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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

#171

Post by dmitriid »

faceplanted wrote: post #150
dmitriid wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AMP's job is to lock publishers in a Google-controlled system where you jump when Google tells you to jump, or else you lose your spot at the top of Google's search results.

Oh. And ads. It's always about the ads.

They don't even attempt to hide it, really. Right there on AMP's page (emphasis mine):

--- quote ---

The project enables the creation of websites and ads that are...

What AMP Provides

Higher Performance and Engagement

....

Flexibility and Results

Publishers and advertisers can decide how to present their content and what technology vendors to use, all while maintaining and improving key performance indicators.

...

More than 1.5B AMP pages have been published to date and 100+ leading analytics, ad tech and CMS providers support the AMP format.

--- end quote ---

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

#172

Post by darreld »

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?

So the answer is to hand the mobile web to Google?

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

#173

Post by IshKebab »

geon wrote: post #108
IshKebab wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes in that sense AMP is a business contact rather than a technical innovation. "Follow these rules and we'll tell users that we think your site is fast and maybe prioritise it in search results". That's why you can't have a fast news site without it - because new site owners won't follow the rules needed to make their site fast unless they get something in return other than speed. Only AMP gives that. If Google base…

> If Google based is lightning bolt etc. on measured page speed instead then yes you might not need AMP. But they don't. But they do? https://searchengineland.com/google-speed-update-page-speed-...

That page doesn't say that at all. Speed is obviously considered in ranking but you don't get a lightning bolt unless you use AMP.

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

#174

Post by dmitriid »

privateSFacct wrote: post #156
saagarjha wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do people not use the web, particularly media sites. PLEASE go browse a bunch of non-AMP media sites with adblocker off. 500kb is TINY by comparison to what is out there outside of AMP.

People do. And people who understand what the web and AMP are know that AMP isn't the solution.

By the time you've loaded CNN's AMP page, you'll have loaded at least 4 MB: ~2 MB of AMP prefetching done on Google's search results page and another ~2.2 MB on the AMP page itself.

If Google adhered to its own page performance standards, as outlined here: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/w..., CNN's AMP page would be demoted in search results. However, since its AMP, it gets put front and center in search carousel.

Same goes for every single other AMP page.

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

#175

Post by ForHackernews »

juskrey wrote: post #157
ForHackernews wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wikipedia user experience is basically a tree, Airbnb is a pretty complex graph

Wikipedia has editors, varying levels of admin permissions, different types of pages, templates, comments, edits, etc. I'm not sure their data model is any less complicated than Airbnb.

But regardless of the complexity of the database schema, neither one of them is really an "feature rich application" in the way that that say, Photoshop, is a feature rich application.

At the end of the day, I think they're both just CRUD apps.

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

#176

Post by wlkr »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #137
Moru wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is this what NextJS does? I assume you couldn't do that without Javascript either way right?

I think it could be done with iframes but it wouldn't be pretty.

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

#177

Post by protonfish »

quantummkv wrote: post #146
emerongi wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Actually, most of do work in corporate dystopia. Not sure what experience you are drawing your opinion from.

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

#178

Post by criddell »

Lukas_Skywalker wrote: post #116
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...

If I'm pulling the page over an encrypted connection, is there any opportunity for caching?

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

#179

Post by josefx »

privateSFacct wrote: post #156
saagarjha wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do people not use the web, particularly media sites. PLEASE go browse a bunch of non-AMP media sites with adblocker off. 500kb is TINY by comparison to what is out there outside of AMP.

To reduce weight issues please replace all your dogs with cows. Research shows that cows are much lighter than your average whale and for this reason should always be used.

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

#180

Post by superflyguy »

boomlinde wrote: post #165
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.

Sadly, Chrome doesn't support extensions for mobile. Firefox does, which is the (only) reason I use it but that's obviously not going to be around forever. If the choice is ever surf with ads/trackers or don't surf I'll be not surfing.
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