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

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

tonsky.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 225 posts

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

#141

Post by ForHackernews »

osrec wrote: post #97
dvtrn wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't this be a native desktop application versus foisting it onto web clients? If we're talking "fully featured"?

This is where the paradigm shift is coming. Your past experiences say it must be a desktop native app, but I believe things like WASM, web workers etc will allow such things to run comfortably in the browser. I really do believe people will build for the browser more than they will for the desktop because it's a more universal platform. I can even imagine a future where, for the majority, the only native app you have…

This sounds like a nightmare.

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

#142

Post by C1sc0cat »

dvtrn wrote: post #14
osrec wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's just a website, then I agree that is indeed excessive. If, however, it's 15mb of useful functionality (perhaps an app that lets you edit and encode video), then in my eyes, it's acceptable, and probably a good candidate to be a PWA. I know a lot of people hate the idea of doing everything in the browser, but seriously, it's the one ubiquitous platform that we have, which even competing entities have agreed to…

If, however, it's 15mb of useful functionality (perhaps an app that lets you edit and encode video), then in my eyes, it's acceptable You either have an abundance of high speed internet access, or benefit from internet usage that isn't metered by the amount of data consumed, or both. Functionality or not, heavy web experiences leave out a lot of people who would otherwise be willing and capable users of %product% if…

I wish I could upvote this more than once

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

#143

Post by aethertron »

In defense of PWA, specifically the value of offline-availability:

> You can’t call Uber while being offline, and why would you open Uber app otherwise?

To see my journey history. Uber has this data. It's my data, why shouldn't it be on my device too?

> Tinder is useless offline. You can’t date empty chat screens.

I could look at my messages offline, if they were saved on the device.

> You can’t join a meetup at Meetup.com without network connection.

But I could look at my calendar and see upcoming stuff for the days ahead, see past events, my message history, and profiles for my groups.

All this stuff loading from a local cache could improve speed. But that's just a bonus.

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

#144

Post by ec109685 »

metildaa wrote: post #12
Spivak wrote: post #2

Well yeah but the author is missing the point: these tools allow your site to load faster than the theoretical limit without them. AMP buys you Google's CDN and prefetching on Search. And PWA buys you a 0 distance cache hit on your second visit, the ability to prefetch unvisited resources, and with the ability to update the cache in the background. Not saying these aren't negligible on a 15MB site but they are tools…

This assumes that Google's CDN is providing a significant advantage in connectivity, when in actuality you'll often have more available bandwidth between say OVH and your ISP at peak times, as compared to relying on Google's congested peering to certain large ISPs. Amazon S3 can be really paimfully slow at peak times too, I often see sub-1MB/s, while fast.com (Netflix) or OVH can fill the pipe.

Google can preload and pre render amp sites because the specification ensures they are safe to do so. You can’t do that with your own website.

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

#145

Post by ec109685 »

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…

Scroll a little, click a link and then swipe back. Back button doesn’t work.

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

#146

Post by quantummkv »

emerongi wrote: post #124
quantummkv wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Most people do not work in an Dilbertesque organization filled with pointy haired bosses. And this is a very bad excuse for all sorts of startups that are generally behind these atrocious websites. And as a startup your whole damn company is filled with engineering people.

If your management that is filled with engineering people fails to understand the importance of fast websites then the I am afraid the problem is with the engineers. Whether that is incompetence or actively cutting corners can be debatable.

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

#147

Post by bill_mon »

robinanil wrote: post #129
bill_mon wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I understand the problem and I don't have a good solution -- does srcset really help here?

How about a browser setting where the user can decide whether to load images only when they are seen?

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

#148

Post by Angostura »

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…

> 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.

Exactly. Nothing stops you from following them in the regular Web

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

#150

Post by faceplanted »

dmitriid wrote: post #126
pandapower2 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/fun…

> it doesn't push content sites to do anything about their actual sites

Literally nothing has ever achieved that, and it likely never will, it's also no AMP's job, AMP's job is to be a workaround for that systemic issue.

Post reply on HN