As a publisher who has some properties with ads and some properties without, I get the stickiness complaints. I don't implement AMP simply because it's time spent that offers me nothing -- my sticky and converting traffic doesn't come from organic google search anyway.
> There are downsides, and I do wish the alternative was simply
A simple alternative would be public content caches; a meta tag that says "prefetch me" is a way for the publisher to tell sites it's okay to prefetch it and store the content in the content caches. I think trusting a google-run content-cache with no cookies would be easy for browser manufacturers to implement. It also wouldn't affect the user interface adversely.
A separate, unrelated program could be used for the "fast" logo that would require all/most content on public caches and pageload fired in under 0.5sec (or some other metric).
> There are downsides, and I do wish the alternative was simply
A simple alternative would be public content caches; a meta tag that says "prefetch me" is a way for the publisher to tell sites it's okay to prefetch it and store the content in the content caches. I think trusting a google-run content-cache with no cookies would be easy for browser manufacturers to implement. It also wouldn't affect the user interface adversely.
A separate, unrelated program could be used for the "fast" logo that would require all/most content on public caches and pageload fired in under 0.5sec (or some other metric).