I've defended it in the past when it used to be faster (combined with pre-loading) than most websites, on mobile. Nowadays, it should be quite easy to optimize a website enough to be faster than the AMP version, but it seems not many websites are even trying…
What websites need to not only regularly preload+prerender other webpages but also webpages outside their trustzone? And when does the performance of half a millisecond matter?
Latency to remote servers isn’t half a millisecond. A click off from google would normally take a second or two to render and be much worse at the p95 page load time.
With AMP, this is cut down to tens of milliseconds.
> A click off from google would normally take a second or two to render
The question isn't what do people normally do. The question is what's possible without Google's help. 200ms click-to-render is not difficult.
Google can get that down to 20ms or whatever with AMP, but for 99.999% of sites, Google's monopoly position is not the thing holding you back from faster loads.
Not in my experience; AMP has no latency benefit. Additionally, this doesn't really answer the question other than "Google needs this". What other websites need to do AMP on their end?
I'm pretty sure there were multiple comments about being able to make an AMP-alternative with regular HTML that's just as fast from the very first AMP-related post on HN. It may even have been the top comment for some of the first posts.
