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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?

#171

Post by SquareWheel »

manicdee wrote: post #170
SquareWheel wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>My complaint is not the use of CDN

Then why the complaint about "phoning home"? Analogies are imprecise and brittle.

>This is a direct form of punishment from Google

If you show me some proof I'll be glad to believe you. Occam's razor says it's a simple fallback for unexpected results.

>Disabling the phone-home feature...

Blocking a required library? Who is straw-manning now?

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

#172

Post by SquareWheel »

dang wrote: post #47

I finally deployed code a few days ago to rewrite AMP urls on HN. It's tricky to get right. Fortunately Brian Eno was not playing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18289349

Shouldn't HN be grabbing the canonical URL from submissions anyway?

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

#173

Post by jefftk »

manicdee wrote: post #162
jefftk wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

That 8s timeout is for loading the AMP JS from the CDN. You want a time limit that separates "you're on a slow connection, keep waiting" and "just give up, it's not worth it". I suspect it was set by looking at network graphs, but I don't know.

What the OP is doing, blocking JS and also ignoring , is bizarre, and something you should expect to break sites.

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

AMP does that very well, but only by taking control of the process of rendering, which requires JS.

(Disclosure: I work on making ads be AMP.)

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

#174

Post by jefftk »

SquareWheel wrote: post #149
black-tea wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 remember browsing the Web in the early 2000s on a good connection and pages loaded fully in a matter of milliseconds. That has to be rose-tinted glasses. Networks used to be excruciatingly slow. I would walk away waiting for page loads during the dial-up era. Our expectations have simply been adjusted over time.

If black-tea had a good connection at a time when the rest of us were on dial-up, and all the sites were coded expecting dial-up, they may well have seen excellent load times!

(But yeah, I remember the internet being super slow. JPEGs coming down scanline-by-scanline.)

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

#175

Post by jefftk »

mr_toad wrote: post #88
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…

By ads you mean tracking. Simple ads can be served statically without JS.

Have you tried to do this? At any substantial volume? If you serve ads completely statically you're going to have massive fraud issues. Distinguishing real views or clicks from fake ones is an arms race, and it's one you have no hope of winning without JS.

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, but I don't know much about how our spam detection works and I couldn't talk about it if I did.)

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

#176

Post by jefftk »

abalone wrote: post #61

I wish Google would just heavily weight fast-loading, responsively-designed pages in pagerank and call it a day. There's no need for a weird problematic proprietary format.. It just smacks of a power grab to keep visitors on google.com.

> There's no need for a weird problematic proprietary format.

The reason we need AMP now is that you can't otherwise preload a page in a privacy-preserving way.

Webpackaging will allow doing this without AMP though: https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/blob/master/explainer.md

(Disclosure: I work at Google on making ads be AMP.)

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

#177

Post by purrpit »

vivekd wrote: post #96
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…

I'm trying to update my site to amp right now. I wrote the thing in django but it doesn't look like django is compatible with amp. I'm switching over to php because it's the simplest language that seems to have CORS headers without requiring middleware packages. It seems like AMP can't even do something as simple as a contact form without CORS headers. I'm sure an experienced programmer could solve this problem easil…

> I wrote the thing in django but it doesn't look like django is compatible with amp.

This doesn't make sense at all. Even if I hadn't previously built a site on django before which served AMP pages, I would be willing to bet that no pure backend web framework limits what your frontend can achieve. . Also, Things are always harder for amateurs, just keep working hard man.

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

#178

Post by manicdee »

SquareWheel wrote: post #171
manicdee wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>My complaint is not the use of CDN Then why the complaint about "phoning home"? Analogies are imprecise and brittle. >This is a direct form of punishment from Google If you show me some proof I'll be glad to believe you. Occam's razor says it's a simple fallback for unexpected results. >Disabling the phone-home feature... Blocking a required library? Who is straw-manning now?

Phoning home is where a web site uses Google Analytics for example, while a CDN is where the assets you actually want are loaded from a server with large links to Internet backbone near you. Completely different things, which are sometimes conflated by people confused about the nature of the argument.

Calling the phone home feature a required library is part of the malintent from Google. Most websites I interact with don’t need a Google Analytics in order to function, for example. If I block a Google Analytics they refuse to work. The simplest explanation here is that time-short programmers just copy the code presented by Google, who in turn want everything to report back to them so they can monetise third party sites.

Building your site for AMP and blindly using the 8s timeout from the Google copy and paste archive is exactly the same story. You don’t need that much time to load all the assets, that timeout is there only to punish people who block the AMP resources.

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

#179

Post by pdimitar »

jefftk wrote: post #176
abalone wrote: post #61

I wish Google would just heavily weight fast-loading, responsively-designed pages in pagerank and call it a day. There's no need for a weird problematic proprietary format.. It just smacks of a power grab to keep visitors on google.com.

> There's no need for a weird problematic proprietary format. The reason we need AMP now is that you can't otherwise preload a page in a privacy-preserving way. Webpackaging will allow doing this without AMP though: https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/blob/master/explainer.md (Disclosure: I work at Google on making ads be AMP.)

Are you sure this is going to be allowed at Google? Policy and all that. They don't exactly look to be condoning open standards in this regard. Would be happy if I am wrong though.
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