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Comment by lovich | Hacker News Reader

Like the other commenters here, I really disliked amp for a variety of reason such as the bar on top and the inability to easily link the main version of the page. However, I'be come to feel that we've brought this on ourselves as Web developers by making every website incredibly bloated and only possible to use on high speed connections. I've spent the past month in thailand on a much slower connection and the only sites I can reliably use currently are text sites like hacker news and amp pages. I can have a site like reddit even take 30-40 seconds to load and more complicated sites like cnn will load part of the page and then silently fail on me.

AMP is not a great solution, but it is at least _a_ solution, when the industry was not taking steps to fix the problem themselves

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What part of Thailand is that? I get around ~50M/s on my phone. I haven't checked my home cable in a while but I stream HD video (Netflix / YouTube) to several computers / TVs at once w/o issue.

> The new preconnect API is used heavily to ensure HTTP requests are as fast as possible when they are made. With this, a page can be rendered before the user explicitly states they’d like to navigate to it; the page might already be available by the time the user actually selects it, leading to instant loading.

I get the impression AMP boils down to that. Google wants to present publisher content in "mobile app" form and has decided to push most of the cost onto publishers. I really wish they would have taken a different approach. They could have just slapped a stamp of approval on sites with good mobile layout and sub 1s load times. Let publishers make their own technology decisions about how to get there.

Also the Google News horizontal scrolling / AMP page scrolling / back button is a clusterfuck. More often than not I have to reload Google News from the address bar as an intermediate step in navigation. If you're going to wreck the web for better user experience then at least deliver better user experience.

I'm near phitsanulok now but had the same experience over the country. It might be because I'm using a tmobile sim through their partnership with local providers as I have seen the locals with much better speed in the city centers. The second you get out of the city and drop down to 3g or whatever the one below that is called, the locals have the same Web experience I have had

The stamp of approval for sub n seconds as a benchmark does sound like a better approach but at this point google is acting like a parent whose told their children to clean their room, or the parent is going to clean the room by tossing everything out. I get the impression that Google only cares about the results when it comes to making the Web faster, and doesn't care about anyone else's costs at this point

> at least deliver better user experience

This is what it comes down to. AMP is failing at that.

> I can have a site like reddit even take 30-40 seconds to load and more complicated sites like cnn will load part of the page and then silently fail on me.

Isn't reddit pretty simple text? Are you running RES at all?

Reddit mobile site. It's some spa thing, but yea it should be mostly text

> the only sites I can reliably use currently are text sites like hacker news and amp pages. I can have a site like reddit even take 30-40 seconds to load.

What about reddit's AMP pages [1]?

[1] https://redditblog.com/2016/09/20/amp-and-reactredux/

It's sending me to the mobile site, didn't even know they had amp pages, I might be better served by requesting the desktop version but my point still stands about sites just not loading

That blog reads as contradictory.

It talks about building a SPA, and rendering on the client side using JavaScript. It also talks about being AMP compliant.

Those goals cannot coexist.

I believe they mean something like https://github.com/choumx/amp-pwa.

AMP pages, which link to (and preload) a react-based SPA, which gets its content from AMP pages.

Oh that damn bar on the top...

At least they seem to have fixed that now (according to the blog post). Once they publish the fix to allow sharing the original URL, I don't see any downsides with AMP.

My issue is that it disappears whens drilling, but slides back in when I stop. I typically continue to scroll as I read, so it constantly gets in the way.

I also don't like that, but I still keep clicking links when they have the flash. Faster loading time beats usability to a certain degree for me, and most web developers are terrible when it comes to that.

I must admit, HN is probably the only more complex page I know (i.e. some interactivity, not just a blog) that loads fast on any connection.

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