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Comment by merrywhether | Hacker News Reader

Keep telling yourself this. AMP, FLoC, Portals, etc are all browser “innovations” too, are you glad those came around? So many of their features are purely to give Google more ad revenue and power over the internet. I’d be willing to bet that the main reason they fund so much non-ad innovation is to overwhelm any potential new-comers to the browser space and stifle competition (even Microsoft gave up). But too many developers buy into the idea that being able to use the newest Array.findLast() API is somehow crucial to the success of their web product and thus help perpetuate the Chrome monoculture.

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If someone says AMP is bad because there's some better project for accelerating mobile pages, I'm all ears. If they say it's bad because web pages are fast enough, I'd tend to favor "bias for action", but I could imagine being convinced by something like Dan Luu's parting shot (https://danluu.com/web-bloat/) that a big new standard hurts other people trying to solve the underlying issue.

If someone says it's bad because corporate interests shouldn't push innovation... well, I'd like to understand why they're okay with the explicitly bought and paid for OpenJS board seats, or the permanent corporate tetrarchy for HTML. A lot of developers seem to have unrealistic expectations about how software governance works.

> If someone says AMP is bad because there's some better project for accelerating mobile pages, I'm all ears.

http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

> AMP, FLoC, Portals, etc are all browser “innovations” too, are you glad those came around?

At least for AMP, I indeed am glad because it finally forced the big media houses to provide pages that didn't suck ten freakin' megabytes off my 50€/2GB data plan (yeah, that were German mobile data prices until not too long ago!) for a single page load with under 10KB of actual content.

I'm not particularly liking the situation, but the fact is that the only entity able to actually force change is Google.

ETA: Sorry, I forgot Apple who managed to get the Web rid of the proprietary, expensive (for authors) and insecure scourge that was Adobe Flash, but that was about the only progress that came from Apple. I'm not counting PWAs because Apple utterly failed to make web apps actually competitive with App Store apps for profit reasons!

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