Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 189 posts

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

#31

Post by tyfon »

mort96 wrote: post #21
napsterbr wrote: post #12

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…

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…

You can siphon off much more user data from an app than a webpage, besides you can pester the user with notifications! The users love that.

I bet there are plugins for firefox mobile to remove those animations and nag window. Basically the "continue to mobile site" just close the banner since you are already on that site.

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

#32

Post by mort96 »

nyolfen wrote: post #27
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…

all reader mode everything

Yeah, no, my experience is that reader modes usually remove blocks of code or images or paragraphs at random. I will rather have a bad reading experience than one where I always worry in the back of my mind that some cruicial part of the content is missing.

A few too many times, I have read an article, finding it a bit vague and honestly not that good, only to find that all the code blocks or some of the images were gone.

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

#33

Post by SquareWheel »

_fbpt wrote: post #29
jonas21 wrote: post #26

So... you're blocking the AMP javascript from loading and then complaining that AMP is slow for you. Have you tried not blocking the script?

Downloading a website sans scripts takes strictly less time than downloading and executing scripts. A website that hides its content for 8 seconds because scripts are disabled is a defective website which deliberately stops users from looking static content (amp uses css animation).

Ha. That's like removing a bunch of methods from a program and claiming it's broken when it crashes. What did you expect to happen when blocking half of a site's libraries?

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

#35

Post by tedunangst »

SquareWheel wrote: post #33
_fbpt wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downloading a website sans scripts takes strictly less time than downloading and executing scripts. A website that hides its content for 8 seconds because scripts are disabled is a defective website which deliberately stops users from looking static content (amp uses css animation).

Ha. That's like removing a bunch of methods from a program and claiming it's broken when it crashes. What did you expect to happen when blocking half of a site's libraries?

At the very least, I expect it to crash faster after removing methods. It should not pause for a long time and then work.

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

#36

Post by HALtheWise »

_fbpt wrote: post #29
jonas21 wrote: post #26

So... you're blocking the AMP javascript from loading and then complaining that AMP is slow for you. Have you tried not blocking the script?

Downloading a website sans scripts takes strictly less time than downloading and executing scripts. A website that hides its content for 8 seconds because scripts are disabled is a defective website which deliberately stops users from looking static content (amp uses css animation).

The intent of the feature seems to be to hide content until it has been laid out properly, which is generally a positive change to the experience because you can't read stuff while it is jumping around. In that sense, the website is "deliberately" stopping you from seeing static content in the same sense that browsers deliberately don't flash the raw HTML code onscreen before they have finished performing layout operations, but it seems unreasonable to imply it is malicious or defective behavior.

The CSS animation is a fallback to that intended behavior.

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

#38

Post by _fbpt »

SquareWheel wrote: post #33
_fbpt wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downloading a website sans scripts takes strictly less time than downloading and executing scripts. A website that hides its content for 8 seconds because scripts are disabled is a defective website which deliberately stops users from looking static content (amp uses css animation).

Ha. That's like removing a bunch of methods from a program and claiming it's broken when it crashes. What did you expect to happen when blocking half of a site's libraries?

News sites are hypertext, also known as formatted text, and not web-apps or programs which download and render websites. I expect news sites to load properly in the absence of the AMP CDN (not "half the methods"), not deliberately hide content from users. (I feel the same way about blocking page rendering when web-fonts don't download when their http connections hang instead.)

EDIT: I just moved to desktop. If I block all scripts in uMatrix, OP's URL loads immediately (albeit with a full page of garbage above page content). If I block external scripts in uMatrix, I have to wait 8 seconds before anything appears.

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

#39

Post by larkeith »

mort96 wrote: post #21
napsterbr wrote: post #12

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…

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…

The mobile web has always been utter trash, it's just gotten worse in the last five years as more sites have rolled out mobile versions.

Disabling Javascript helps a lot, but the "request desktop site" toggle is still frequently necessary.

Imgur is, however, deserving of special mention for actively degrading their mobile experience - direct image links redirect to the mobile site now, which loads low-resolution images.

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

#40

Post by justAnotherNET »

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.

AMP is an anti-open-web disaster, and just another example of Google abusing their dominant position.
Post reply on HN