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Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

tonsky.me

191–200 of 225 posts

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#191

Amp is not about making your site fast but about making sure that sites aggregated in e.g. Google News are all predictably fast by constraining what they can do. It's not about making the individual sites fast but making sure that none of them are needlessly slow by imposing constraints. Similarly PWA is also not about performance but about adding metadata that phones and browsers can use to treat the site like an ap…

>... but making sure that none of them are needlessly slow by imposing constraints. Anecdotally, AMP sites always load a bit slower for me. The page will sit blank for a few seconds before finally dumping all of the content at once, as opposed to loading text immediately while it takes a moment to load the rest of the content that has a higher file-size. Without AMP, I can start reading a page before it's done loadin…

Sounds like you have a rogue extension blocking render

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#192
post #13

The author says you can do these things anyway without AMP, but what he doesn't get is that web developers were not doing them. It took the nudge of AMP to get decent performance on the mobile web. He also failed to mention a key AMP rule: all CSS is in the head, a max of 50 KB. There is no external CSS at all. That's crucial. It reverses a persistent anti-pattern in web development that calls for a bunch of separate…

I know nothing about AMP, but isn't having the CSS in the head pretty bad for caching? An external file can be fetched once by the browser and then cached forever, while having the CSS in the head forces that part to be downloaded over and over again? Edit: I just realize that others posted the same concerns below...

It's mixed: that CSS file is only cached until the next time you change it and browsers, especially mobile ones, do not have enormous caches. As with most engineering problems the best solution is a balance: put enough CSS in the page for the document to render and either prefetch or demand-load resources which aren't as important, all the while working to keep the absolute size down so your worst-case performance is reasonable.

As an example, if you had something like an item page and a detailed viewer which the user could choose to open, the item page's HTML could have its critical CSS inline and a tag to tell the browser to preload the viewer's CSS so it will likely be in the cache by the time the user opens the viewer.

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#193

>I’m not saying practices promoted by AMP are bad or useless. They are good practices. But nothing stops you from following them in the regular web. Disagree. The most important feature of AMP is that it makes it impossible to add the kind of bloated crap that causes poor performance on something like a large media company website. Something like a news website likely has 2-4+ analytics integrations, and a similar nu…

I’ve yet to find an AMP page that downloads less than 1MB of crap for what edsentially id a dtatic text page (sometimes with images).

Your S key is having some problems...

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the only available solution to a real problem. If you have a better solution, by all means, be a hero. Meanwhile, the rest of the search and content aggregation industry has gone with AMP, which works today.

> It is the only available solution to a real problem. Don't shove JavaScript and random bloat into your website? That's what I do.

That doesn't result in instant, not merely fast, page loads. That's the same mistake the author made, as I pointed out in the GGGP post.

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#195

This guy doesn't know what AMP does. AMP is a subset of HTML that can be validated safe to prerender. That means instant page loads for the user, not merely fast.

They are not ”instant”. When you visit Google search, Google preloads AMP (and doesn’t preload anything else). The only readon AMP id fast is because Google has search monopoly and preloads its own non-standard things ahead of time, effectively penalising everyone else.

Reread GP post. AMP is a subset of HTML that can be validated to be safe to preload. That's why Google and others preload it.

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not ”instant”. When you visit Google search, Google preloads AMP (and doesn’t preload anything else). The only readon AMP id fast is because Google has search monopoly and preloads its own non-standard things ahead of time, effectively penalising everyone else.

Reread GP post. AMP is a subset of HTML that can be validated to be safe to preload. That's why Google and others preload it.

It's a subset of HTML that Google has full control over and whose only purpose is to lock publishers into a model that benefits Google, and Google alone.

BTW. This "subset" is invalid HTML. Just so you know.

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reread GP post. AMP is a subset of HTML that can be validated to be safe to preload. That's why Google and others preload it.

It's a subset of HTML that Google has full control over and whose only purpose is to lock publishers into a model that benefits Google, and Google alone. BTW. This "subset" is invalid HTML. Just so you know.

If it benefits Google and Google alone, why do Microsoft, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress, Baidu, and Weibo (among others) also prerender AMP pages? The reality is that every link aggregator and search engine wants instant results, and your conspiracy theory falls apart as soon as you understand that.

What part of AMP is invalid HTML? It is a competitor to Facebook instant articles and Apple News that works on the open web.

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#198
Google is steadily undermining the foundational principles of the web that made the platform so popular and allowed Google to do searching in the first place.

The scary part is that they don't just offer an "alternative" technology like ActiveX, Flash, Applets, Silverlight and so on. They are influencing core web standards.

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a subset of HTML that Google has full control over and whose only purpose is to lock publishers into a model that benefits Google, and Google alone. BTW. This "subset" is invalid HTML. Just so you know.

If it benefits Google and Google alone, why do Microsoft, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress, Baidu, and Weibo (among others) also prerender AMP pages? The reality is that every link aggregator and search engine wants instant results, and your conspiracy theory falls apart as soon as you understand that. What part of AMP is invalid HTML? It is a competitor to Facebook instant articles and Apple News that works o…

> If it benefits Google and Google alone, why do

Because publishers jumped on bandwagon and started deploying AMP pages en masse.

Just because someone else besides Google implemented AMP pages doesn't mean that their intent and purpose is something else than what I wrote.

> What part of AMP is invalid HTML?

     //  is invalid
    
    // script attributes are invalid
    
    

I once found more, I couldn't be bothered again.

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#200
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If, however, it's 15mb of useful functionality (perhaps an app that lets you edit and encode video), then in my eyes, it's acceptable You either have an abundance of high speed internet access, or benefit from internet usage that isn't metered by the amount of data consumed, or both. Functionality or not, heavy web experiences leave out a lot of people who would otherwise be willing and capable users of %product% if…

Why would you not just edit and encode video locally, with an actual installed program? Everyone with a computer produced after 2010 has the equivalent of late-90s supercomputer, and we were doing video editing on desktops in the 90s!

Such a web application would essentially be an installed program!

Look, I know its weird but there is finally a multi-implementation cross-platform runtime that people actually want to use. I would be so excited if I could run full Photoshop in my browser on Linux.

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