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

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

#161

Post by osrec »

dkrikun wrote: post #121
osrec wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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))

Thank you!

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

#162

Post by robinanil »

bill_mon wrote: post #147
robinanil wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How about it is made the default behavior in any browser, I see no reason why image downloading should ever be not lazy and viewport dependent

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

#163

Post by tyingq »

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

It also grabs a significant portion of the top of your webpage...which happens to be the reddest part of a heatmap for eyeballs.

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

#164

Post by boomlinde »

krageon wrote: post #133
oliwarner wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except this doesn't happen in practice. We've already seen that in the wild. What is left to have a discussion about?

The top-level post of this thread argues that the problem Amp solves is that it makes it impossible to add bloat, and that the mere possibility of adding bloat to your website means that it'll happen.

Now, I don't know whether that's true, but supposing that it's, the post you're responding to raises an important point. If AMP doesn't inherently limit bloat, maybe it's only a matter of time before AMP pages are all bloated crap.

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

#165

Post by boomlinde »

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…

> Turn off your ad blocker, go to a news site, watch the network tab and despair.

Or don't, and you'd never have the problem in the first place. The problem with bloat IMO is that clients at all support it. Thankfully there are a lot of browser extensions for generous content blocking that can make the user experience passable.

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

#166

Post by tonyarkles »

raxxorrax wrote: post #158
izacus wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What problems exactly? The web works pretty well and the source of most problems is non-technical. AMP is cache + handcuffs. No, thanks. I am no web-developer, but pretty sure I wouldn't want to touch that. Is performance really an issue these days? It probably always is but there are worse ones. One specifically being closed web technologies administered by large companies like Google.

The number of times I open a news article (local/regional seems to be the worst) on my phone, start reading the article, and then 10-15 seconds later have the whole thing go blank, reflow, and start me back at the top of the page... I haven't spent any time investigating what actually causes it, whether it's a stylesheet or a big JS module or what, but it's absolutely enraging. I'm just reading what could be plain text content, and that flow gets horribly interrupted.

I'm really torn on AMP to be honest. I'm morally and technically opposed to it, but... the experience is often dramatically better than what I would have gotten without it.

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

#167

Post by boomlinde »

youngtaff wrote: post #135
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…

But if there's no advertising where's the money going to come from to pay those developers? Part of the third-party bloatware problem on the web is us, users who aren't willing to pay for content

The truth probably is that most websites would fail if users had to pay for them. In my opinion, that's a good thing. Ideally, anything that serves an important interest would remain (because users have a genuine interest in further use) while the useless stuff that's just tricking you into paying attention would disappear (because no one actually gives a crap about vapid celebrity gossip unless you really bait them into it). The sooner this can happen, the better.

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

#168

Post by jillesvangurp »

Amp is not about making your site fast but about making sure that sites aggregated in e.g. Google News are all predictably fast by constraining what they can do. It's not about making the individual sites fast but making sure that none of them are needlessly slow by imposing constraints.

Similarly PWA is also not about performance but about adding metadata that phones and browsers can use to treat the site like an app by e.g. giving it an icon in an app folder. You couldn't do this before, now you can. Before people were doing silly things like packaging up websites as apps and putting them in the app store just so they could their own cute little icon in somebody's app folder. Now they don't have to do that and the install/discovery is a bit smoother as well (easier discovery, less steps, less users lost).

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

#169

Post by sureaboutthis »

youngtaff wrote: post #135
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…

But if there's no advertising where's the money going to come from to pay those developers? Part of the third-party bloatware problem on the web is us, users who aren't willing to pay for content

There are a number of articles on the 'net that show AMP can often be slower than a well made page or site. I don't recall the details.

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

#170

Post by sureaboutthis »

boomlinde wrote: post #167
youngtaff wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if there's no advertising where's the money going to come from to pay those developers? Part of the third-party bloatware problem on the web is us, users who aren't willing to pay for content

The truth probably is that most websites would fail if users had to pay for them. In my opinion, that's a good thing. Ideally, anything that serves an important interest would remain (because users have a genuine interest in further use) while the useless stuff that's just tricking you into paying attention would disappear (because no one actually gives a crap about vapid celebrity gossip unless you really bait them…

I talked of this elsewhere. It's a form of vetting we don't have anymore where there is an educated editor somewhere to make sure what we read is worthwhile (not censorship which isn't the same thing).
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