[acdha]

Having been a web developer in that era, performance was definitely a big concern. People were more willing to wait but there were still limits and you had the same tendencies for developers to work on fast systems and forget the experience on slow ones.

AMP is also a worse experience than that was because in the 90s you were usually waiting on images to render and progressive display was usually possible so you could start seeing that fuzzy JPEG fairly quickly and read the rest of an article, whereas AMP by design prevents anything from displaying until it’s loaded and executed correctly so you often have to reload the page to see anything at all when it fails.

This matters because most of where AMP was marketed to are competitive fields and that means it’s training users that they’ll get what they want faster and more reliably somewhere else.

[lphnull]

I remember browsing the web on my old Nokia N900 phone and watching everything get progressively slower as javascript started getting more and more memory intensive. Eventually I stopped receiving updates, and the entire web became unusable because lots and lots of websites break without javascript now.