Applications were a thing you downloaded once and ran locally. They did things offline. If you needed something extra, it could communicate with a remote host to give you the thing you needed. Eventually, packagers were created to distribute applications more easily.
Then we had web pages.
Web pages were supposed to enable us to browse remote documents. They worked, for a time. But then people either forgot or were annoyed by making applications.
Then we had web applications.
Entire systems of software development combined a web page with an application. You couldn't use it offline, and it didn't browse documents so much as allow you to use an application remotely. The browser would show you an application with which you would browse documents. And it worked, for a time. But then people apparently got tired of distributing apps over a web page.
So now we have web packaging?
If you wanted a universal application platform, make a less shitty form of Java or something. But stop pretending that hypertext is an application, trying to make me jump through hoops to read some text. I don't need my content proxied, prettified, modified, imaged, scripted, stylized, or customized. I don't need it faster, or better, or more private, or more anything. I really just want to read the text of the article I wanted to read. Honestly.
I'm sick of new wheels. I'm sick of progress. I'm sick of advertisements, scripts, pretty fonts, pop ups, pagination, and columns of useless distraction. I'm sick of commentary by ignorant intolerant insensitive paranoid outraged strangers. I'm sick of trying to read a news article and being assaulted by the equivalent of five kinds of media warring for my attention. I'm sick of likes. I'm sick of sharing. I'm sick of people who have seemingly made it their purpose in life to annoy me. I'm sick of technology.
AMP isn't being used for applications, it's being used to deliver mostly static text documents with images. It's pretty bare bones, but people didn't like Google's implementation that works on unmodified browsers, and so now there's a new proposed implementation that requires browsers to implement it natively.
Most of the anti-AMP commentators keep repeating over and over again that people can make documents which render as fast, but the Redfin article essentially points out that this goes beyond stripping out all JS, and having quick HTML parsing. You could reduce parse/layout to 0 and still be slower than AMP.
Do you want to install a native application just to read each article? It doesn't scale. Even simple things like DNS lookups on mobile networks can add hundreds of milliseconds delay (from 80ms at the median to 500ms at the 90th percentile), and the subjective delay causes people to feel the bad.
It takes several seconds to load most web pages on modern browsers because modern browsers have more code in them than my operating system, my browser wants to load everything encrypted, and most web pages are designed to deliver so much unnecessary crap in such an obnoxious way as to make it take significantly longer on purpose just to get to the content.
Google's response is "No worries, we'll just download it for you, screw it up, and then present it to you." Thanks, Google. I didn't ask for that, but that sure never stops you from encroaching ever more into my life.
Incidentally, all ISPs could provide simple proxies that cache and return pages faster, but not with HTTPS. Google being our grand overlord and de facto tech nanny state, they would rather provide this solution themselves than allow ISPs to not do it perfectly (and at the same time siphon up any potential metadata that a carrier could use to monetize traffic going over its infrastructure)
Google didn't invent advertising-driven free services, but they sure as hell perfected it. Most of the annoyances on the web are due to free services - not latency. And mobile providers could prioritize latency over bandwidth, but lower latency does not sell new mobile plans.
We're not talking about AMP vs bloated desktop web pages, we're talking about AMP vs hand-optimized and stripped down simple documents.
Yes, ISPs could provide proxies, if you want your ISPs to be able to track everything you do and then resell your behavior (https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/28/house-vote-sj-34-isp-regul...) , or allow the NSA to snoop on your behavior. You act as if HTTPS was introduced for nefarious reasons and not as a reaction to very real attacks on confidentiality and integrity. The web isn't going to return to the world of 1994, or the idyllic pre-Morris Worm era when we just didn't care about security.
You're sick that the world has gotten a lot more complicated and noisy. I am too, it's part of growing old, get used to it.
I'm talking about AMP vs the news articles and cooking recipes I try to read that get intercepted by AMP.
Google already tracks everything I do and resells my behavior. That is literally their entire business model.
