If we go down the AMP road of a faster and more minimal web spec, I'd bet that we're going to spend the next 10 years gradually adding more capabilities/cruft into it until AMP 5.0 ends up just as bad as HTML/CSS except now we're have two diverged standards for making slow webpages.
I don't particularly care if a new standard is defined or not, but at some point you have to shift incentives and Google has shown itself to be willing to throw its weight around.
Beyond that, I wonder if in browser "This page is loading slowly" wall of shame messages could work, styled similarly to the "This page tried to open four popup windows" alerts.
Users don't have any visibility into page size or javascript load beyond how sluggish it feels, but both of these impact your user experience and battery life, so I'd love to see browsers do more to expose poorly performing sites. Browsers setting a benchmark for "This is unacceptably crappy" would let users know they should expect better.
The hard part of that would be differentiating sites that use tons of resources for bullshit reasons from sites that are actually doing something.
It’d be great if those portions just weren’t transferred to me.
When a site is trying to go over its limit, you can either continue to browse it in slow mode, allow the permission prompt for better performance, or GTFO and find a less shitty website.
It's just assumed right now that webpages get to be as much of a resource drain as they'd like, and site owners are acting as they've been incentivized too. Fifteen ad networks and a Monero miner? Sounds great!
You can look at the list of AMP components we have right now[0], including some stuff from the social section:
- Facebook comments
- Vine
- #!?X Riddle.com
So what happens when Facebook changes how its comments works, or adds more Javascript or bloat to the component? What happens when Vine closes down?
Does anyone really think that an AMP committee is going to say, "No, your component isn't efficient enough Facebook, we won't update what code gets shipped"? We've traded a composable API for company-specific widgets. And once you decide to have company specific widgets, two things happen.
First, when the AMP standard really does become commonplace you get complaints that it's too difficult to get new components approved and updated, and that this is anti-competitive and unfair to smaller companies who are just trying to launch their own Vine replacement. Second, once you open up the process and make it easier to approve new components, people start shipping a bunch of awful code that breaks existing widgets and slows down pages because some CEO somewhere decides, "we can have an fancy widget on the Google? We need that by next week."
So then we'll try to come up with some kind of automated system to tell if components themselves are performant which will... sort of work. And the question we apparently won't ask at that point is, "why didn't we just start with the automated system for weeding out bad code and use that to rank websites, and skip the whole AMP thing?"
Seriously, AMP has only 15 social components right now, and 1 of them is already for a dead service that no longer exists and that will absolutely go completely offline at some point in the future. I'm sure this system is going to scale just great.