That is exactly what AMP is; with the exception (a huge one, I know) that Google also then caches the page on their server and serves it from a google.com host.
And forces you to load content from Google’s CDN.
And so on.
AMP could have been done without the huge exception, but then Google couldn't profit from it.
Sure google could modify chrome to allow this and not block it. but you'd be asking for even more technical blockers. And you'd have something that only works for a small portion of the web.
And this would work for at least as much of the web as is currently putting effort into AMP.
This is important for avoiding that you e.g. would suddenly see re-marketing ads for pages that you have never clicked.
I fully support a "faster page spec" that search engines incentivize, just like I support a ranking boost for using HTTPS.
But AMP isn't that; AMP is incentivizing the payment of tribute data to Google under the veneer of a faster page spec, to steer the rhetoric more favorably for the company.
If AMP went away tomorrow I would just browsing on my phone. Ad blockers are not good enough, and I refuse to fight popups and scroll blockers and blah blah blah in 2017.
If you are a publisher and think that you need AMP than it only means that your website sucks big time.
If all I wanted to do was read hacker news comments I would be safe..
I think it is more likely that they just higher web-developers, according to some cultural norm about how to select devs and about what features to specify. And those devs choose frameworks according to other cultural norms about what makes a good web framework. They are partly, but not completely constrained in this by the requested features set.
The result is bloated JS applications where mere pages are required, but the complexity of the system, and the social inertia is so great that nobody can fix, or even perceive the problem.
Well, kind of, in the same way that common-sense lightweight HTML/CSS/JS pages aren't a desired product for the people who make those decisions on publisher websites.
this is 100% true. yet somehow there are still those who swear this isnt the case. i've ranted about it previously [1].
what does google get out of it? The experience is better for users who like fast, lightweight pages, but as far as i can tell there's no tangible direct benefit to google when you load an AMP page. The only benefit to google is if their users like the experience and continue to use Google search so they can access AMP-cached pages. If users don't like AMP, google gets no benefit.
or am i missing something?
Every AMPed page is contributing work towards improving the effectiveness and appeal of Google's product (selling ads), by adding data to the targeting algorithms.
If every piece of content on the internet is tracked -- through full UX hijack on Google's infrastructure -- that might be a trillion dollar holy grail.
People absolutely share amp links.
Also, amp being google.com hosted means no more pesky same-origin privacy protections like limiting cookies.
Google is tracking you. If you don't want to be data-mined, you shouldn't be using Google. If you are using Google, it means you don't mind being tracked. It means you are placing the convenience that Google provides above your concerns about what a faceless corporation can do with your data. If you don't mind being tracked, AMP is not a problem.
I understand how you could dislike Google. I don't understand how you could dislike AMP specifically, but not necessarily google.
But I also don’t want to end up basically deranked on Google by sites that have nothing to do with the result.
Just look at this example to see how AMP distorts the actual search ranking, by moving pages to #1 that have nothing to do with the topic, but happen to be on AMP: http://i.imgur.com/84FvZmA.png
Not sure where you think AMP is coming into this? Those results seem relevant to me?
AMP carousel pages have some subtle capture features that regular AMP pages don't. They will add more, then slowly move them to the regular AMP pages over time.
Even served from my cheapo shared web host and not Google's AMP cache, I have pretty-much instant loading of all pages: http://multithreaded.link/2017/08/lyft-customer-acquisition-...
It's a good framework for building super fast pages. I will admit it's a little riskier to build a site on top of technology a large company owns, but this is a risk that you also have when you use React or other frameworks.
React isn't a good analogy. When you use React, you can get 100% of the value of the library, even if Facebook disappears overnight.
By contrast, much of the benefit of AMP is the caching aspect, which relies on Google.
You don't need requires-js-to-render markup or a cache operated by a privacy whoring ad company to make a page load quickly.
Edit: also, comparing to react or whatever js framework is like saying "look at my new cast iron shoes, they're so much lighter than those old lead ones".
Except that there is mandatory 3rd-party javascript that needs to be loaded just to get it to render. That doesn't make sense if it really just were about lean pages
Facebook, twitter, reddit, etc already utilize similar techniques on their mobile apps to make it so "web links" you click just keep you in the app.
But the web (as in, not bespoke mobile apps, but what you get in a general-purpose web browser) is supposed to be decentralized and resistant to any one entity owning the end-to-end experience.
I'm aware that any other entity (like Bing for instance) could do the same thing that Google does, and that the AMP standard isn't what's at fault here, but there should be no doubt as to Google's motives.
But that wouldn't give google control and importantly, a sure-fire run around same-origin privacy protections.
If you get a score above 95 or (X) on google page speed insights that might be a metric that everyone can agree on.