The hosting/caching of those pages on outside caches is a bit more problematic, especially when it gets used by Google to de-emphasize the destination site in favor of flicking through Google results.
I think the same idea implemented as a browser standard would have much better reception.
I think this gets at a core tension - there are three parties involved in a search results page. The search engine, the destination site, and the user. Each has its own set of incentives. Both search engine and destination site have this bizarre idea that they have some kind of root-given right to the user's undivided attention for as long as they like.
The user's interests are frequently poorly represented. They rarely include giving either search engine or destination site the amount of engagement each feels they deserve. Often, but not always, the search engine is somewhat better aligned with the user.
> I think the same idea implemented as a browser standard would have much better reception.
I personally have quite deep doubts. A standard like AMP works only because it can require adhering very strictly to a tightly written specification that blocks a lot of the things website authors want to do. I suspect AMP as a browser standard would produce a vast amount of forever broken webpages before publishers ditched it due to poor ad revenues and went back to their crappy, bloated, slow, ad-laden pages.
The ability to load it into a CDN controlled by someone else - kind of a huge deal for performance reasons - is exactly the key feature that's user-friendly and hated by publishers. It's the kind of thing that would be cut out of a browser standard or just ignored by publishers.
The user's interests should be looked after by the browser. A true "user agent" should act on behalf of the user's preferences, fetching only what the user says they need, and rendering it in a manner that the user wants, not necessarily how the web developer wants. We've gotten far away from this ideal over the years, with browsers ceding more and more control to web developers. Users have lesser and lesser say as to how their browsers render web sites, to the point where we now just have super-blunt instruments like ad blockers and "Disable javascript".
If a web site is too slow, or choked with ads, or doesn't use an accessible color scheme, or uses a font too small, I want my browser to do something about it. I don't want to have to rely on the web developer (or Google) to adopt my own preferences. And if my browser even allows this, the function should be easy to use, not buried deep in Settings.
You're right. User agents should be for the user. They should expose options and controls for the user. They should tune and change and transform things for the user. They should understand what the user wants and make life easier for the user.
I am just skeptical that browsers are ever going to be true user agents and capable of fully representing the user's interests and intent.
