Is HN (the site you're on right now) somehow slow? What is this magical instant loading you're talking about? Content still has to be requested, downloaded and parsed.
AMP is a fork of HTML with a required JS framework and a strict set of rules about how other media can be added to the page. AMP sites are also cached on a free Google CDN. None of this is necessary or worth the dev effort for sites, they only do it because of search rankings.
The reason sites are slow is because they add so much stuff to the page that comes from vendors using bloated heavy frameworks and bad coding. Remove or optimize that and sites are perfectly quick.
Google downloads the content in the background before you click on it, so that is why it is fast.
I agree hacker news is super fast (and the back button works perfectly!), as long as you have a reliable internet connection. I use it as my anti-example as to why we don’t need single page apps to read the news.
So I agree: if google can determine your internet seems reliable and the page loads as fast as hacker news from the user’s location, the site should get an amp-style lightening bolt.
