I would also like to read the stripped down markdown copy and not the original. All the time.
Maybe now we'll get something similar, just happens to be for LLMs, but for us who like less bloat, it can be a better viewing/reading alternative. Hope it spreads :)
It's effectively dead today, and while it was dominant, Google abused it to get people to view and link to their cached copies of AMP pages, rather than the original site.
It also led to widespread abuse where the AMP version of the page differed in content significantly from the regular page. The same issue existed for WAP.
You may also remember browsing the web using Opera Mini, which wasn't a direct user-agent but used Opera's backend systems as a proxy that stripped, minified and compressed HTML/CSS, and resized and recompressed images. It let you browse the web using massively less mobile data, but raised a lot of privacy and security issues.
That was the entire point of the tech. If Google had wanted they could have upranked simple and lightweight websites but they didn’t do that (at least not until whoever had used amp for their promo package left and the project was killed).
AMP was just one of many smash-and-grab attempts to steal the internet, wrapped in a fake-gold-encrusted PR-infused box. Google has quite a lot of them.
I remember how amazing that mode was on desktop, I'd sometimes enabled it on site and shrink it horizontally just to look at it handle anything perfectly. Don't remember if that was independent of the proxy though, I just cared about the removed padding and the responsiveness. Make all sites look like that and add some gutter to the side I can toggle and resize, and I'll use your browser kthx.
It's frankly wild how many of my favorite tools for Internet browsing have nothing to do with connectivity, solving bugs, or any of that and it's just stripping out all the fucking BULLSHIT that comes on a modern website.
JS annoyances it won't fix are like idiotic scrolling behaviour and stuff. And for that, yeah reader mode is ideal.