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Ask HN: Is it just me or is the AMP project making everything slower?

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Ask HN: Is it just me or is the AMP project making everything slower?

#1
I have µMatrix in my browser, and by default it blocks the AMP CDN. The result of this seems to be horrendous white-screen times for web-pages, beyond what I would expect it to take for a web-server to load these pages, and the delay in loading is very noticeable across all of them.

I have a vague idea of the point of AMP, which is to speed up the delivery of web pages. However:

1) I'm not convinced the web pages were really _that_ slow to start with, so it feels like an unnecessary project (well, excepting the fact that web-page bloat has massively increased as people use more and more javascript libraries &c.).

2) Perhaps I'm being a bit old fashioned, but I don't really understand what was wrong with a browser serving a web page made out of some HTML, CSS, and Javascript. It feels like we're replacing one technology with another (and that latter one comes from Google, which makes me nervous). Do we really want AMP to be the way we serve the web?

3) I haven't properly investigated, bt I'm assuming that this delay is some script which is waiting for the data to load from the AMP CDN, and once that times out it displays the underlying content (I did check and loading this page [1] is almost instantaneous yet the content only displays after three seconds). Any insight into why it's seen as acceptable for this to be so slow when it is unnecessary for displaying the page?

[1]: https://www.ehow.co.uk/how_5840711_test-electrical-outlet-digital-multimeter.html

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is the AMP project making everything slower?

#2
I think there are definite drawbacks to the AMP project. For starters, it seems like the main goal is for Google to own more of the time people are interacting with the web, rather than anything else.

A mark in its favor though is local news sites. They are desperate to be at the top of the search page so when they join AMP, and you look at their AMP pages all of a sudden the loads of dark patterns they usually employ are absent.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is the AMP project making everything slower?

#3
In my experience AMP is considerably slower unless I happen to be browsing in Chrome. It's probably an accidental result of how they implemented AMP, that framework is tuned specifically for Chrome in the first place (odd CSS hacks to nudge Chrome's compositor into behaving a certain way, etc.)

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is the AMP project making everything slower?

#5

In my experience AMP is considerably slower unless I happen to be browsing in Chrome. It's probably an accidental result of how they implemented AMP, that framework is tuned specifically for Chrome in the first place (odd CSS hacks to nudge Chrome's compositor into behaving a certain way, etc.)

"accidental"?

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is the AMP project making everything slower?

#6

In my experience AMP is considerably slower unless I happen to be browsing in Chrome. It's probably an accidental result of how they implemented AMP, that framework is tuned specifically for Chrome in the first place (odd CSS hacks to nudge Chrome's compositor into behaving a certain way, etc.)

"accidental"?

That's the joke.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is the AMP project making everything slower?

#7
The most frustrating is that AMP version of app/pages/websites are very incomplete, e.g. the AMP version of a reddit post has only 3 comments (and the "load more comments" button is buggy).

Would have been much better to use Lighthouse / PageSpeed as a basis for showing optimized pages.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is the AMP project making everything slower?

#9
AMP pages take forever to load for me with Firefox and uBlock Origin. When I open a news story from Google's recommendations, which always open to AMP pages, it pretty much always takes about 15 to 30 to show anything on screen. I instinctively edit the link manually nowto try to go to the non-AMP version, which typically loads the content in under 5 seconds.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is the AMP project making everything slower?

#10

I think there are definite drawbacks to the AMP project. For starters, it seems like the main goal is for Google to own more of the time people are interacting with the web, rather than anything else. A mark in its favor though is local news sites. They are desperate to be at the top of the search page so when they join AMP, and you look at their AMP pages all of a sudden the loads of dark patterns they usually emplo…

Maybe Google could just heavily discount for SEO popovers, slow sites, huge blobs of JS and generally stuff that we all find slow and irritating (i.e. jumpy images). It used to be the case that Google wanted to solve problems of their users but now Google wants to solve the problems of Google.
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