This never made sense to me.
You can have natural scrolling, an accurate reader view, a working back button and other highly performant features in a mobile-optimized HTML and CSS standard like AMP. In fact, you practically have to go out of your way to break these things in the way that AMP does.
Why does AMP have to suck so much?
When they do load, they fuckify the URL, so I can't copy/paste it normally. I know I can go in through the page's menus and get the real URL, but it makes it harder for no reason.
I consider the URL part of the page's UI, and commonly manually edit it. This makes it harder.
So far as I can see, there is no advantage to AMP pages, versus a fast and simple HTML page, with no external resource requests.
Sites can serve that themselves, rather than using Google.
In short, it breaks features I use, and doesn't provide advantages.
People who like it can't seem to understand that it has a crappy user experience for some people and always assume you don't like it for "philosophical reasons".
I really don't care about AMP from that POV, I just wish it was a secondary link instead of the stealth replacement of where I wanted to go with a page that usually doesn't load and messes up my back button.
> Why does AMP have to suck so much?
Because it violates every assumption on how browsers should work. I would prefer a slow browser I understand to a fast one I can't control.
My only real complaint about AMP is the scrolling - it doesn't feel natural and breaks shrinking the browser UI (I have an iPhone 5S, so screen real-estate is a premium).
They must have actually had to do work to override the expected behaviour and break the user experience, which I just don't get.
I don't understand why Google has to break these well-established UI conventions.
Down with AMP!
Actually, AMP pages had the most consistent scrolling with the rest of the system. It was 'regular' web pages that had the different scrolling
iOS 11 fixes that. All pages now scroll at the same 'speed' as the rest of the system.
AMP has always worked poorly on iOS: it has different scrolling, it breaks reader mode, and it breaks status bar autohide and jump-to-top. Perhaps Apple would be less hostile to AMP if the implementation were better.