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Comment by petarb | Hacker News Reader

I haven't used AMP, but my impression with all of Google CDN JavaScript files for AMP is the end user has to download them just once per version (which I agree will lead to a bloated first load experience) but on subsequent requests throughout the AMP network they'll be loaded from cache. Similar to how Google recommends you load jQuery through their CDN since millions of people already have it in cache.

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And then you have to waste your battery on running 100s of kbs of JS to show static HTML.

No thanks.

But you'd rather go to the non AMP version which is 10x as bloated?

It seems like the vision in your head is: AMP vs. Perfectly optimised site. In reality it's publishers who have built their main site over several years with massive bloat and are unable for whatever reason to optimise.

What google could do instead, if they really cared, is incentivise simple javascriptless static HTML. They won't do this though, because it makes tracking for ads harder.

This seems to be the main recurring argument against AMP.

It isn't a comparison between AMP and the current web, it's a comparison between AMP and this utopian case where the entire web is simple javascriptless static HTML.

It's like the ascii ribbon against HTML email...

The diffence is that google has the power to improve the web and instead they warp it for their own profit while saying they're improving it.

No one doing the ASCII ribbon thing could change what the majority of mail users saw when they opened their mail clients.

The problem is that what you call "improving the web" isn't necessarily what other users would call "improving the web".

What do you mean by improving the web?

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