[smabie]

I lived in Africa and the only internet I had was cellular and by the gb. Amp is a massive improvement over the extremely large web pages we now have to endure.

It's also much faster to render, which makes a huge difference on the crappy Android phones that are everywhere. Hell, I'm using a $200 Android phone right now because my iPhone broke and browsing the web is painful on it. And with the terrible hauwei $40 phones that have taken over Africa, most of the web is unusable.

I don't like Google's control of Amp, but it exists because of the original sin of html and js. Everything about html is terrible: bloated, pointlessly verbose, etc.

I have a dream that we all just start using Gopher and dump the www, but it's never going to happen. Maybe even browser vendors could get to together and design a super light weight markup based on S-exps or something, but that's probably not going to happen either. Amp is the best we got and it solves a real problem. And it solves the problem well.

[lultimouomo]

But does AMP makes internet usable on those $40 phones? I have a recent mid-range $200 phone and pretty much the only website the regularly hogs my browser is Google News, which coincidentally is also the only one that uses AMP. It's anecdote, but in my experience AMP (or whatever else Google News does) degrades performance to an amazing extent.

[izacus]

Google News is far from being the only one using AMP and there's a massive difference in loading times and rendering speed for most news sites between AMP and non-AMP versions even on my 1GBit internet connection.

[lultimouomo]

FWIW my impression is not that Google News is bandwidth heavy, but that it is JavaScript heavy. It works fine on the computer but it's hard to use on the phone, even on the same connection.

[bobbydroptables]

Fair points, although to your last point, I wouldn't necessarily agree it solves the problem well. AMP makes some websites almost unusable (intentionally disables core functionality) and there's no way to disable AMP except manually re-typing the URL for every page. If its goal is just to serve a smaller page, it is a rough workaround with high costs IMO (often slower loading times, weird performance issues, disabled functionality, less open internet).

I appreciate that not everyone has fast data, but not having data speed to read a basic web page is really becoming the exception, not the norm. Data transmission is getting cheaper and faster and available in more remote places every year.

I wouldn't have a huge problem with AMP if I could opt out. Unfortunately I can't. So despite my blazing fast unlimited plan on a flagship device, I'm getting served crippled pages with degraded performance. It's like I own a Ferrari kitted out with all the extras and Google is saying "here have you tried out this cool bicycle? It has special pedals so you can't go too fast and we reconfigured the handlebars so you don't accidentally do something like steering! It even has a bell. Ting-ting, ting-ting! How cool is that?"

In all seriousness, it is neat if it makes the web more useable for low-connectivity users, but maybe then limit AMP to those places (which are shrinking every year) and don't serve needlessly crippled pages when I'm standing in downtown Amsterdam or Hong Kong at the center of the internet, connected to blazing fast Wifi.

[toastal]

As much as a smack my lips at a supported non-XML, S-exp language for markup, isn't this what Brotli's dictionary of all the bloated XML tags, et. al. sets out to solve with its compression?

[smabie]

Sure, but that's just another layer on a steaming pile of shit. The webpage is still super large, it still takes up ram, it still takes up cpu to decompress and compress, etc etc. It's the kind of solution one comes up with when they recognize that nothing can actually be done to solve the real problem.