Yes, I'm OK with world having the ability to buy a smartphone for 50$ outside US. Mobile devices shouldn't be reserved just for rich westerners. Same for the whole web - I don't see the reason why it shouldn't be usable on a dual core laptop with 2GB of RAM.

I'm fine if supporting people with older and slower devices costs more development time for developers in Silicon Valley.

Years ago the web was fast on a 1 GHz single-core with 512MB of RAM. What changed, other than ads and ad networks like Google becoming far more invasive by wasting more and more memory and CPU?

In the days since 1 GHz CPUs, web pages have also grown from simple HTML/CSS to huge JavaScript frameworks, in which displaying the simplest static content requires a ton of JavaScript.

But if you install a browser add-on such as uMatrix, you can see that surprisingly many web sites will still work just fine if you disable JavaScript (even first-party JavaScript). One example is nytimes.com.

Should mention that megabytes of javascripts are slow to download, compile and execute. While a few seconds may go unnoticed on the developer desktops, it will be a lot more on a mobile or laptop.

I advised a friend to ditch the JS-powered pop-out social media icons which were hovering almost out of sight over on the right. They said quite flatly, "nope, that's staying". That was probably ten years ago. There is a school of public opinion that everyone seems to be attending. The things they learn there are not always logical or justifiable but I get the impression that they all want to secure their piece of the pie and that means meeting everyone's expectations, so they are all doing it to each other, together. Google is "merely" running classes in that school, it seems... and of course helping the school keep running by supplying tons of tech.

I was mildly disgusted when required reading for freshman orientation at Akron U included a book called Nickel and Dimed. The gist was something like "get your education or you're screwed". But people made it that way in the first place! Everyone supposedly needing formal higher education in order to have any decent future isn't something that just happens, it's something the human race is doing to itself. Leave it to a higher education institution to push the idea that "this is just the way it is, do the right thing if you know what's good for you".

edit: obvs I didn't read the book, it's not exactly like I said. I think I bought the book but dropped that "class" anyway

In a similar way, stupid "trends" like social media buttons and Like buttons are just examples of how everyone is ruining the web together. These days it's the aforementioned massive JS frameworks and SPAs and of course the obsession with "analytics." In a way it's nice for me and my workstation because it helps drive up the current average affordable densities of RAM and storage, but ...it's slavery. And Google seems to be less and less bashful about it.

"you are slaves of whatever you submit to by obeying" --that guy

> because it helps drive up the current average affordable densities of RAM and storage

It does, but it also means that RAM and storage isn't available to be used for other things. Think about what you could if you had current hardware back in the XP days...

We covered it, floor to ceiling, in images and video. Yesteryear's web had a few grainy avatar images and GIFs in footers, todays has nonstop, wall-to-wall, high-definition media.

Not an excuse, those can be loaded on demand. Also, gifs have basically no compression.

JavaScript, SPAs, animations, pages filled with "pretty" instead of content.

> Yes, I'm OK with world having the ability to buy a smartphone for 50$

But you apparently aren't okay with getting $50 worth of smartphone, since you're demanding a ton of companies you erroneously claim to be in California expend thousands of dollars in labor to support a framework they never agreed to support, have little to no say in how it's developed, in the name of a supposedly "open" web, so that you can have a good experience consuming content more than likely for free. That, to me at least, reeks of the worst kind of entitlement.

This is, in my mind, like buying a Tata Nano, which is a perfectly acceptable if limited car, and subsequently demanding all the road ways be limited to 65 mph, so that you don't feel slow. If you want to drive with the pace of traffic, the absolute cheapest car you can possibly buy brand new [1] is probably not what you want.

[1] That I'm aware of.

You guys are both way off the rails here

Developers don't need to put in more work to support cheap phones

You just have to install an ad-blocker, and you can surf the web lightning-fast on even an old, slow piece of crap phone

Yeah, this is ridiculous. I used to browse the Web (not the Wap!) 13 years ago on my Nokia N70 (Symbian OS, 220 Mhz, 32MB) smartphone, on a Internet plan that cost 1€/MB (I have a plan that costs 100 000 times less today), and while it was a bit rough, it was already pretty serviceable!

Most of the content (in time spent on it) is still text (remember what HTTP stands for?), and text takes hardly any processing power!

A cheap phone with shit hardware is a feature of Android, not a bug.

The solution to slow web pages isn't AMP, it's Firefox with an ad blocker. Google doesn't like this solution, obviously, but that's not my problem.

In particular, publishers don't like this solution.

That's not our problem either.

Not everyone can buy $800 iPhone or close to that. Being from a third world country, I understand how valuable it was to have a cheap smartphone (umm laptops were too costly) so my main interest shifted from physics to CS / Programming..

If you don't like Google AMP, it is fine.. (of course I too prefer to browse with only HTML & CSS whenever it works).. If you don't like low end hardware standards, it is fine.. But they have solved real world problems, whether first world problems or not. Not everything is black and white..

> Being from a third world country, I understand how valuable it was to have a cheap smartphone

And just because you live in the US doesn't mean you can afford a top tier iPhone. That's why the secondary market is so hot for them.

> If you don't like Google AMP, it is fine..

I don't really care one way or the other.

> If you don't like low end hardware standards, it is fine..

I do take some issues with the fact that Google employs no standards at all for a baseline level of quality with their devices, and then places the burden of supporting those devices on others under threat of delisting.

> But they have solved real world problems, whether first world problems or not.

Ends do not always justify means. Lest we forget that the winner here is not limited to people with low end hardware getting to consume AMP content, it's also Google, who profits directly off of that consumption. And THAT is where I believe the ethical lapse is. Google isn't doing this so people can get content easily on low end hardware, they're doing it under the guise of that, while laughing to the bank as they're breathlessly defended by people who refuse to accept for some reason that Google is a business, and it acts in every way to forward it's business.

Just like Stadia is not Google setting out so that people who can't afford game consoles can still play the latest games, they are inserting themselves in a user's market so they can be the provider, and get that sweet, sweet engagement.

I used to browse the Web (not the Wap!) 13 years ago on my Nokia N70 (Symbian OS, 220 Mhz, 32MB) smartphone, on a Internet plan that cost 1€/MB (I have a plan that costs 100 000 times less today), and while it was a bit rough, it was already pretty serviceable!

Most of the content (in time spent on it) is still text (remember what HTTP stands for?), and text takes hardly any processing power!

We're not okay with Google usurping web sites but we don't sympathize with publishers either.

The right thing is to build good web sites. Publishers obviously don't care about doing it right and we ended up with system requirements for web sites as a result. Google is now making it expensive for them to not care. Publishers are not a blameless victim of Google's monopolistic power, they actively contributed to the current state of the web.

People should not need a $1000 phone to read a news article. The only situation where it's acceptable for web sites to not work on "shit hardware" is when it's a WebGL application. In those cases, people know that powerful hardware is required before they even load the page.

If Google had blocked manufacturers from selling cheap Android phones then they would have just found another mobile operating system to use. Maybe Firefox OS or WebOS.

Also yeah I'm pretty happy that cheap smartphones are available for the masses to use. I have zero sympathy for content publishers with bloated websites.