
Characterizing the Performance Impact of AMP - jsnell
https://blog.apnic.net/2019/08/08/amp-up-your-mobile-web-experience/
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elliotec

        Where is the performance improvement coming from? 
        The largest performance benefits comes from a drastic reduction in the number of various objects loaded in AMP
    

For the millionth time, you don't need AMP to improve your website
performance. The reason there is "better performance" in the AMP vs non-AMP
pages according to this article, is that there are fewer assets and objects to
load in the AMP pages due to some of the restrictions AMP imposes.

In other words, load fewer assets, write less code, and you'll have better
performance.

AMP is still bad, and it does not itself make the web faster.

~~~
CDSlice
But publishers weren't doing that before AMP came out. What AMP does is
provide a tangible thing devs can sell to higher ups in order to be allowed
(or just given the time) to write less code and load fewer assets. AMP also
helps search engines (not just Google) be able to preload websites without
violating user's privacy, which seems like a good thing, no?

I honestly don't get all the hate AMP gets around here. From a consumer
standpoint AMP provides nothing but benefits compared to what we had before.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
> I honestly don't get all the hate AMP gets around here. From a consumer
> standpoint AMP provides nothing but benefits compared to what we had before.

Two main reasons:

1\. The obfuscation of AMP source URLs in Google search results is usually the
biggest reason for the hate.

2\. The "AMP Carousel" in Google search results is _designed_ to keep people
on Google and makes it much less likely people will leave to explore other
pages on the publisher site (I can't find the article now but I recall reading
a report from one publisher that showed a HUGE dropoff in users viewing an
article and then going to view other articles on the site).

So it's less about the technology of AMP per se and more that, the way it's
currently implemented, is about Google dictating more and more the way the web
works.

~~~
gregable
#1 is being fixed for supporting browsers (Chrome so far).
[https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/04/instant-loading-
am...](https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/04/instant-loading-amp-pages-
from-your-own.html)

You can see it for a number of sites already. For example, search for an AMP
result from collins dictionary.

~~~
zaarn
So essentially yet another standard pushed out by google via Chrome with 0
feedback from other browser vendors.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
No, the other vendors gave feedback and objected to it:
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/30/mozilla_web_packagi...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/30/mozilla_web_packaging/)

~~~
zaarn
That sound even more like Google's modus operandi when it comes to browser
development!

------
spankalee
> AMP viewer versions are worse than their cached version in > this graph
> since this plot does not capture the impact of > pre-rendering.

I'm confused by what the "AMP viewer" plot-lines represent then, but not
including the actual pre-rendering is leaving off a huge source of
improvements.

