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Can the Most Contentious Piece of the Web Form the Basis of a New Standard? Inside Google's Plan To Make the Whole Web as Fast as AMP (theverge.com)
Dieter Bohn, writing for The Verge: In a blog post today, Google is announcing that it's formally embarking on a project to convince the group in charge of web standards to adopt technology inspired by its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) framework. In theory, it would mean that virtually any webpage could gain the same benefits as AMP: near-instantaneous loading, distribution on multiple platforms, and (critically) more prominent placement on Google properties. This is important, a little tricky to understand, and critical to how the web and Google interact in the future. In many ways, Google's success or failure in this endeavor will play a major role in shaping how the web works on your phone.
[...] By creating AMP, Google blithely walked right into the center of a thicket comprised of developers concerned about the future of the web. Publishers are worried about ceding too much control of their distribution to gigantic tech companies, and all of the above are worried that Google is not so much a steward of the web but rather its nefarious puppet master. The whole situation is slightly frustrating to David Besbris, VP of search engineering at Google. Earlier this week, I went to Mountain View to talk with Besbris and Malte Ubl, engineering lead for AMP. "This is honestly a fairly altruistic project from our perspective," says Besbris. "It wasn't like we invented AMP because we wanted to control everything, like people assume," he says. Instead, he argues, go back and look at how dire the state of the mobile web was a few years ago, before AMP's inception.
[...] By creating AMP, Google blithely walked right into the center of a thicket comprised of developers concerned about the future of the web. Publishers are worried about ceding too much control of their distribution to gigantic tech companies, and all of the above are worried that Google is not so much a steward of the web but rather its nefarious puppet master. The whole situation is slightly frustrating to David Besbris, VP of search engineering at Google. Earlier this week, I went to Mountain View to talk with Besbris and Malte Ubl, engineering lead for AMP. "This is honestly a fairly altruistic project from our perspective," says Besbris. "It wasn't like we invented AMP because we wanted to control everything, like people assume," he says. Instead, he argues, go back and look at how dire the state of the mobile web was a few years ago, before AMP's inception.
I disliked AMP so much that I stopped using Google search on my phone, and switched to DuckDuckGo. The last thing we need is more of this crap interfering with the browser paradigm.
What do you mean I can't turn it off? Sure I can.
DuckDuckGo became my default browser on mobile. Before long, I switched to it on desktop as well, ditching Chrome for Firefox in the same step. And my primary email is now at ProtonMail. The Gmail account I've had since the year Gmail was announced is slowly withering away, getting fewer and fewer emails that actually matter. Before long I'll completely switch over and "delete" the Gmail account's contents (which I know they'll keep archived, as well as the data about me they've harvested from it over the years; I'll just consider it their last middle finger to me as I leave their services forever, and a lasting reminder of why I left).
I know it's a drop in the bucket, but honestly it feels pretty good personally, and well worth the very minor pain of switching over.