Out of interest, is there anyone who wants to defend the current Google AMP (not the concept of lighter webpages, but how google has gone about it?) I haven't found anyone yet personally.
2. I can read the article without having to wait 5 mins for every little javascript and popup to finish
3. Success
Optimizing a rich content-heavy website is hard, and time consuming. While we all can moan about all the tracking and ads that appear on these sites, they are a fact of life, and simply relying on the engineering chops of every website to up their game is not a winning strategy. It's infinitely simpler at the end of the day to drop in a few extra scripts and meta tags than to yak-shave-optimize the entire site.
I'm probably going to get flak for this but tracking aside, and I can understand the arguments for that, from my experience a lot of poor performance is down to cargo cult development on the client side.
On the flip-side, if you want an example of a content heavy media site that gets it right: http://www.bbc.com/news.
The implementation of AMP is one of those technologies that's "the more it gets deployed, the better it is." Reading the spec, it's clear that Google's vision is for AMP to be the opposite of FB instant articles; where the entire web can have a decentralized cache (yes this sounds weird but makes sense). I suspect Cloudflare will help quite a bit with this.
I could see mobile networks implementing their own AMP caches, so their inbound traffic winds up terminating mostly at the cache layer. This speed boost will win the mobile networks customers.
How would that work? Google can replace links to AMP pages with links to their own AMP cache in their search results, since they're the ones generating those resutls. Cloudflare can serve the AMP version of their customers' pages since they are the ones actually terminating the TLS connection.
Mobile operators don't have either type of access. At best they could try to do this for non-encrypted content with some kind of a transparent proxy. But the share of non-encrypted content is plummeting quickly, and might as well not exist soon. No operator is going to invest any money in HTTP-only services at this point.
[0]: https://www.christianheilmann.com/2017/01/05/first-decoded-c...
I do understand the negativities around Google's AMP, but the speed was.. blazing fast.
I can't help to think that for a user who may not be familiar with all the underlying issues, it is a pretty good user experience in terms of the speed alone.
Also, most people who complain about AMP claim that no caching is needed, just adherence to the AMP format. But there's no way to go from a Google search results page, or a link provided to you by someone who uses Google for search, to an uncached page.