Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

> I have µMatrix in my browser, and by default it blocks the AMP CDN.

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but if you're getting a slow load/blank page because you're blocking parts of the content, yeah, "it's just you". Without the fallback mechanism that gets triggered after a few second, you'd just be stuck at the white page.

A good site will load faster than AMP, on a decent connection it may even be comparable to preloaded AMP. However, news sites have been pretty universally horrible at making good web sites. If someone stood behind their web developers and management with a whip, forcing them to build decent web sites and disallowing them from adding bloat, AMP would likely be unnecessary.

Part of the benefits of AMP is the possibility to preload, which allows for near-instant page opening from the search result page (unless you're blocking content, of course), the other part of the benefits is being that whip.

My overall experience with AMP has been positive.

> If someone stood behind their web developers and management with a whip, forcing them to build decent web sites and disallowing them from adding bloat, AMP would likely be unnecessary.

sadly it's the management, marketers, sales who are standing behind them and holding the whip. Most places measure engineering quality by how many features you can push through your CI/CD pipe (minus the fault-reports, breakage that the pipeline generates).

When everything works perfectly it isn't appreciated as it indicates that engineering isn't running at full capacity. The same problem we have with security and all resilience topics: how do you measure & budget (or in security monetize) something that is supposed to be invisible to the end-user?

As for AMP it's not just a tire-fire it's a clear attempt to break the open web and create lock-in for competitors.

What’s weird to me though is because I browse the internet on my phone a lot, there are some sites that are terribly slow (and prone to those weird “you’ve won an iPad” hacks).

The Huffington post is one. On an older phone or tablet, the site is unusable on iOS. It will crash, and sometimes freeze. Long articles fill in excruciatingly slow.

I would think in a data driven business, that there has to be significant numbers of people who actively avoid the site, and that they would want to minimize this.

Yet there seems to be no improvement over time.

I’ve sometimes wondered if it’s because literally every person in engineering and management at company like Huffington Post have fast devices, and they don’t notice how bad it is.

I find it paradoxical.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com