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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?

#41

Post by acdha »

HALtheWise wrote: post #28
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.

The problem is that preloading is brittle. I see AMP pages lagging only a daily basis which is much rarer for sites which follow best practices — that 100KB of render-blocking JavaScript makes AMP incredibly brittle.

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

#42

Post by SquareWheel »

_fbpt wrote: post #38
SquareWheel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha. That's like removing a bunch of methods from a program and claiming it's broken when it crashes. What did you expect to happen when blocking half of a site's libraries?

News sites are hypertext , also known as formatted text, and not web-apps or programs which download and render websites. I expect news sites to load properly in the absence of the AMP CDN (not "half the methods"), not deliberately hide content from users. (I feel the same way about blocking page rendering when web-fonts don't download when their http connections hang instead.) EDIT: I just moved to desktop. If I blo…

>News sites are hypertext, also known as formatted text, and not web-apps or programs which download and render websites.

No, there are many thousands of websites that render their content dynamically on the client - news or otherwise. Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit all make use of client-side rendering (and all provide news services).

>not deliberately hide content from users

Your browser also "deliberately hides content". It waits a few hundred milliseconds before triggering a paint, just to avoid content from jumping around. AMP pages do the same -- unless you break the mechanism of course.

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

#43

Post by askdlflkjklk »

_fbpt wrote: post #38
SquareWheel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha. That's like removing a bunch of methods from a program and claiming it's broken when it crashes. What did you expect to happen when blocking half of a site's libraries?

News sites are hypertext , also known as formatted text, and not web-apps or programs which download and render websites. I expect news sites to load properly in the absence of the AMP CDN (not "half the methods"), not deliberately hide content from users. (I feel the same way about blocking page rendering when web-fonts don't download when their http connections hang instead.) EDIT: I just moved to desktop. If I blo…

> News sites are hypertext, also known as formatted text, and not web-apps

nope.

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

#44

Post by acdha »

chuckgreenman wrote: post #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 emplo…

Google could get the same effect by more aggressively factoring page load time & size into page ranking. They don’t because that doesn’t give them control over the ad ecosystem.

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

#45

Post by aboutruby »

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…

reddit user:

> 2) Can you stop the "Download the app" popups showing up so frequently on mobile?

spez (Steve Huffman):

> 2) They've been gone a while, but we are chasing down an issue with incognito users seeing it more often. Please let me know if that's the case, or if you are having a different experience.*

Also talking about dark patterns: https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/9ld746/you_h...

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

#46

Post by SquareWheel »

tedunangst wrote: post #37
SquareWheel wrote: post #18

Correct. You've broken the page by blocking only some of the assets. AMP loads fine if you allow all scripts or disable Javascript completely.

Disabling javascript doesn't disable css animations.

The CSS animation only comes into play as a fallback mechanism. The AMP script will force a draw sooner otherwise.

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

#49

Post by SimeVidas »

kjullien wrote: post #24

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…

8 seconds? I thought it was 3.

That being said, this is most likely the culprit. If OP is blocking AMP CDN, the inlined CSS code will hide the content until the CSS animation completes after whatever the timeout is nowadays.

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

#50

Post by SimeVidas »

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...

My takeaways from that article:

When comparing AMP pages to their associated canonical pages, the most striking difference is that AMP pages are significantly lighter (905 KB vs. 2,762 KB) and load significantly fewer assets (61 vs. 318 requests). (All numbers are median values from testing 50 pages.)

Many people have slow phones and expensive internet, and for them this difference enables them to browse news sites, literally.

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