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Comment by misterbishop | Hacker News Reader

AMP is probably the single worst thing Google has produced. But as a Pixel 6 user, I think the real solution to bypassing AMP would have to live at the VPN level. Using Firefox Nightly as my primary browser, I don't really get AMP search results. The place I see it is in Google's news feed on the right side of the home screen. Brave wouldn't solve my problem there, and I already trust Firefox more.

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Ok there's a lot of amp hate here, and a lot of it justified, but when amp first picked up steam as just a regular mobile user it was amazing. I basically filtered searches to only look at those with the amp icon because in the real world in real conditions on mobile connections they legitimately & consistently loaded 10x faster than non-amp pages. And basically never had the dreaded random scroll jumps during loading.

Since then networks & phones got faster, a lot faster, and the difference maybe isn't worth the cost anymore. Also I think the amp restrictions have greatly relaxed, making amp just as slow? But "single worst thing"? Hardly. At launch it delivered and big time, the UX experience was night & day.

The main trick behind AMP is simply the ability to load third party content in a hidden IFRAME on the google.com origin securely. Your clicks were instant because they were literally pre-rendered client-side before you clicked, and that's why custom JS is prohibited.

SXG and WebBundle basically help map that trick out into the browser's domain, rather than some nasty restrictive JS library. It allows eliminating the whole megabyte-sized supersystem of JS nonsense that makes up the AMP library and having just plain ol' regular HTML/JS, while still netting most of the performance benefits of the old approach.

Mobile networks may have improved but the speed of light has not, and so these techniques still have a place in contemporary networking.

> Your clicks were instant because they were literally pre-rendered client-side before you clicked, and that's why custom JS is prohibited.

All the wasted rendering for all the amp links not clicked sounds like a really great way to churn through mobile battery life unnecessarily. Glad I don't use Google.

No it wasn't. The main trick of AMP was getting things like news sites to cut out dozens of JS libraries. The main trick was to get page load speed onto PM radars as a priority, so they got that little lightning bolt icon. You can make a regular page as fast as an amp one, absolutely. But the trick of AMP was getting major sites to actually do it.

Preferching/prerendering existed long, long before AMP did. That wasn't a new AMP technology, although it does communicate that there's going to be less to preferch than other links.

It is not the worst. It is just "one of them", how to get the monopoly over web content.

It is the worst. It offers nothing to anyone, it has a terrible user interface, and it breaks basic features of the world wide web.

If AMP is genuinely a way to enhance online user experiences, then make it opt-in, instead of the current no-way-to-opt-out.

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