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Comment by defaultname | Hacker News Reader

Having AMP controlled and intermediated by Google was always a bad thing. It tainted what ultimately was a good effort, which is taking the enormous scope of web technologies we have now and winnowing them back down again for optimized publishing purposes.

And this article does what is often done in the AMP discussion and (disingenuously) demonstrates that you can make a non-AMP page that's smaller/faster than an AMP page. No one ever contested that. No one ever doubted it. But AMP isn't the alternative to your minimalist page, it's the alternative to the grotesquely overloaded media site where over time every single web technology gets smashed into a monstrous, massive pig of a page. Comparing the AMP pages of a news source and what they serve in their "full" web experience and it's absolute night and day.

I do wish we had a "web lite" mode that we could turn on, if only for certain domains.

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My problems with AMP are:

1) Google clearly leveraging it to take over more of the web,

2) The scroll hijacking that made it feel worse-performing (plus just otherwise unpleasant) than middle-weight websites normally do,

3) That some of the sites I most commonly accidentally end up viewing through AMP are useless in their AMP version, so it just adds a hunt-and-click for no reason (Reddit is a big offender)

Google is one problem, one is a technical implementation problem, and the other is an ecosystem problem.

> I do wish we had a "web lite" mode that we could turn on, if only for certain domains.

There are some options for activating reader view even before loading a web site[0]. I imagine it would be a pretty light lift from there, to create an extension that keeps a domain list which automatically prepends the reader view URL prefix.

The magic prefix is

    about:reader?url=

[0] https://www.howtogeek.com/268116/is-there-a-way-to-force-ena...

Pity that Google’s amp “host page” breaks reader mode on iOS Safari. It’s why I use Duck Duck Go on my phone, so I can actually read the pages undistracted. I don’t like the DDG search results as much as Google, but Google ruining my web experience drove me away.

I wonder if amp intentionally breaks reader mode, to force viewing of Google served mobile ads.

AMP was about keeping news content on the web competitive with Facebook instant articles.

When Google was forced to cut a deal with News Corp last month (the Australian debacle) that would bring News content from the open web into their News app, AMP became much less important to them anyway.

All in all, yes, another loss for the open web, but I think the picture is more complicated then the "AMP is evil" meme.

> I do wish we had a "web lite" mode that we could turn on, if only for certain domains.

You get to choose what browser and plugins you use. That goes a long way.

> It tainted what ultimately was a good effort

Really? Scroll jacking is good effort?

Re-inventing a bunch of tags, just because, is a good effort?

It had a good claimed goal: make heavy sites load faster, particularly on low bandwidth/high latency connections.

The approach taken was, like everything Google does, heavy handed, tone deaf, and instantly defended by fanboys waiting for another chance to suck on the google teat.

The thing that gets me is that AMP isn't even necessarily that fast. It appears fast because the Google search results page preloads AMP articles, which it's able to do because they are served from the same google.com domain.

Overall it just feels like hack upon hidden hack with a sliver of standardisation on top.

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