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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?

#121

Post by LordDragonfang »

hedora wrote: post #92
SimeVidas wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They could have fixed this in a heartbeat by simply having pagerank penalize pages for adding external JS assets. No AMP needed; better experience all around, and with less effort.

That just leads to every page on the web hosting its own copy of jQuery. The whole purpose of external JS is to reduce load times by sharing cacheable libraries (admittedly with the side benefit of less bandwidth for the host).

And if you think a whitelist would work, all it takes is one look at how rapidly new JS libraries come and go to render that unfeasible

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

#122

Post by dingaling »

gregable wrote: post #74
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 open question is would it be better or worse without AMP? It's likely that reddit (for example) would have just deployed an equally frustrating "mobile" page that loads even slower. I just tried fetching http://www.reddit.com/ in an incognito window (no personalization) on a fast connection and it took 1.2s to get the first byte on the connection. I can't say if this is typical, but the AMP Cache has much faster…

> The open question is would it be better or worse without AMP?

https://i.reddit.com loads instantly, no JS required for 'performance'.

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

#123

Post by kilburn »

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…

> provides a CSS hook by which the author can do stuff like "hide the text for up to 3s, or when the font has loaded, whichever comes first

Modern browsers let the page author control this with the "font-display" CSS property [1].

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/...

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

#124

Post by dingaling »

bowlich wrote: post #110

Have I been under a rock? I keep reading about AMP on HN, but I have yet (professionally or personally) actually come across AMP in the wild unless I intentionally went looking for it -- or am I consuming AMP and not even realizing it?

I don't believe that Google serves AMP links to Firefox, certainly not to the Mobile version and also not when you have JS disabled from google.com

Plus you might not be browsing the subset of AMPish websites. The only ALP links I see are when people share mainstream news links, and then it's straightforward enough to manually extract the URL.

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

#125

Post by NeedMoreTea »

y4mi wrote: post #111
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sometimes it's that simple, often it's not. There's still plenty of sites available without such hassles so it's not yet a problem finding alternatives.

On the other hand an ad blocking user is not necessarily producing no value for the site. I've had subs to newspaper sites, all of which I viewed with blocking on, and Independent will never now be one of them. If Guardian did likewise, and added AMP, I'd cancel my current sub and look elsewhere, which would be a definite loss of value for them.

I'm not so wedded to the views of any one outlet that I'd subscribe with this in place, or turn off blocking to subscribe, or feel I must subscribe to the same one indefinitely.

If it's a site I wouldn't have considered a sub or donation to, you're right, nothing is lost.

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

#126

Post by black-tea »

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 remember browsing the Web in the early 2000s on a good connection and pages loaded fully in a matter of milliseconds. It was often imperceptible. Oh how we've regressed.

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

#127

Post by jayd16 »

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.

Is bringing up reddit fair? The their new design is awful and only getting worse, AMP or not.

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

#128

Post by hombre_fatal »

acdha wrote: post #44
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.

I'd wager it's because the most relevant results for a search don't become less relevant just because they load more slowly. I certainly don't want that as a user.

Website performance could be a minor tie-breaker between two similarly ranked websites that have the same information (and it probably is), but I don't see how it could be anything more than a weak signal in a search system where the objective is to find the most relevant results.

I'll wait 30 seconds if it means I'm loading the result I'm looking for. That a less relevant website loads in one millisecond is frankly immaterial to me.

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

#129

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

> I have µMatrix in my browser, and by default it blocks the AMP CDN.

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but if you're getting a slow load/blank page because you're blocking parts of the content, yeah, "it's just you". Without the fallback mechanism that gets triggered after a few second, you'd just be stuck at the white page.

A good site will load faster than AMP, on a decent connection it may even be comparable to preloaded AMP. However, news sites have been pretty universally horrible at making good web sites. If someone stood behind their web developers and management with a whip, forcing them to build decent web sites and disallowing them from adding bloat, AMP would likely be unnecessary.

Part of the benefits of AMP is the possibility to preload, which allows for near-instant page opening from the search result page (unless you're blocking content, of course), the other part of the benefits is being that whip.

My overall experience with AMP has been positive.

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

#130

Post by jacquesm »

y4mi wrote: post #111
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Accessibility.
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