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Comment by thepangolino | Hacker News Reader

I really never got the point of AMP being anything else than a set of recommendations for lighter mobile pages. A sort of remnant of the time where you got redirected to another version of the website you were visiting if you were doing so from a mobile device.

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The ironic part of AMP is that it's heavely relies on js. External js.

For example, you have a lightweight website with size of 140kb for everything (html, CSS, js, images) without AMP. It works blazing fast and you get 100/100 scores on any website speed meter.

But it was not enough for google, because you don't use their super-duper AMP tech.

You known what? Your website doubles in size when you implement AMP, because you must load several additional scripts to make AMP work, and not only size increases, load time (from click on your website link till full render) will increase too, because additional js processing to make AMP work.

The only benefit was preloading and heavely caching by Google, so user feels like website shows instantly.

I "optimized" several lightweight websites with AMP and every time I had exactly one thought in mind - that's useless stuff adds more problems than benefits, except mobile search ranking.

Thanks God now AMP is not mandatory to be in google mobile search top

Do you have some examples of sites where the regular site is faster than the AMP one?

Literally anything that doesn’t use JS and is CDN cached?

Do you have real world examples of that though? Nearly every real world news, facts, recipe, cooking blog, etc I can find loads huge amounts of JS.

Ex. Here's Snopes: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210818_BiDcQB_f0db4233292...

For sure a static site is faster than AMP, but I'm pretty sure AMP is faster than most sites regular folks visit on a daily basis.

You’re using one right now.

For sure hacker news is pretty light weight, but it also seems they didn't feel any pressure to use AMP (and also have historically not cared about SEO).

Well, my current project is good example: https://etke.cc

Try to apply AMP to it and see the difference...

The AMP project allowed Google to dictate how ads can be served, and host publishers' pages themselves. Don't forget Google is a tracking-based advertising company.

It was very convenient that these things could be bundled in a package with some webdev best practices, a JavaScript framework, and marketed as a (questionable) speed improvement.

I've worked for a publisher that abandoned serving their own fast no-JS article pages in favor of half-assed AMP pages full of slow iframes, because Google favored any use of AMP over actual page speed. It took Google many years to ease that AMP favoritism.

The point is to prevent user from leaving google.com.

I also remember that if you also tried to share the webpage, it was awkward to try and get the non-AMP page, taking the other user to Google.com.

AMP was first and foremost an answer to Facebook's Instant Articles (or whatever they were called), and, as an extension, a death grip on publishers.

Everything else in AMP served that.

The point is Google keeps users captive and content publishers hostage. All for a glorified CDN serving “light” static pages.

The main problem with AMP is that everything loads from Google's servers... so it is not worth using even if sometimes it can be faster (Google itself should probably use it instead of their javascript mess that slows down everything for no reason).

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