It turns out that if you strip most of the JS bloat from a webpage and serve it from a fast CDN, the page loads way faster. Shocking stuff.

It's not shocking but AMP enforces it.

People talk a lot of trash about AMP, but until there's another solution that allows me to go to a news website and actually read it, I'm an AMP supporter.

Such a solution has existed for at least a decade: ad blocker :)

Do ad blockers really solve the problems that this article criticizes AMP for? You've closed one bag of worms and opened another one. How can independent publishers live in an all adblock world? State publishers like criticized in the article might survive. You're again centralizing journalism, this time into the few organizations that can get their readers to pay a subscription.

I think that the ones that will best survive in an ad-blocking world would be hobbyist journalists and bloggers. That does not seem to be that bad to be quite frank as it would probably lead to higher quality content, less copy-paste and less clickbaits.

Not really unfortunately. The ones that thrive are the ones not doing it for money. Propaganda, state and commercial, are by far the biggest ones.

What the heck is a hobbyist journalist?

Me. I run http://startupnews.com.au despite making no money doing it (as the plaintive pleas for sponsorship and donations on the site show). The Perth startup community needs it, so I run it.

There's similar blogs for every small community, run by people who care about that community. Usually unfunded, and only covering stories of interest to that community.

> What the heck is a hobbyist journalist?

Shills and Kool-aid-drinking zealots mostly - they are the ones usually motivated enough to do 'journalism' for free. Don't expect any professionalism, depth or any form of investigative journalismbeyond tweet-storms.

They cannot. How can wagon wheel makers live in the age of the car? Their business model is defunct.

We outsourced our opinions and fact-finding to journalists for a few hundred years. Now that time has past. Journalists themselves have destroyed their own industry by producing a poor quality product. Maybe in future journalists will re-invent themselves as purveyors of pure factual reporting, and those that care about that kind of thing will pay for it. But it is a niche market. Democracy, decency, enlightenment and society will suffer of course. But those things were never guaranteed with any kind of real safeguards.

There's more to the world than the US. The press in, for example, The Netherlands and Finland might be opinionated but they're mostly factual and high quality.

I wonder if the clickbait and fake news is an English-language phenomenon, because of the huge potential global market for English-language articles?

> Maybe in future journalists will re-invent themselves as purveyors of pure factual reporting

If you think this was ever the case, rose colored glasses are in effect.

Ad blockers serve minified JS and CSS through a CDN?

Because minified JS and CSS was invented by AMP?

Unless you’re doing tree shaking, which AMP can’t do duplicate, compression has rendered “minification” useless long time ago anyway.

From what I've heard this is false, since for large javascript and css libraries the parsing is faster with minification.

+ reading mode in Safari helps a ton.

But still you are loading ton of unnecessary content. Ad blocking on iOS still sucks (no custom filters).

Custom filters are absolutely possible, it just depends which adblocker you choose to enable. IIRC the block list has to be compiled to a static JSON file for Safari to consume, but most of the decent adblock apps on iOS provide a companion configuration application that lets you insert custom entries then recompile the block list.

If anything I prefer this way of working - Apple alone are responsible for maintaining a high performance adblocker in Safari, the wider app ecosystem just provides the block lists, rather than rely on app developers to write performant browser plugins.

RSS readers ?

Why don't I see a significant difference then? The only thing I've noticed about AMP sites is the pain of trying to navigate them, alongside the dual top bars (reminds me of toolbars back in the day) and impaired functionality.

It feels like the principles (minus the tracking) of AMP should become a W3C spec. Surprised Microsoft and others haven't pushed for this.

What tracking?

I'm not aware of anything AMP does differently than non-AMP with regard to tracking, except that it's declared in a way that allows it to be cached+preloaded without falsely triggering analytics.

When a user searches for an article on Google and clicks on an AMP link it never leaves google.com, even if the AMP link is an external entity.

Repro: 1. Search for some BBC news on google.com, click on an AMP link and load a BBC page 2. Notice that you're still on google.com and not on bbc.com

Actually we could do even better and let the browser do the tracking and anonymize the data.