Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How fast is AMP really?

timkadlec.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 167 posts

Re: How fast is AMP really?

#51

Post by manigandham »

seanwilson wrote: post #44

I think the point of AMP is it gives Google a simple and reliable way to detect fast rendering pages that render well on mobile in a way that can't be easily gamed. When you allow unrestricted usage of JavaScript that's changing page content, loading styles etc. for example, detecting pages like this is more difficult. You can write performant pages without AMP but how would Google reliably detect pages like this? I'…

> Google reliably detect pages like this?

The same way it reliable detects the content of the site and everything else. Take a snapshot and keep the latest history.

You can easily change the content on a page with javascript so Google still needs to load everything to get an accurate representation. Since there are plenty of tools already (including Google's own) that measure page loading speed, it would be trivial to combine them into a performance score for search rankings.

If speed was actually made into a strong signal, major websites would've become as fast as AMP within months.

Re: How fast is AMP really?

#52

Post by lern_too_spel »

millstone wrote: post #17
lern_too_spel wrote: post #11

A very low quality article. The whole point of AMP is to define a restricted subset of HTML that is safe to prerender and still provide working analytics to the publisher. When you prerender, the advantage of AMP is substantial as it is impossible to beat a user experience of instant, which is why users prefer it and why publishers go through the trouble of implementing two web versions of their web pages (in additio…

Publishers go through the trouble in order to get the boost in Google's rankings. As an iOS user I find AMP to be quite buggy, and AMP versions of pages like reddit are borderline non-functional. I don't prefer it at all.

Your experience was due to a bug in iOS that Apple has since fixed. Those of us using platforms that allow quickly updating non-buggy browsers never saw such issues.

Re: How fast is AMP really?

#53

Post by lern_too_spel »

geuis wrote: post #33
lern_too_spel wrote: post #11

A very low quality article. The whole point of AMP is to define a restricted subset of HTML that is safe to prerender and still provide working analytics to the publisher. When you prerender, the advantage of AMP is substantial as it is impossible to beat a user experience of instant, which is why users prefer it and why publishers go through the trouble of implementing two web versions of their web pages (in additio…

AMP is a cancer on search results. The purpose of a search engine is to provide the best links it can to content related to a user’s search. The search engine should not be providing the content of the search result as a primary link. Having a backup cache of the link is fine in case it changes or disappears. It’s the responsibility of the original site to be able to serve its visitors.

Most users think otherwise. Most users prefer results that load instantly, which is why the dominant search engines in the US, Japan, China, and Russia as well as the dominant short message sharing services in the US and China all provide special support for AMP results.

Re: How fast is AMP really?

#54

Post by Waterluvian »

cptskippy wrote: post #45
Waterluvian wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy crap. The internet on a phone can feel like this?!

It didn't seem that fast to me compared to other sites, then I realized I'm running Firefox with uBlock while the rest of you are probably on Chrome.

On a phone? Last time I tried adblocking on a phone I was super irritated by it. Some proxy setup that never quite worked and felt like it slowed everything down.

Re: How fast is AMP really?

#55

Post by manigandham »

notatoad wrote: post #9
xenadu02 wrote: post #5

So basically Google could get 90% of what AMP provides without AMP itself, because the magic is in the caching and forcibly reducing the ad junk the page loads. Does that about sum it up?

Yes, except how do you propose to implement caching and stripping out the ad junk without AMP?

Make performance (not AMP) matter in search rankings and websites would immediately start getting faster.

Re: How fast is AMP really?

#56

Post by seanwilson »

JoshMnem wrote: post #46
seanwilson wrote: post #44

I think the point of AMP is it gives Google a simple and reliable way to detect fast rendering pages that render well on mobile in a way that can't be easily gamed. When you allow unrestricted usage of JavaScript that's changing page content, loading styles etc. for example, detecting pages like this is more difficult. You can write performant pages without AMP but how would Google reliably detect pages like this? I'…

> I think I understand what it's trying to do. It's appifying the WWW on Google's domain and allowing them to dictate how sites are monetized. On the most basic level, it isn't motivated by speed.

> On the most basic level, it isn't motivated by speed.

So you think Google has no interest in making search results load faster and this factor is just a ploy?

Re: How fast is AMP really?

#57

Post by seanwilson »

manigandham wrote: post #51
seanwilson wrote: post #44

I think the point of AMP is it gives Google a simple and reliable way to detect fast rendering pages that render well on mobile in a way that can't be easily gamed. When you allow unrestricted usage of JavaScript that's changing page content, loading styles etc. for example, detecting pages like this is more difficult. You can write performant pages without AMP but how would Google reliably detect pages like this? I'…

> Google reliably detect pages like this? The same way it reliable detects the content of the site and everything else. Take a snapshot and keep the latest history. You can easily change the content on a page with javascript so Google still needs to load everything to get an accurate representation. Since there are plenty of tools already (including Google's own) that measure page loading speed, it would be trivial t…

> The same way it reliable detects the content of the site and everything else. Take a snapshot and keep the latest history.

Wouldn't benchmarking page speed accurately for all pages on a website for a variety of screen sizes on a regular basis cost significant resources? If it's so easy, why are they not doing this already?

What I meant about AMP is that when a page validates as an AMP page you know there's certain things it can and can't do. This makes the task of identifying performant pages significantly easier.

Re: How fast is AMP really?

#58

Post by fastball »

cptskippy wrote: post #45
Waterluvian wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy crap. The internet on a phone can feel like this?!

It didn't seem that fast to me compared to other sites, then I realized I'm running Firefox with uBlock while the rest of you are probably on Chrome.

I have uBlock.

Chrome is faster than FF with real world applications.

Re: How fast is AMP really?

#59

Post by guu »

Waterluvian wrote: post #54
cptskippy wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't seem that fast to me compared to other sites, then I realized I'm running Firefox with uBlock while the rest of you are probably on Chrome.

On a phone? Last time I tried adblocking on a phone I was super irritated by it. Some proxy setup that never quite worked and felt like it slowed everything down.

On iPhone you can use a safari content blocker like purify or 1blocker. On Android you can use Firefox and ublock.

Re: How fast is AMP really?

#60

Post by fastball »

xenadu02 wrote: post #5

So basically Google could get 90% of what AMP provides without AMP itself, because the magic is in the caching and forcibly reducing the ad junk the page loads. Does that about sum it up?

Which is made clear in the AMP documentation itself.

The AMP project isn't pretending they're bringing something unprecedented to the web... they're very open about the fact that most of the things you need to do to make your site "AMP compatible" are just speed-conscious best-practices (like only using CSS transitions that have hardware acceleration, or async loading of assets).

Post reply on HN