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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?

#131

Post by [deleted] »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #121
hedora wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

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

#132

Post by EvilTerran »

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…

From my reading of https://www.ampproject.org/docs/fundamentals/spec, it looks like you could override this behaviour in uBlock Origin with a style cosmetic filter. Something like...

    ##html[amp] body,html[\26A1] body:style(animation:none!important)
(I can't test it in my current browser, unfortunately, but I think that's right.)

[edit]

Update: I got to a browser I could test it on. Unfortunately, it turns out uBO doesn't let you apply :style() rules to all pages indiscriminately, you have to specify a domain name pattern - which is pretty annoying, because the principle is evidently sound; this does work on the link in OP:

    ehow.co.uk##html[amp] body,html[\26A1] body:style(animation:none!important)
Hrmph.

Alternatively, you could use a CSS injection addon (or userContent.css, in Firefox) to add the rule to all pages:

    html[amp] body, html[\26A1] body {
        animation: none !important;
    }
Or do it with a userscript (ie via Greasemonkey or similar).

[edit 2]

It appears uBO is aware of a need for something like this - they provide an injectable "scriptlet" that adds the necessary CSS: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Resources-Library#amp...

Unfortunately, scriptlet injection also can't be applied to every page indiscriminately. :/

    ! works on OP's link
    ehow.co.uk##script:inject(ampproject.org/v0.js)
    ! doesn't work at all
    ##script:inject(ampproject.org/v0.js)
So I'm just mentioning it here for completeness' sake.

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

#133

Post by y4mi »

jacquesm wrote: post #130
y4mi wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That claim is pretty shallow.

The content is there, it's just hidden through css. If anything, a screen reader has access to the content earlier than the unimpaired people.

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

#134

Post by matt_kantor »

lphnull wrote: post #116
acdha wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 interne…

> Nowadays, why does it matter if a website is made "brittle" if the content isn't going to matter in a few months anyways?

One reason is brand perception. If your website is significantly slower and/or brokener than a competitor's then eventually people will stop coming back. Presumably you want your brand to last more than a few months.

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

#136

Post by mort96 »

lphnull wrote: post #119
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…

>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 no…

I don't know, I seem to hear now and then complaints from relatively non-nerdy people about websites are bugging them about apps or don't work or force them to use their computer because the mobile page doesn't have some necessary feature. Besides, even if everyone is using, say, Reddit, from a dedicated reddit app, links they click will still open in a web view. A link to a medium.com article will still bug you about getting the app; you're there from a dedicated app, but not from _their_ app. Similarly, if an image happens to open in an imgur.com web view instead of a dedicated image viewer, there will be "Get the app" buttons hovering over the image - again, you're visiting their content from a dedicated app, but not _their_ app.

If mobile web pages did just enough to make it obvious to their users that there are apps which the user can download, I'd believe you that it's just corporations being altruistic and wanting the best user experience for their users. They don't though. They intentionally break their mobile pages by removing important functionality, they have modals which reappear for every load trying to trick you by making the big orange "Continue" button take you to the app store, while having a tiny link which is easy to miss-click taking you to the page you're actually trying to visit, they put "get the app"-buttons _over_ the content, sometimes even with no close button, they try to distract you from the content you're trying to read by making their "Get the app" buttons fucking animate around.

This is not just corporations being altruistic and keeping their users' well-being at heart. This is corporations wanting to optimize for user interaction and data collection, and the best way to do that is to make their users use a dedicated app for just their content, where the user will always be reminded that they should check Imgur whenever they unlock their phones, they can send their users a notification about what's trending on /r/AskReddit if they detect their users haven't used their app for a while, they can make sure their users won't leave for a competitor as easily.

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

#137

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #129

> 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 preload…

> 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.

sadly it's the management, marketers, sales who are standing behind them and holding the whip. Most places measure engineering quality by how many features you can push through your CI/CD pipe (minus the fault-reports, breakage that the pipeline generates).

When everything works perfectly it isn't appreciated as it indicates that engineering isn't running at full capacity. The same problem we have with security and all resilience topics: how do you measure & budget (or in security monetize) something that is supposed to be invisible to the end-user?

As for AMP it's not just a tire-fire it's a clear attempt to break the open web and create lock-in for competitors.

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

#139

Post by Steko »

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…

This issue is compounded by the fact that you need a search engine to find old reddit posts and AMP-free DDG doesn’t have the last year and custom date filters Google does.

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

#140

Post by b1daly »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #137
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #129

> 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 preload…

> 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. sadly it's the management, marketers, sales who are standing behind them and holding the whip. Most places measure engineering quality by how many features you can push through your CI/CD pipe (minus the fault-reports, breakage that…

What’s weird to me though is because I browse the internet on my phone a lot, there are some sites that are terribly slow (and prone to those weird “you’ve won an iPad” hacks).

The Huffington post is one. On an older phone or tablet, the site is unusable on iOS. It will crash, and sometimes freeze. Long articles fill in excruciatingly slow.

I would think in a data driven business, that there has to be significant numbers of people who actively avoid the site, and that they would want to minimize this.

Yet there seems to be no improvement over time.

I’ve sometimes wondered if it’s because literally every person in engineering and management at company like Huffington Post have fast devices, and they don’t notice how bad it is.

I find it paradoxical.

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