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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?

#111

Post by y4mi »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #95
gregable wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Lots of documents (amp or not) use the same ... trick Perhaps luck, but I have never encountered one that is so hostile about it with nearly 10s wait outside of AMP. I've rarely encountered a second or so's delay, but two or three sites including a large one that have the massively excessive AMP delay. So to call it the same trick seems like a stretch from a user annoyance point of view.

but why should they improve your experience, who has ad-block enabled and as such not creating any value to the website owner?

It annoyed me as well before, though I realized as I stopped going there that this is for the best... for both my sanity and the websites bottom line.

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

#112

Post by eitland »

grenadier21 wrote: post #105
SquareWheel wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

no script support that makes you wait eight seconds in a technology to make things ×faster× isn't really support, is it?

Agree. To put it another way in hope of driving this home:

It is sad when the brightest minds in the world decide that the fix for "flash of unstyled content" is to show no content at all for close to 10 seconds.

Seriously: 8 seconds mandatory waiting would have been considered slow even 10 years ago and the only reason it passes now is because Google got a stranglehold on most of the web.

Edit: improve last paragraph

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

#113

Post by super-serial »

lsadam0 wrote: post #34

AMP has always and will always be a garbage idea. Stop implementing AMP.

Over the last couple years Google has acted like a dictator on the web. No more autoplay... except if you're Youtube, or these 100 approved sites. If you use Chrome... oh now you're auto signed in. You opt out of location tracking - we'll still track you, we don't care.

Don't give Google more power.

Implementing your website in AMP is basically handing the keys of the web over to Google. They're going to make it more and more ridiculous to stay AMP-compliant and you're going to be shut out if you don't play their game. Eventually they'll enable/disable features of AMP-based sites arbitrarily... similar to how they determine autoplay policy on their "approved sites list." Do you think Google should be the all-powerful being that determines what features you can have on your website? That's the future you're opting into if you implement AMP.

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

#115

Post by k_bx »

AMP is about guarantees that you can't have with regular JS. You guarantee to not do any sync JS and document.write() stuff when you use AMP. Personally, I plan to use AMP to make a better indexation of my app which I do as a SPA, and which seems to be poorly indexed by Google. I'll make sitemap pointing to AMP pages with content, which has "see full view" link on it.

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

#116

Post by lphnull »

acdha wrote: post #41
HALtheWise wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The web isn't what it was back in the 90s and early 2000s though. Back then, you wanted a website to last because there wasn't much on the web to begin with. Those of us who were online owned a reasonable amount of web bookmarks that led us to nice solid pages that were designed to load nice and fast over slower connections.

Nowadays, the landscape is way different. There are just so many "normal folk" on the internet now that content is being consumed at an alarming rate. There is so much stuff on the internet now, that even Youtube videos have become disposable. Most of the stuff that people read and watch now is consumed once and then never visited again because there's just not enough time to revisit the insane amount of content we're exposed to.

Nowadays, why does it matter if a website is made "brittle" if the content isn't going to matter in a few months anyways? And if you do want to archive something for later, shouldn't the words on the page matter more than the code behind it? After all, if a user 12 years from now wants to read your article, all they're going to want is your words and pictures. Code is always brittle because new technology makes everything obsolete.

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

#117

Post by lphnull »

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…

Why in the world would anybody browse reddit on anything other than the unofficial apps? Their website is awful too.

Unofficial apps make browsing 100x faster and less annoying.

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

#118

Post by zzo38computer »

The content of [1] displays immediately for me (and I do not have document scripts enabled). There are elements; I don't know what they are, and they do not do anything.

For webpages that do hide everything, I define my own CSS overrides which prevents the and element from ever being hidden, opacity less than 1, or similar. Further rules can be added to prevent from being animated or having transitions.

What is wrong with just HTML, without CSS and JavaScript, or in some cases just plain text and not even HTML?

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

#119

Post by lphnull »

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…

>Is it just me or has the mobile web taken a nosedive in recent years?

It's because "desktop" web is difficult for newbies.

People like you and I love the "desktop" web because we grew up using desktop computers. We don't mind firing up our web browser, typing in a URL and poking around for tiny menu items using CSS that's optimized for big HD desktop monitors. That's what we're used to and that's what we think is normal.

Nowadays, everybody- even your grandma- is on the inernet. Everybody's using an iPhone with a tiny screen and large fonts. Opening up a web browser to browse a website is just something people no longer do.

Grandma would much rather have an app on her home screen that connects her to the world rather than a bookmark in Google Chrome.

Not everybody is a nerd like you and me. The internet has exploded in ways we never imagined, and now we're going to have to deal with everything being optimized for the average user.

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