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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?

#81

Post by monadgonad »

SquareWheel wrote: post #42
_fbpt wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

> Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit all make use of client-side rendering (and all provide news services)

Oh, come on. You and I both know that those are social media apps which act as news aggregators, and are not themselves sources of textual news articles. _fbpt was clearly talking about the latter.

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

#82

Post by stordoff »

Falkon1313 wrote: post #64

>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.). Right. It's super easy to make lightning fast web pages. In fact, that's the default state of a static HTML page. It actually takes a lot _more_ work to make pages slow by adding tons…

> The 90th percentile weight for the canonical version is 5,229kb.

I get antsy when I made a page over 100KB (excluding images, and even then anything over 1MB starts to feel excessive unless it's something particularly reliant on images). 5MB feels very high.

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

#83

Post by SquareWheel »

monadgonad wrote: post #81
SquareWheel wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 con…

> Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit all make use of client-side rendering (and all provide news services) Oh, come on. You and I both know that those are social media apps which act as news aggregators, and are not themselves sources of textual news articles. _fbpt was clearly talking about the latter.

What is the meaningful distinction between news websites and non-news websites? Client-side rendering is just a technique which isn't specific to any industry.

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

#84

Post by gregable »

stordoff wrote: post #82
Falkon1313 wrote: post #64

>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.). Right. It's super easy to make lightning fast web pages. In fact, that's the default state of a static HTML page. It actually takes a lot _more_ work to make pages slow by adding tons…

> The 90th percentile weight for the canonical version is 5,229kb. I get antsy when I made a page over 100KB (excluding images, and even then anything over 1MB starts to feel excessive unless it's something particularly reliant on images). 5MB feels very high.

I'm with you, but it's the reality. I just searched for "NASA" on google news, clicked the first thing not from JPL (https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/01/12/whos-who-in-nasas-...) and it loaded 2.6MB cold cache.

Fetched the same on the AMP Cache: https://www-fool-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.fool.com/amp... 200KB cold cache. Removing the likely cached resources (amp javascript, fontawesome cdn font) and the payload is ~35KB.

It's certainly possible to make a lightweight page, as hacker news is a great example, but people aren't doing it. For whatever reason, AMP seems to be effective at making the web actually follow best practices.

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

#85

Post by justinph »

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…

I, too, sadly have to code on AMP bullshit for work.

To be a valid AMP page (at least, according to the Google overlords) you _must_ use the CDN'd AMP scripts. This is the very antithesis of what the world wide web is supposed to be about. IMHO, it's not at all unreasonable to block stuff from domains you don't trust, especially domains controlled by large surveillance corporations. The web should be more resilient. AMP makes it brittle.

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

#86

Post by taneq »

larkeith wrote: post #39
mort96 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The mobile web has always been utter trash, it's just gotten worse in the last five years as more sites have rolled out mobile versions. Disabling Javascript helps a lot, but the "request desktop site" toggle is still frequently necessary. Imgur is, however, deserving of special mention for actively degrading their mobile experience - direct image links redirect to the mobile site now, which loads low-resolution imag…

Imgur's mobile site used to be really good. Now it's awful and I refuse to use it, much less be badgered into installing their damn app.

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

#87

Post by taneq »

aboutruby wrote: post #45
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…

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...

Just went there and there's a pulsing 'use app' button on the top banner and an 'open in the official app' non-scrolling pop-in taking up the bottom 1/5 or so of the screen. So they're, uh, not gone at all.

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

#88

Post by mr_toad »

SimeVidas wrote: post #80
TFortunato wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What bothers me about this argument is that there are plenty of other ways to make a news site fast...like just using straight static html content and minimizing JS usage. See http://text.npr.org or http://lite.cnn.io for example

Do you really think that websites can “just minimize JS usage” without consequences? For example, AMP provides an ad component that is probably the by far most performant way to display ads on the web. Without AMP, the site has to use alternative ad solutions, which probably perform worse and load more JS. The only way for the site to reduce JS would be to find an ad solution that is similar to AMP in terms of perfor…

By ads you mean tracking.

Simple ads can be served statically without JS.

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

#90

Post by mr_toad »

_fbpt wrote: post #29
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).

I’m surprised anyone hangs around a web page for 8 seconds waiting for it to load.

By that time I’d assume the server/connection was down and either refreshed or moved on.

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