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Comment by amiga386 | Hacker News Reader

There was also AMP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages), where Google gave a huge reputation boost to your pages provided you served them under a different URL that Google could discover, and you massively stripped down the HTML and CSS to Google's limited subset.

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.

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> 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.

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).

There were also quite a lot of examples where AMP pages were slower after the shift, but got ranked significantly higher. It definitely wasn't about speed, they already have that project and they could just listen to it.

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.

> 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.

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.

Google AMP might have enforced stripped down HTML, but I think you were also supposed to embed their JS as well, probably making a page that was lightweight from the start heavier…

amp wasn't just stripped down HTML either, it was a mix of restricted HTML and custom AMP components, the latter being necessary to load external resources (breaking standard browser preload scanners and requiring amp's js to load before that could happen). The banned HTML elements (https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/websites/...) included img, picture, video, audio, iframe, all replaced with equivalent amp components.

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