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

Post by grenadier21 » Sun, Jan 13, 2019, 6:02 AM UTC

nyolfen wrote: post #98

mort96 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, no, my experience is that reader modes usually remove blocks of code or images or paragraphs at random. I will rather have a bad reading experience than one where I always worry in the back of my mind that some cruicial part of the content is missing. A few too many times, I have read an article, finding it a bit vague and honestly not that good, only to find that all the code blocks or some of the images were…

this happens to me maybe 1 or 2% of the time

Post by grenadier21 » Sun, Jan 13, 2019, 6:09 AM UTC

SquareWheel wrote: post #75

dathinab wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I is actually both. If it would be just a fallback then the time it uses would be at most 5s, more realistic 3s. The think is, if you are on a internet connection where you have frequent loading time of 3s for the _basic_ content, then you are used to seeing partial loaded pages and you likely love it if the connection happen to load the content you care about first, potentially leaving the page before it's completel…

Eight seconds may seem exceptional on broadband internet, but it is not elsewhere in the world. I recently worked with a website in Brazil that could take over a minute to load over 3G. It only looks malicious because you're looking for it to be malicious.

Post by grenadier21 » Sun, Jan 13, 2019, 6:13 AM UTC

SquareWheel wrote: post #72

pdkl95 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a CDN isn't the problem on it's own; the problem is the (unfortunately common) shoddy programming practice of assuming error never happen. Good programming almost always involves checking for and properly handling errors. Using the returned value from fopen(3) without checking if it was NULL probably results in the program crashing when displaying a simple "file not found" error message would have been more app…

I agree with you. However understand that AMP actually does have a failsafe here, and it's exactly what the OP is complaining about. After a timeout (to allow for shoddy network conditions as you described) it will load the content as best it can. All three cases are actually covered (full-script support, partial-script support, and noscript support). That's more resilient than most apps.

Post by eitland » Sun, Jan 13, 2019, 7:00 AM UTC

gregable wrote: post #70

SimeVidas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This CSS animation is just the backup in case the javascript doesn't load at all, really. After 8 seconds, the page gives up trying to prevent the flash of unstyled content and just renders, regardless of how bad the styling is. It also includes a block that renders the page immediately if javascript is disabled. The 8s thing is for network issues. Graceful degradation. Lots of documents (amp or not) use the same "hi…

Post by throwaway13337 » Sun, Jan 13, 2019, 7:18 AM UTC

andy_ppp wrote: post #10

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…

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.