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

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

#21

Post by mort96 »

napsterbr wrote: post #12
aboutruby wrote: post #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.

Ugh, Reddit. Their amp version is terrible for the exact reason you mention. I know every time I see a Reddit page on Google results that I'll make two page loads instead of one (this does make a difference on my country, where everything is slow). Then, when accessing their pages on mobile browser, there's a huge banner telling me to download their app. In this same banner there is a dark UX pattern, where the call…

My favorite is that they've recently started animating their "Get the app" button in the header. That's both immediately on page load, _and_ on an interval as you're reading, meaning it's impossible to read for more than a minute or so without an animation distracting you.

Is it just me or has the mobile web taken a nosedive in recent years? Imgur won't even let you upload images from mobile anymore without their app, reddit is getting progressively more annoying, "Get the app" buttons and modals and banners are getting progressively more prominent and dark-pattern-y, and the default for all web pages now seems to be to include regardless of whether the developers actually tested that their web page works on small screens, meaning web pages which would've just fallen back to desktop emulation mode in the past just simply don't work at all.

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

#22

Post by throwawaysea »

They're likely unrelated issues, but I am not surprised that those outside Google's happy path experience severe performance issues. Gmail has been horrendously slow ever since they launched their terrible redesign, with initial page load taking 10+ seconds and actions like opening up emails taking several seconds. I can't help but think this is because I don't use Chrome.

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

#23

Post by pkamb »

aboutruby wrote: post #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.

The multiple "Open in the Reddit App" banners that load for every AMP result, and do not remember that you've closed them in the past. Awful.

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

#24

Post by kjullien »

I sadly have to code AMP for work. The reason you see a white page is that the boilerplate code required for any AMP page to be valid includes :

  webkit-animation:-amp-start 8s steps(1,end) 0s 1 normal both;
With visibility set to hidden for every element on the page. This is used to minimize page rendering artifacts for the end user, which is one of AMP's main goals, content should be fixed.

The problem however here is that this animation is usually triggered before the 8s, as soon as the AMP javascript has been served from the CDN. Your adblocker of something of the sort is blocking it which results in you having to wait for the hard coded 8s fallback to see the page no matter if the content is already loaded.

AMP is beautiful.

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

#27

Post by nyolfen »

mort96 wrote: post #21
napsterbr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, Reddit. Their amp version is terrible for the exact reason you mention. I know every time I see a Reddit page on Google results that I'll make two page loads instead of one (this does make a difference on my country, where everything is slow). Then, when accessing their pages on mobile browser, there's a huge banner telling me to download their app. In this same banner there is a dark UX pattern, where the call…

My favorite is that they've recently started animating their "Get the app" button in the header. That's both immediately on page load, _and_ on an interval as you're reading, meaning it's impossible to read for more than a minute or so without an animation distracting you. Is it just me or has the mobile web taken a nosedive in recent years? Imgur won't even let you upload images from mobile anymore without their app…

all reader mode everything

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

#28

Post by HALtheWise »

pornel wrote: post #8

Yes, AMP is rather slow: https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2018-03-19-how-fast-is-amp-r... and looks fast mainly because Google preloads it: https://ferdychristant.com/amp-the-missing-controversy-3b424...

Sure, but from an end-user perspective, preloading is a perfectly valid way to achieve good performance, so it shouldn't be left out of the conversation. The fact that AMP can be preloaded without leaking your sensitive information to the owners of domains that you have not yet navigated to is a primary component of the design, and often gets ignored by armchair analysts.

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

#29

Post by _fbpt »

jonas21 wrote: post #26

So... you're blocking the AMP javascript from loading and then complaining that AMP is slow for you. Have you tried not blocking the script?

Downloading a website sans scripts takes strictly less time than downloading and executing scripts. A website that hides its content for 8 seconds because scripts are disabled is a defective website which deliberately stops users from looking static content (amp uses css animation).

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

#30

Post by HALtheWise »

nty wrote: post #11

>I'm not convinced the web pages were really _that_ slow to start with, so it feels like an unnecessary project That's because you use umatrix and possibly ublock. AMP is about making the web faster for the common Joe.

It is also likely that you don't spend a significant amount of time browsing on a 2G cellular connection. When ping times are very long, the only way to get web performance anywhere close to native apps is pre-caching, which is what AMP is designed to enable (link-rel="prefetch" is a privacy nightmare). AMP is about the common Joe, but also about the 90th percentile slow performance (like in the developing world or on cellular networks).
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