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Comment by adtac | Hacker News Reader

To everyone who's against AMP - try opening any article on an extremely slow 2G connection when you're travelling and try the same with AMP. The difference is night and day.

You may be against some principles, but it's an absolute life-saver sometimes.

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Hacker News loads very fast without AMP. Daring Fireball loads very fast without AMP. Lots of sites do. That's up to the people making the sites to fix.

He's the thing: I CAN'T OPT OUT. If I don't like it or don't want it my only option is to ditch Google.

You're not claiming the solution to the slow web is that every website should look like HN or Daring Fireball, are you?

No, you can do a lot more and still have it fast. But there are also a lot of sites that have basically the same content as HN or DF and load way too slow due to crud.

Isn't that effectively what AMP does?

I dislike AMP because sometimes it just fails to load, it screws with scrolling, blocks off part of the screen, and causes me extra effort when I want to share URLs.

What's really annoying is that your problem could be solved without causing all of mine.

This has absolutely nothing to do with AMP. May I remind you that slow Internet connections are not a new phenomenon. Try browsing the web on a 9600 baud modem. The means for solving this problem (content negotiation, carefully crafted pages, CSS media selectors) have existed since the dawn of the web, and AMP is a terrible solution that carries the collateral damage of obscuring the URL/source of the original resource and hijacking the presentation of the page.

Slow internet connections have existed for quite a while, indeed. But websites were smaller back then - they didn't load a 300 kB JS file just to hide a few elements.

A slow connection combined with huge websites are practically unusable.

>carefully crafted pages

Yes, this is the ideal solution - people adopt saner (and smaller) web development. But that is uncontrollable and, frankly, I don't see it happening.

Nonsense. Let it be bloated. Let people wait and pay. They won't go back, and that would be the point.

This way, google "saves" those sites by essentially stealing content, since from now on, visitors won't even hit your site.

Just having a cookie-based opt-out would be fine. I don't want AMP but I won't presume to know what other Internet users want.

Google is presuming to know what I want and it is irritating.

The publisher can trivially create a light website which loads just as quickly as the AMP version.

I tried opening sites with AMP, and some of them didn't even load. 1000/300 AC 5ghz wifi. What is page speed when sites don't load? My guess is even on 2G that's not an added bonus..

Nobody is particularly against having a site that loads quickly. The problem is AMP is a double-edged sword and its implementation siphons traffic from sites and hurts publishers.

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