A few months ago, I decided to remove Google AMP support from MacStories due to the obfuscation of our permalinks by the AMP plugin. There was a good discussion about publishers’ AMP concerns, including a story on The New York Times.

Today, Google has announced that they’re introducing a new feature that makes it easier to see a publisher’s full URL and copy it. Here’s Alex Fischer, writing on the Google Developers Blog:

Today, we’re adding a feature to the AMP integration in Google Search that allows users to access, copy, and share the canonical URL of an AMP document. But before diving deeper into the news, let’s take a step back to elaborate more on URLs in the AMP world and how they relate to the speed benefits of AMP.

And:

In addition to the above, many users have requested a way to access, copy, and share the canonical URL of a document. Today, we’re adding support for this functionality in form of an anchor button in the AMP Viewer header on Google Search. This feature allows users to use their browser’s native share functionality by long-tapping on the link that is displayed.

Google is also hoping that browsers will add support for a new Web Share API (which sounds nice as long as it can only be manually activated by the user; I can imagine websites abusing programmatic activation of the system share sheet).

I’m still not going to re-enable AMP in the short term, but I’m glad to see Google is listening to publishers and iterating quickly.