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There's a deep irony in AMP also, purely anecdotally it doesn't seem to help with slow connections. I'm traveling and as such my US carrier restricts me to 2G s
by dayjah 9y ago
There's a deep irony in AMP also, purely anecdotally it doesn't seem to help with slow connections. I'm traveling and as such my US carrier restricts me to 2G speeds while roaming somehow, which is resulting in me seeing a lot of butchered pages. As the author mentions:
> AMP tries to load an image only when it becomes visible to the user, rendering a white square instead of the image. In my experience I’ve seen it fail fairly regularly, leaving the article with an empty white square instead of the image.
Text content is very fast, but images either don't load or partially load making the reading experience pretty poor.
- jsnell 9y agoYou're saying that AMP doesn't help with slow connections, based on AMP not loading all resources on 2G. But you're missing the data point for non-AMP pages on 2G. Are you sure it's not even worse? It's hard to believe how bloated many modern websites are, before trying to load them over 2G. We're talking megabytes of data and tens of connections to display what should be a 20kB of text.
- corobo 9y agoIf a regular page doesn't load on a 2G connection and an AMP page doesn't load on a 2G connection.. what's the point of AMP?
- acdha 9y agoAMP puts 100KB of JavaScript in the initial render path, and a bunch of CSS. That doesn't mean that other sites cannot be worse but it means that there's no way to make an AMP page which doesn't require transferring at least that much data. I notice this fairly regularly in marginal network coverage (subway tunnels/platforms) where AMP pages load no faster than any well-optimized site unless the stars are aligned and you actually get a cache hit.
- niutech 9y agoKeep in mind that this AMP JS library is being loaded from the CDN only once for all AMP pages, then cached in the browser.
- acdha 9y agoIf that works. In my experience, you're eating the initial DNS lookup, connection and SSL setup, etc. more frequently than expected. The general rule about inclining render-blocking resources matters here, too.
- dayjah 9y agoThanks for raising this. Anecdotally text in both cases appears to render first which makes sites workable. Images are consistently the laggards. In the AMP case the text content is always reasonable (i.e. formatted well) whereas in the non-AMP case you're beholden to whatever CSS the author applies which if it's lagged can cause re-draws - which are quite jarring.
- IshKebab 9y agoPurely anecdotally it works about 20-30 times better for me. Non-anecdotally there are plenty of large scale results showing it is much faster. If you find it equal or slower you are probably an extreme exception.