It's Google throwing its weight to force websites into dubious practices all in favor of an alleged performance. Users also get the short end by being served low quality pages instead of the full experiences they expect.
I have this extension [1] to make sure I never visit an AMP page again.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/
People usually don't want a "full experience" when reading news. Especially when the "full experience" is pop-up ads and autoplaying video.
The bad part about AMP is that it is tied to Google services. But once de-Googled, AMP is really good 99% of the times, I leave 1% for those web designers who really use their skills to provide a better user experience, and do it right.
Considering all the extra JS it requires to preload, I also question it from a practical standpoint.
Of course, if you are otherwise including 3MB of JS for no reason, and it isn't cached, and you aren't using a CDN, maybe, perhaps, Google's CDN might serve it faster..
Though to be fair, I use FF, so AMP is hostile to it, and anyways FF has this great reader mode..
But do you have any numbers to back up the claims that any AMP pages are ever better?
The hosting/caching of those pages on outside caches is a bit more problematic, especially when it gets used by Google to de-emphasize the destination site in favor of flicking through Google results.
I think the same idea implemented as a browser standard would have much better reception.
I think this gets at a core tension - there are three parties involved in a search results page. The search engine, the destination site, and the user. Each has its own set of incentives. Both search engine and destination site have this bizarre idea that they have some kind of root-given right to the user's undivided attention for as long as they like.
The user's interests are frequently poorly represented. They rarely include giving either search engine or destination site the amount of engagement each feels they deserve. Often, but not always, the search engine is somewhat better aligned with the user.
> I think the same idea implemented as a browser standard would have much better reception.
I personally have quite deep doubts. A standard like AMP works only because it can require adhering very strictly to a tightly written specification that blocks a lot of the things website authors want to do. I suspect AMP as a browser standard would produce a vast amount of forever broken webpages before publishers ditched it due to poor ad revenues and went back to their crappy, bloated, slow, ad-laden pages.
The ability to load it into a CDN controlled by someone else - kind of a huge deal for performance reasons - is exactly the key feature that's user-friendly and hated by publishers. It's the kind of thing that would be cut out of a browser standard or just ignored by publishers.
The user's interests should be looked after by the browser. A true "user agent" should act on behalf of the user's preferences, fetching only what the user says they need, and rendering it in a manner that the user wants, not necessarily how the web developer wants. We've gotten far away from this ideal over the years, with browsers ceding more and more control to web developers. Users have lesser and lesser say as to how their browsers render web sites, to the point where we now just have super-blunt instruments like ad blockers and "Disable javascript".
If a web site is too slow, or choked with ads, or doesn't use an accessible color scheme, or uses a font too small, I want my browser to do something about it. I don't want to have to rely on the web developer (or Google) to adopt my own preferences. And if my browser even allows this, the function should be easy to use, not buried deep in Settings.
You're right. User agents should be for the user. They should expose options and controls for the user. They should tune and change and transform things for the user. They should understand what the user wants and make life easier for the user.
I am just skeptical that browsers are ever going to be true user agents and capable of fully representing the user's interests and intent.
But the question is do they want news sites to get promoted over the actual content they were looking for because news sites can be amped and dynamic content sites can not be amped?
AMP performance was a huge win for me as a user.
I almost never wanted the "full experience" of a page. I wanted its core content, quickly.
I agree AMP is anti-competitive, but if publishers made their default pages as lightweight as an AMP page _felt_ then they would have far more of a leg to stand on with users in regards to it being anti-competitive.
https://bestmotherfucking.website/
Loads almost instantly.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/21/europe/russia-navalny-poisoni...
Takes almost 6 seconds to finish loading and settle (content stop moving around). Pre-loading is not the only reason amp is faster.
On mobile its even more dramatic.
But if you're looking for something more generally extensible to work around AMP and other things that make the modern mobile internet frustrating, we've been working on a browser for iOS that's extensible with low code/no-code extensions as well as JS.
We're still beta testing (and launching early next year) but you can get the testflight beta from here https://insightbrowser.com/ and the AMP disabling extension here http://share.insightbrowser.com/8
Would love feedback or any changes you'd like to make. Feel free to respond here or abhinav@insightbrowser.com
For example, why not rank https://lite.cnn.com/en above https://cnn.com/?
exactly this, it's WAP/WML all over again