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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?

#161

Post by HALtheWise »

Marsymars wrote: post #67
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.

Can it be preloaded without Google having any pertinent information logged?

No matter what, the site you are navigating from will inevitably know the link was shown to you and whether you clicked it. If that site isn't Google, they can run their own AMP cache or use Cloudflare's.

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

#162

Post by manicdee »

jefftk wrote: post #144
grenadier21 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you turn off all scripts AMP has a block that disables the 8s timeout. The OP is blocking only external scripts, which not surprisingly looks a lot like a very bad network connection. (Disclosure: I work at Google on making ads be AMP)

Why 8s though? That’s well into “give up on loading this page, close the tab and try somewhere else” territory.

Perhaps a better option is finding ways to prevent content jumping around so much while assets are loading.

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

#163

Post by gtf21 »

justinph wrote: post #85
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.…

> 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.

My thoughts exactly, this is what makes me nervous about AMP, it feels like it's pushing the web in a direction that is alien to its original ideas.

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

#164

Post by gtf21 »

cramforce wrote: post #154
fixermark wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if uBlock needs to be modified to make your Amp-adjacent experience better, it's probably a bug uBlock's team should be notified about.

Has it been figured out which adblock list accidentally blocked AMP? We'd like to contact them. This is clearly a bug, since blocking AMP is not related to blocking ads (all the normal ad blocking rules should do the job just fine).

µMatrix blocks everything that's not from the primary domain unless I tell it otherwise, which is sometimes annoying, but on the other hand lets me cut out loads of crap (hello AMP-project).

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

#165

Post by gtf21 »

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.

This sort of assumes that (a) the only possible system is surveillance capitalism (I have no problem unblocking advertisers on sites which don't track me e.g. DuckDuckGo, I also have no problem paying for things directly -- in fact, I prefer it); and (b) that this is the sole reason for using something like µMatrix which blocks _everything_, not just ads.

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

#166

Post by gtf21 »

black-tea wrote: post #126
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.

I don't remember it being milliseconds, but it definitely didn't take _this_ long, especially not if I had had the same connection speed I have now.

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

#167

Post by gtf21 »

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…

This is why I have µMatrix -- it's amazing just how many unnecessary requests it has blocked.

I am constantly amazed at just how bloated (and carelessly built) websites have become.

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

#168

Post by gtf21 »

SquareWheel wrote: post #18

Correct. You've broken the page by blocking only some of the assets. AMP loads fine if you allow all scripts or disable Javascript completely.

This is not really the point, the point is that the page loads anyway, without the AMP scripts so there's really no excuse for having an 8s delay. I don't want this google stuff on every web page I visit, and frankly it's unnecessary -- this article could easily have been written using static HTML / CSS and it would probably have been easier to develop (as well as access).

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

#169

Post by SquareWheel »

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?

No, the page loads perfectly fine if Javascript disabled. It's only if you go out of your way to break the page in the most difficult way possible that the script will fallback to having a delay.

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

#170

Post by manicdee »

SquareWheel wrote: post #60
manicdee wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely different. This is like a car that tries to phone home every time you start it, so either you keep the phone service active and get a salesperson talking to you while driving, or you disable the phone and the car leave the immobiliser active for a minute each time you try to start the car.

Are you upset that the website is using a CDN? That is the standard distribution method for common libraries. As for the other half of your analogy - stop poking holes in the gas tank and it won't need active service.

Is the only way you can argue via straw man?

My complaint is not the use of CDN, it is the forced delay to load a page when the CDN is not available or certain resources are blocked. This is a direct form of punishment from Google: refuse to let us track everything you read, we will make it uncomfortable for you to read anything.

Disabling the phone-home feature is nothing like poking holes in the fuel tank.

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