By limiting the functionality of pages, AMP makes them load faster, but also allows publishers to include ads. The ads however, can't run JavaScript (or Flash) and so should be a lot less obnoxious.
There's no reason to only use AMP on mobile though - AMP content renders equally well, and fast, on the desktop. These extensions for Safari and Chrome will redirect to AMP URLs for content that has them.
I suppose referrer spoofing could help mitigate this, but then I suppose other browser fingerprinting techniques, if any, could counter this. Bottomline, having one server contribute resources to all the pages you visit is a significant threat to privacy.
Just using a competent blocker nowadays easily takes care of the page load speed issues -- which is the advertised benefit of AMP.
Addendum: basically, if you are already using an extension which purpose is to reduce privacy exposure, installing this extension (DesktopAMP) is self-defeating.
Did Google specifically work with them on it? What are they getting from supporting it now? Are they just being paid?
How will advertising work on Accelerated Mobile Pages? (...) As part of that, those involved with the project are also engaged in crafting Sustainable Ad Practices to insure that ads in AMP files are fast, safe, compelling and effective for users.
If Google should at one point choose to block all non-AMP-compliant ads in Chrome, it might be a good idea to get into the boat early when "AMP-compliant" is still in the process of being defined.
I expect that they've worked with people to figure out what makes the most sense to actually build and so the BBC and Buzzfeed would have had a bit of time before the announcement to start making the pages.
Aside that it looks ok, and probably I will make my blog AMP compliant.
I think the point is that amp.js will be preloaded anyway, so including it in your package manager means it is downloading content it already has.
. bower install amp
and serving it statically from my server. Why not? Maybe cause Google want to create an audience of people using AMP on their devices.
My first impression is that the whole thing is kind of a gross hack on top of HTML. I get that there's a lot of work you don't need to do when you do it this way, but this likely won't survive long.
We have a perfectly good container format called Atom that could have done the job here. Instead of hacking and slashing at HTML, why not define an AMP markup language and well-specify the transformation to HTML?
Stop breaking the web. It's stupid. You can try to just shove the ads down someone's throat but you're in for a surprise, again. Any attempt to force it will actually hurt the advertising. People don't hate ads. People hate obnoxious, obtrusive ads that bloat the page to the point of making it completely useless and the whole experience fruitless frustration.
Non-obtrusive ads work just fine. I know that for a fact, they pay my bills.
Because it's wasted bandwidth. AMP can easily intercept the CDNed version and serve a cached copy. If it's part of your bower build, it can't.