> and Windows
"Accelerated Mobile Pages" should not be showing up on desktop at all. If they do, that's poor coding by the website itself. Just like how you often get stuck on website's mobile version when browsing on desktop.
> it’s completely broken
That's a pretty big statement, could you specify in which way it is "completely broken"?
> friction increasing to grab a link
This has been mostly fixed, I haven't had an issue in the past year. On Chrome and Firefox I believe, it works natively, and in other browsers I believe it adds an extra bar at the top to grab the link.
> Not only that but it seems the page slightly degrades sometimes.
Quite the opposite, in my experience it's often a far simpler and focused page with less crap. The only slight disadvantage is that comment sections on articles are often disabled, but they are usually a click away. It makes sense anyways to not load those by default on mobile.
> A theoretical page load time improvement?
It's definitely not theoretical. It's also a way to bundle websites allowing easier edge caching which helps tremendously.
> we already have “request desktop mode”
Partly because the majority of websites never gave a shit about optimizing their mobile experience without an incentive.
> seemingly even worse?
I truly believe this is a case of "assigning downsides you notice to AMP, but upsides being mostly invisible". You wouldn't have anyone to assign it to when you see a mobile page on desktop, but if it's an AMP page, then you have someone to get angry at.
Another example would be how a spam protection could be blocking 99% of the spam, but if a couple bad content get through, you'll think the spam protection is doing absolutely nothing and it sucks, because you don't get to see the 99% of work it's actually doing.