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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?

#181
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Google is one of the main groups working on it. For example, the draft https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin-dispatch-web-packa... is by a Google employee.

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>Calling the phone home feature a required library is part of the malintent from Google.

It is code required for the WebComponents to function. It's also charged with optimizations such as sandboxing of iframes, making requests synchronous, and calculating layout to reduce paints.

Clearly it's not "phoning home". The script provides clear actions, as laid out on the amp project website.

>You don’t need that much time to load all the assets

On American broadband, perhaps. Other countries do not have the same infrastructure.

>that timeout is there only to punish people who block the AMP resources.

Citation, not speculation, needed.

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

#183

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…

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.

I only visit reddit when friends link off to it - I rather not be giving reddit any traffic at all if I could help it, so downloading an app just doesn't make sense for me.

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

#184
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accessibility is about much more than screen readers. If a user experiences problems accessing your site, that’s an accessibility problem, no matter what physical attributes that person possesses.

It seems you've been misinformed by the current generation of web designers. Accessibility is actually limited to people with disabilities, though a few people have started to use it interchangeably with usability. [0] I agree with the spirit of your message though, but that's not what the grandparent post claimed. > Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilit…

There is more to accessibly than screen reader compatibility. (I want to emphasize this point, not because I think you said anything to contradict that but because I think that is a point lacking from the conversation in this thread)

For example, I'm autistic and use a "normal" browsers, but garish websites (for example those displaying animated ads) are less accessible to me, because those lead me to becoming overstimulated, making me less likely to absorb and remember information presented on the page as well as being physically and mentally exhausting.

I am perfectly willing to pay for content (and am, through Spotify, Netflix and Patreon), but much of the web is actively hostile to many disabled people. My physical disabilities don't prevent me from using my computer in the standard way but every time I misplace my mouse and try to navigate the web solely using keyboard (which isn't that far from how I usually use my computer, so it's not like I don't know the shortcuts) I am reminded how it must be for people who are unable to use a mouse and have to rely on other input methods. Many websites couldn't have worse UI when it comes to accessibility if they tried.

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

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 90th percentile weight for the canonical version is 5,229kb. I get antsy when I made a page over 100KB (excluding images, and even then anything over 1MB starts to feel excessive unless it's something particularly reliant on images). 5MB feels very high.

I'm with you, but it's the reality. I just searched for "NASA" on google news, clicked the first thing not from JPL ( https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/01/12/whos-who-in-nasas-... ) and it loaded 2.6MB cold cache. Fetched the same on the AMP Cache: https://www-fool-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.fool.com/amp... 200KB cold cache. Removing the likely cached resources (amp javascript, fontawesome cdn font) and the pay…

> AMP seems to be effective at making the web actually follow best practices.

Then those best practices aren't very good. In my experience, AMP is, on the whole, a detrimental thing that degrades web pages.

All I want is some way of telling sites to never give me an AMP page.

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

#187
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm using Django templating language to serve up pages with a base template and also allow server side stuff to show up in the html pages.

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

#188
I refuse to work with AMP simply because it seems like the only reason for its existence is to retain more users permanently in the google "ecosphere". Making performant, fast loading websites has always been a priority for me and my employers, AMP isn't being integrated everywhere because companies want to make their pages load faster, they simply don't want to be penalized by google for not doing AMP.

So TL;DR AMP is rarely implemented for the right reasons, and the implementations reflect this.

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

#189
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Having been a web developer in that era, performance was definitely a big concern. People were more willing to wait but there were still limits and you had the same tendencies for developers to work on fast systems and forget the experience on slow ones. AMP is also a worse experience than that was because in the 90s you were usually waiting on images to render and progressive display was usually possible so you coul…

I remember browsing the web on my old Nokia N900 phone and watching everything get progressively slower as javascript started getting more and more memory intensive. Eventually I stopped receiving updates, and the entire web became unusable because lots and lots of websites break without javascript now.
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