The correct response to bloat is to penalize it in search. If they can't get rid of bloat, better quality sites can rank.

This would likely mean sites with less tracking and ads - two things Google has a vested interest in.

How many average people are walking around saying "I've quit the web! It's too slow!"?

Nobody. It's a non-issue because, despite the faults of the web, the average person is still clicking on chum-boxes, sharing clickbait, and using Google services.

Google isn't trying to save the web. They're trying to become the web. And they've already made their money, so what makes you think they care out of the goodness of their hearts?

> How many average people are walking around saying "I've quit the web! It's too slow!"? Nobody.

Everyone did. It's why web apps are dead & buried, and native apps rule the world. Nobody talks about cool web experiences anymore. It's why we're all talking about the experience of viewing a search result instead of the experience of browsing the web.

Entire areas that started exclusively on the web are now dominated by native apps, like social.

The web only exists for long-tail, rarely used content. That's the actual area it occupies now. Google, with AMP, are optimizing for the usage the web has left. It's a realistic approach to the web.

Show me the numbers. Everyone just spouts this rhetoric about the web being "dead" but where's the evidence? Please show me evidence. If people are still using The Google, then I doubt the web is "dead".

I know it is a rhetoric "nobody", but I did. I almost never use a browser on my phone if possible because the experience is always terrible.

I quit sites all the time. Take trip advisor, great website, completely unusable if you are not on a high end desktop. Its a website ffs! I refuse to open pages unless I really need them. I find them using the duck since google is: to slow.

You're right in a sense, but I have changed which local/regional/national news sources I use. In Canada, the Postmedia group of companies have made it almost impossible to actually read the news. I'm actually ok with them having ads, but they have ads that cause the page to scroll/shift while I'm trying to read, and it seems to be random. It might teleport me further into the article, or earlier. And trying to scroll to where I was causes further ad loads that shift the page again. Totally unusable. The CBC though has none of that junk. If it continues frustrating people this much, it'll potentially shift the political discourse left (the CBC seems to have a left-leaning bias)

How many people use HN over other tech news aggregator sites specifically because it's so lightweight? I know I do.

completely anecdotal, but my cousin did. she told me chrome (not the web, chrome, but she definitely meant the web in general) was "too confusing" and now only uses facebook and the mobile apps for a few other services.

Quit the web? Non issue. Have become highly annoyed the sites that load slow or not at all? That's pretty much eveyone.

It's foolish - and naive - to dismiss user experience.

Neither does Google. They prioritise AMP pages over regular pages, regardless of what the regular page looks like.

EDIT: @afiori comments below that this may no longer be the case.

What does that have to do with respect for receiving device or connection speed?

If the respect was for the receiving device or connection speed, the metric used to determine priority of results would be size of payload / speed of delivery, rather than if the technology / hosting was google-owned.

As far as I recall they fixed that, now the problem is that they the measure for speed they use does some weird tricks around partial loads; as long as you display _something_ soon they are happy and the fact that a page might be useless for many seconds is weighted less

That matches with human psychology of perception, IIUC.

Yes, I understand why they would want to do it. But it also mean that I am staring at a unusable page...

But the alternative is you'd be staring at a useragent-provided crawler for N seconds to get to a usable page, right?

But then Google shows up and demands that all that cruft has to be added back to make AMP and normal pages the same again. Doesn't this kinda defeat the purpose? I thought I can maybe understand AMP pages as some reader mode, fast and no-bullshit content, but now they look like they just want to push their kind-of proprietary tech.

It's frustrating to me that anyone buys that the driver behind AMP was performance. A Trojan horse has to have some plausible reason to let it in the gates. That plausible reason isn't the actual reason it exists.

If performance really mattered to Google, it would influence SERP and Carousel position in a meaningful way.