Selig on Monday announced on Twitter that Amplosion, which costs $2.99, had made it to the top of the Utilities list on the App Store.
An enthusiastic Selig, who is also the developer behind the superior third party Reddit client, Apollo, thanked his users for downloading the add-on in great numbers.
The AMP format, that Google created in 2015, was marketed as a way to make web pages load faster. But not only has that often not actually been the case – with pages served by Google rendering incorrectly – there are deeper issues at play.
Critics have said that AMP effectively sidelines publishers and their concerns over how their content is accessed and ultimately monetized, affirms Google’s dominance on the web, practices anti-competitive behavior by giving preferential position to AMP pages on mobile (something since abandoned), and in the entire process, tracks users.
In addition, it gives web developers more work to do, because to implement AMP (and increase their sites’ all-important visibility on the dominant search engine, Google Search), they must use special HTML and JavaScript subsets.
Selig’s extension now does away with this “unholy mess,” at least for iOS Safari users. In exchanges on Twitter, the developer said that he was willing to produce the extension for other browsers available on the platform, but that none of them support add-ons.
