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

tonsky.me

121–130 of 225 posts

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

#121
post #28

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

There seems to be a few misconceptions around what is and what isn't a PWA. A PWA (in my opinion) is simply a website that makes use of certain browser features (e.g. service workers, push notifications, manifests). It's a bad definition, with a lot of grey areas, but it is what it is (and let's face it, definitions in web development are often hard to pin down). For example, we built https://usebx.com/app with plain…

gj using plain old js+html, very nice))

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

#122

I agree on AMP, you can just pack less JS and be done with it. But AMP is REALLY about rich search results online. Google creates more interactive search results for AMP pages than non-AMP versions. As for PWA's, I'm honestly a fan, to a certain limit. I really like Gatsby.js, especially because the rendered pages work with Javascript disabled. Django/Rails/$FRAMEWORK with Turbolinks.js is also great, for the same re…

Not a fan of Turbolinks really. Usually one of the things I remove in a default Rails install.

Just means JavaScript stuff needs to be re-init every page load etc and means extra messing about to get stuff to work

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

#123

>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.

Google Analytics became useless after Google decided they weren’t going to block Analytics spam.

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

#124
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…

This isn't about engineers. This is about businesses. Up until now there apparently hasn't been a business case for fast websites.

Fast website costs a lot of money in development time. If a website loads fast enough, nobody wants to invest X amount of dollars to make it somewhat faster.

Since AMP sites are prioritized on mobile, there is now a very clear business case for supporting AMP.

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

#125

>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…

This is nonsense. AMP pages can still track and advertise and use unlimited amounts of crap; it's just different syntax.

TFA is just stating that you don't need handcuffs to behave well. You can optimise your site without AMP.

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

#126

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).

1 MB is incredibly compact by news site standards. Try a random article page like https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/07/tech/australia-encryption... I refreshed a few times, scrolling to the bottom of the page each time. According to Chrome dev tools even without a video playing between 6 MB and 21 MB was transferred just for me to scroll to the bottom of the page.

True. The problem with AMP though is that it doesn't push content sites to do anything about their actual sites. Content/news sites produce a stripped down version for AMP in the hopes to get into the search carousel, and that's it.

That's why I view other initiatives by Google such as https://web.dev [1] laughable at best.

[1] Is a rehash of what has been in their docs for ages: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/w...

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

#128
post #58
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 think if more web developers understood how browsers actually render a page we'd get much better web pages. In the case of CSS, the browser won't render until all the CSS files are loaded and parsed. Having lots of them is terrible for time-to-first-paint performance. That's reason enough to inline styles in the head and only have one CSS link on a page if you want something simple, or to use media queries in links…

Thank you for sharing this, looks great at first glance.

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

#129

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…

No images without javascript? Imo js should be for functionality only, basic content should always load.

True critique, but progressive loading is not supported by html5 alone. I have been following up with srcset to support proper lazy loading behavior and the day it gets supported you will see it on our site.

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

#130
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having a basic knowledge of optimising images in photoshoot would save a MFT (Metric F&^K Ton) of page weight
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