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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

#111

Post by StreamBright »

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…

You are implying that ads are mandatory part of life when we know that they aren't. I agree with the analytics part, however I would not use Google for that either. For me AMP is pretty useless and it is another way for Google to hijack the web.

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

#113

Post by saagarjha »

modernerd wrote: post #106
dmitriid wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve yet to find an AMP page that downloads less than 1MB of crap for what edsentially id a dtatic text page (sometimes with images).

The AMP Project site itself is ~500kb. https://www.ampproject.org/ (desktop version is AMP-ified too).

For me it was over a megabyte, could not scroll smoothly, and had a broken header once I started scrolling.

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

#114

Post by izacus »

saagarjha wrote: post #88
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

The web development community had plenty of time to fix these problems in better ways and it instead just spent time building bigger and bigger JS frameworks and background videos.

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

#115

Post by NightlyDev »

Technetium_Hat wrote: post #22
starik36 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you just use ServiceWorkers in a regular webpage? Seems like you can. That would allow you to have an offline persistent website while still using a webpage. https://caniuse.com/#feat=serviceworkers

So the thing that makes a site a PWA in your eyes is the "add $app to your homescreen" prompt? Because I would view any site that works offline, beyond http/s caching, to be a PWA.

The definition of a PWA is a page that uses features like add to homescreen, service workers... or push notifications. It doesn't have to use this and the browser doesn't have to support it. PWA will progressively use such features when they are supported, and that's where the name comes from. If a page requires these things to function then it's not a PWA.

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

#116

Post by Lukas_Skywalker »

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…

I know nothing about AMP, but isn't having the CSS in the head pretty bad for caching? An external file can be fetched once by the browser and then cached forever, while having the CSS in the head forces that part to be downloaded over and over again?

Edit: I just realize that others posted the same concerns below...

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

#118

Post by juskrey »

Though we can find a lot of obvious overengineering cases, Tonsky should have known better that reference-style website a la Wiki and feature rich application like Airbnb impose very different trade offs between initial/overall loading times and functionality.

An interesting case when someone who is firmly saying "BS" three times in every paragraph is BS too.

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

#119

Post by im3w1l »

seanwilson wrote: post #85
cheschire wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hackernews has 7KB of css - 2KB with compression. The html for this document is 200kb - 30kb with compression.

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

#120

Post by ForHackernews »

juskrey wrote: post #118

Though we can find a lot of obvious overengineering cases, Tonsky should have known better that reference-style website a la Wiki and feature rich application like Airbnb impose very different trade offs between initial/overall loading times and functionality. An interesting case when someone who is firmly saying "BS" three times in every paragraph is BS too.

How is Airbnb a "feature rich application" compared to Wikipedia? They're both Search+CRUD sites as far as I can see.
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