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Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

tonsky.me

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Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#81

Post by naikrovek »

Romanulus wrote: post #57
naikrovek wrote: post #30

I agree with the article author. Performance today is not a priority for web developers. It's not even in the top ten priorities. Performance is just not considered unless it is so bad that a site looks like it isn't working. We can change this at any point we like. We won't. It will continue to get worse.

It's a shame since all hardware is getting slower and slower every day.

That kind of thinking is why people STILL wait on computers to do things that could be SO MUCH faster.

Why the hell does it take an application like Photoshop 30 fucking seconds to simply launch and get to where it can accept input on my 32-core, dual-Xeon desktop at work with 192GB of RAM and a very fast SSD? Because people punt the fucking problem into the future and assume everything will just continually get faster

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#82

Post by dmitriid »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #11

This guy doesn't know what AMP does. AMP is a subset of HTML that can be validated safe to prerender. That means instant page loads for the user, not merely fast.

They are not ”instant”. When you visit Google search, Google preloads AMP (and doesn’t preload anything else). The only readon AMP id fast is because Google has search monopoly and preloads its own non-standard things ahead of time, effectively penalising everyone else.

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#83

Post by cheschire »

seanwilson wrote: post #66
Solar19 wrote: post #13

The author says you can do these things anyway without AMP, but what he doesn't get is that web developers were not doing them. It took the nudge of AMP to get decent performance on the mobile web. He also failed to mention a key AMP rule: all CSS is in the head, a max of 50 KB. There is no external CSS at all. That's crucial. It reverses a persistent anti-pattern in web development that calls for a bunch of separate…

> all CSS is in the head, a max of 50 KB. There is no external CSS at all. That's crucial. It reverses a persistent anti-pattern in web development that calls for a bunch of separate files for CSS and JS. This means CSS and JS cannot be cached between page loads however so you're requesting the same data every time while navigating pages. It's a tradeoff against faster page loading. I'm surprised there isn't a better…

I wonder if one of the user stories being addressed by AMP identifies that users don't typically visit more than a couple pages from any particular site before a style update is pushed by the developers that invalidates the cache anyways.

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#85

Post by seanwilson »

cheschire wrote: post #83
seanwilson wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all CSS is in the head, a max of 50 KB. There is no external CSS at all. That's crucial. It reverses a persistent anti-pattern in web development that calls for a bunch of separate files for CSS and JS. This means CSS and JS cannot be cached between page loads however so you're requesting the same data every time while navigating pages. It's a tradeoff against faster page loading. I'm surprised there isn't a better…

I wonder if one of the user stories being addressed by AMP identifies that users don't typically visit more than a couple pages from any particular site before a style update is pushed by the developers that invalidates the cache anyways.

Well, fast initial page loads would improve the experience a user gets when they're using a search engine to find an answer, especially if they have to visit multiple websites.

For a site like Hackernews though where you probably visit many pages each visit, downloading the same e.g. 50KB of CSS every page is wasteful.

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#86

Post by arbie »

goldenchrome wrote: post #48
spiralganglion wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some cases, sure, it's not the fault of engineers — if an engineer is in an environment where they're not able to take the time to do things right. In some cases, it is the lack of tools. But I think it's often not either of those, and it is in fact the chosen priorities of the engineers. A lack of attention to craft. We see a similar split in GameDev. Some game developers (Carmack, Blow, Acton) sweat every millis…

To many people, programming isn't a craft. It's just a way to get things done.

It's a combination of the tooling getting better, and expectations/parceling for a product solidifying at a higher level in the org chart. "Engineers" are devolving into technicians as a result.

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#87

Post by Moru »

quantummkv wrote: post #78
Solar19 wrote: post #13

The author says you can do these things anyway without AMP, but what he doesn't get is that web developers were not doing them. It took the nudge of AMP to get decent performance on the mobile web. He also failed to mention a key AMP rule: all CSS is in the head, a max of 50 KB. There is no external CSS at all. That's crucial. It reverses a persistent anti-pattern in web development that calls for a bunch of separate…

> AMP, or something even better, needs to be the default way to build websites. No. We don't need AMP or something else. The existing tools are more than enough. What we need are actual, trained engineers/developers on the platform. The real problem with web performance is that any random guy with questionable or non-existent knowledge thinks he can whip up a website by mixing any library he comes across. That is fin…

As others here are saying, they like AMP because they as developer do not ha e final say on what goes in The product. They can only do what The boss/client tells them to do.

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#88

Post by saagarjha »

pandapower2 wrote: post #27

>I’m not saying practices promoted by AMP are bad or useless. They are good practices. But nothing stops you from following them in the regular web. Disagree. The most important feature of AMP is that it makes it impossible to add the kind of bloated crap that causes poor performance on something like a large media company website. Something like a news website likely has 2-4+ analytics integrations, and a similar nu…

Except it does so in a rather poor way:

* It's clearly driven by a biased entity (Google)

* It doesn't actually directly prioritize page speed

* It breaks websites

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#89

Post by robinanil »

43920 wrote: post #80
robinanil wrote: post #41

At Tock we had been obsessed with page load performance since the beginning and I agree with the author. We avoided PWA mostly due to it's broken behavior. Often times we are faster than loading the same restaurant page on Google search. Out challenge has been that we have to load a lot of images, so we spent a lot of time optimizing everything around it and optimizing everything around it. From TLS1.3 to the CDN, to…

Sort of off-topic, but there seems to be a bug with the way search results work. If I click on "search", it shows me an option for " nearby", but if I click on that, I get results for a city that has the same name, but is in a completely different area. edit: this also applies to the "near you" cards on the home page.

Thanks, could be a geocoder issue for a specific city - we will investigate.

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#90

Post by Moru »

craftyguy wrote: post #59
Solar19 wrote: post #13

The author says you can do these things anyway without AMP, but what he doesn't get is that web developers were not doing them. It took the nudge of AMP to get decent performance on the mobile web. He also failed to mention a key AMP rule: all CSS is in the head, a max of 50 KB. There is no external CSS at all. That's crucial. It reverses a persistent anti-pattern in web development that calls for a bunch of separate…

Eh, the 'trick' is to discard javascript. You can build a functional website without it.

If you really want you can build a very fast site if you only download the part of the html that change between loads and still not break the back button. This is more work though.
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