The NSA puts backdoors in hardware modules you can't remove, finds flaws in firmware, cracks crypto, and exploits mobile devices that can't or won't be updated. And HTTPS simply isn't necessary for 90% of the use cases its champions claim.
I've switched my default search engine, changed browsers, unloaded most of my free hosted services to paid ones, and am paying for a newspaper subscription. I am saving money in the process by cutting unnecessary expenditures to pay for these things. I didn't have to get used to it and life is better.
Putting a backdoor in hardware modules is a way more expensive threat model than the low hanging fruit of observing or modifying your network traffic. So your argument is, since the most elaborate state level actor in the world can bypass pretty much any protection you come up with if they focus on you, you should therefore ignore all of the other threats out there?
And by getting used to it, I was referring to the complexity of the whole technology stack, and the sheer amount of defense of depth that has been added to it. You obviously didn't get used to it, because you're complaining about it and ranting about "technology", social media, and many other things, in your top level post.
But if you disconnected from all of this stuff and achieved a zen-like state of nirvana, then "Likes" or proliferation of tech stacks that other people like to create and use shouldn't bother you.
When someone lists a whole bunch of stuff they hate, but then state they've gone cold turkey and freed themselves from it, but still go on an epic unprovoked rant complaining, it sounds to me like someone saying "Get off my lawn and stop playing rap music".
I despise selfies and hate people taking food pictures when I'm eating with them, but it's pretty much the the world is now. That's what I meant by "get used to it", there's no point ranting about it anymore.
> But if you disconnected from all of this stuff and achieved a zen-like state of nirvana, then "Likes" or proliferation of tech stacks that other people like to create and use shouldn't bother you.
I didn't achieve zen. My life is better, but all the other shit still bothers the hell out of me.
Complaining has a long and successful history. Our entire democratic process is based on complaining. Complaining and throwing tea in a harbor. Just because I threw my tea in the harbor doesn't mean the tea isn't still getting taxed, or that my responsibility to speak out goes away. Granted, my form of whining and moaning was more "kids on my lawn" than "taxation without representation", but hopefully people can see the point is that this is all unnecessarily burdensome.
Websites are at least supposedly are sandboxed so they are not as much of a risk as running native binaries. But this is getting worse and worse though as browsers expose more and more of their host operating system's functionality. The benefits of using a website instead of a native app are quickly disappearing, while the drawbacks have only been somewhat mitigated. We're getting to the point where browsers are worthy of the decades old criticism Emacs has received. They have eventually become an OS with many fine features - simply lacking a good web browser. For the privacy conscious user, modern web technologies will undermine you every step of the way, or simply break if you choose to stand your ground.
Applications were a thing you downloaded once and ran locally. They did things offline. If you needed something extra, it could communicate with a remote host to give you the thing you needed. Eventually, packagers were created to distribute applications more easily.
Then we had web pages.
Web pages were supposed to enable us to browse remote documents. They worked, for a time. But then people either forgot or were annoyed by making applications.
Then we had web applications.
Entire systems of software development combined a web page with an application. You couldn't use it offline, and it didn't browse documents so much as allow you to use an application remotely. The browser would show you an application with which you would browse documents. And it worked, for a time. But then people apparently got tired of distributing apps over a web page.
So now we have web packaging?
If you wanted a universal application platform, make a less shitty form of Java or something. But stop pretending that hypertext is an application, trying to make me jump through hoops to read some text. I don't need my content proxied, prettified, modified, imaged, scripted, stylized, or customized. I don't need it faster, or better, or more private, or more anything. I really just want to read the text of the article I wanted to read. Honestly.
I'm sick of new wheels. I'm sick of progress. I'm sick of advertisements, scripts, pretty fonts, pop ups, pagination, and columns of useless distraction. I'm sick of commentary by ignorant intolerant insensitive paranoid outraged strangers. I'm sick of trying to read a news article and being assaulted by the equivalent of five kinds of media warring for my attention. I'm sick of likes. I'm sick of sharing. I'm sick of people who have seemingly made it their purpose in life to annoy me. I'm sick of technology.