You're absolutely right. Everything we need, in a strictly technical sense, to make wonderfully fast and performant web pages already exists. And has accomplished little, because as you say it's a human problem.

AMP exists because Google figured out a way to make non-technical humans want to be fast and performant. It's a nice carrot to offer people who normally don't care at all about performance.

And yet, AMP has succeeded at getting publishers to deliver fast and performant pages where other efforts did not.

I dispute the idea that technological factors are not at play here. AMP's preloading and automatic CDN caching system have a pretty big impact on load times, and its technically-enforced restrictions on what sort of performance-impacting content publishers are allowed to include in their pages seems to do a pretty good job of ensuring pages do not become bloated.

The fact that Google Search is a monopoly is not a technological factor. Google gives preference to AMP sites on Google Search, therefore publishers must implement AMP.

I actually have a lot less issue with AMP as a technological solution, as I do with the Google's "our way or the highway" treatment of the Internet. Google uses both it's search monopoly and it's browser monopoly (and often, both at the same time) to force the entire world to do whatever Google wants them to.

Sometimes you might perceive the result to be "good", but that doesn't justify the behavior. That's why another technical implementation change blog doesn't improve anyone's mood about the whole thing: Because Malte Ubl is still pretending he's on #teamweb and not #teamgoogle.

You're really missing the broader context here, which was the rise of wholly proprietary news formats like Facebook Articles and Apple News. This was Google's entry into the market that was very much #teamweb vs Facebook and Apple's #teamproprietary because it based itself on open web standards and had a clear pathway towards standardization (that you see materializing in the OP's article).

This was the best solution the web could hope for that balanced open standard concerns with the necessary commercial backing that advantaged AMP's proprietary competitors.

Fair point, but that problem (at least as far as AMP is concerned) is exactly the one this blog post is addressing: Google is planning to stop pushing AMP specifically in its search results and instead push a set of open web standards which achieve the same technical goals.

Even so, I’m tired of jumping through hoops to adhere to bullshit standards that make life hard without any actual benefit. We have HTML and CSS, why do we need AMP? How does my personal webpage benefit from HTTPS? Why did they enforce mandatory HTTPS across the entire .dev TLD in WebKit, breaking my local test env, when it’s only used by a few internal projects at Google?

They seem to have a vested interest in making web development harder than it needs to be.

> How does my personal webpage benefit from HTTPS?

It prevents bad actors like ISPs or public WiFi APs from injecting bullshit into it.

> We have HTML and CSS, why do we need AMP?

Do you even know what AMP is?

Poor phrasing on my part. I meant that fast websites can already be built without adhering to the AMP standard.

- Open Chrome

- Open Chrome Dev Tools

- Switch to mobile view (to force chrome open AMP pages)

- Search in Google

- Open an AMP page

- Force refresh to force reload from cold cache

I've yet to find a page below 1 MB. I've routinely seen pages anywhere from 2 to 4 MB. So much for "slimmed down performant webpages".

The only reason they are "performant" is Google preloading them while you search

Yes, the preloading is a dirty trick. Google has the power to play dirty and noone dares to slap him in the face anymore.

Don't be evil -> do the right thing -> do what's right for Google.

Check out the non-amp versions of those pages though.

First example I got (via searching Google for "news" and clicking the first AMP link).

AMP: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sfgate.com/crime/amp/Active... (2.4 MB, loaded in 760ms)

Non-AMP: https://m.sfgate.com/crime/article/Active-shooter-reported-a... (4.7 MB, loaded in 7 seconds)

The non-AMP page is twice as big and takes an order of magnitude longer to load. So, yes. I would _absolutely_ describe the AMP version as a "slimmed down performant webpage".

Could it be better? Of course! But users are still _much_ better off with AMP than without, at least in terms of performance. (And that's ignoring the fact that preloading is part of AMP. It's not "cheating" if it works in a real-world situation.)

My personal non-AMP page weighs ~800 KB (including all images and JS). It still has no chance in hell competing against a 2.4 MB AMP page because I don't have Google's CDN.

Even if I follow all of Google's own performance guidelines, it won't help, as AMP pages load faster than text-only http://motherfuckingwebsite.com

> It's not "cheating" if it works in a real-world situation.

No. It's still cheating. Even if it works

Call it cheating if you want. I as a user still strongly prefer a "cheating" site that loads instantly over a "non-cheating" one that I have to wait 5 seconds to load.

Publishers are in a deep shit, print numbers are dwindling, their pure existence depends on facebook and google whom are trying to suck them dry.

It's not a simbiosis, it's parasitic relationship even though the hosts may try to pretend it is not.