Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by blablabla123 » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 2:59 PM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #168

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 ap…

No idea how Amp actually works, I always thought that one component about it was acting like a CDN for common frameworks.

PWAs are much easier to tune for global performance though if you have a tight budget. The app doesn't have to talk much to a Backend server and (down)loading can be tuned by using a CDN.

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

#182

Post by jjulius » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 3:01 PM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #168

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 ap…

>... but making sure that none of them are needlessly slow by imposing constraints.

Anecdotally, AMP sites always load a bit slower for me. The page will sit blank for a few seconds before finally dumping all of the content at once, as opposed to loading text immediately while it takes a moment to load the rest of the content that has a higher file-size.

Without AMP, I can start reading a page before it's done loading. With AMP, especially on a desktop, I'm often stuck staring at a white screen for 15-20 seconds before anything shows up. I often find myself trying to cut the "amp" bit out of the URL to see if I can get to the original page. It's frustrating, and it is a big part of why I'm considering dumping Google as a search engine.

That's just my experience, though - YMMV.

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

#183

Post by Uw7yTcf36gTc » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 3:02 PM UTC

robinanil wrote: post #162

bill_mon wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

its in the pipeline for chrome. should be in testing or dev soon enough.

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

#184

Post by codedokode » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 3:06 PM UTC

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…

AMP is used mostly to get higher visibility on Google. Imagine if there was a third-party AMP caching website. Would anyone make an AMP version for them? No way. They do it only because Google will show them above their competitors in search results.

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

#185

Post by aceon48 » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 3:09 PM UTC

Lol this guy's site took over 10 seconds to load on my mobile. Invalidates anything he had to say

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

#186

Post by ayoisaiah » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 3:12 PM UTC

jjulius wrote: post #182

jillesvangurp wrote: post #168

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 ap…

>... but making sure that none of them are needlessly slow by imposing constraints. Anecdotally, AMP sites always load a bit slower for me. The page will sit blank for a few seconds before finally dumping all of the content at once, as opposed to loading text immediately while it takes a moment to load the rest of the content that has a higher file-size. Without AMP, I can start reading a page before it's done loadin…

AMP on the desktop? Don't think I've seen that before. I've only seen AMP links on mobile and I don't think it's returned in desktop search results

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

#187

Post by fipple » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 3:14 PM UTC

The headline is analogous to “Antitrust laws are not needed to prevent price fixing.” Treated as a statement of fact, it’s technically true, but it’s really a statement of policy opinion, whose weaknesses are clear.

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

#188

Post by liuyanghejerry » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 3:21 PM UTC

The article is with prejudice somehow. You still need lots of apps which working perfectly with offline mode. For example reading books you already downloaded, watching movies you already downloaded, or whatever immutable content you already have. The author choose to making examples with apps that demands communications with outside world instantly, which makes the whole point weak.

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

#189

Post by acdha » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 3:22 PM UTC

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.

The only reason AMP matters is because Google was heavily pushing it and for awhile restricted the top search result carousel to AMP pages. This goal could far more easily have been satisfied by a policy which set limits for time-to-render and total transfer rather than dictating usage of a proprietary framework which often makes performance worse (you need a 100KB of JavaScript to finish running before an AMP page isn't blank).

What actually made Google try it is that it gives them control over the advertising system. Performance was the pretext they used to protect their main source of revenue.

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

#190

Post by acdha » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 3:24 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #178

Lukas_Skywalker wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes: your device can always cache it, if you use a trusted proxy (think enterprise networks) it can be cached, and if the site uses a CDN it can be cached there as well.