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Comment by amirmasoudabdol | Hacker News Reader

I see this more and more recently where a webpage takes ~5 seconds to load if it’s an AMP page if I have some sort of ad blocking (cookie restriction) in place. What’s interesting is that the page content is already loaded but my browser (Safari) is waiting for something to render everything. So, if I have the Reader Mode pre-activated on the same page, I can read the page before the ~5 seconds is over and I can actually see the page!

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That's because to create a valid AMP page you need to add an 8 seconds delay of blank page for users that disable Google's third-party js.

You actually have to make it deliberately slow if Google's js is disabled? that seems a little malicious...

Yup. This snippet adds a css animation to make the page white for 8s, and it's stopped by Google's JS or the browser's noscript (which you don't enable if you only block Google's JS and not the domain JS):

https://amp.dev/fr/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/learn/...

So, is there a way that I can block this tag somehow and drop it during the load time?

You can add a Stylus stylesheet enabled for the regex .[star]amp.[star] (replace [star] with the star symbol) that contains body{animation:none}, but I don't know if that's good for performance.

Edit: Developers can also add that css in their amp style, and it seems to be accepted by the amp validator. AMP devs, you know what to do! ;)

Btw you can begin a line with two spaces for code formatting:

  .*amp.*

Go for this on all pages instead:

  html[\26a1] body, html[amp] body {
    animation: none;
  }

(I wrote \26a1 because HN doesn’t allow the literal U+26A1 character.)

That way it applies to all AMP pages, regardless of their URL, and doesn’t clobber any other pages (though I can’t actually imagine any genuine animation on a body element).

Works perfectly, thank you!

I took the liberty to put it on userstyles.org for one-click install: https://userstyles.org/styles/171953/disable-amp-blank-loadi...

Insane. Google has lost all credibility.

I assume the idea behind it is to prevent the “flash of unstyled content”.

I wonder who made the decision that 8s delay is better than the unstyled flash.

There is no delay if the script loads properly.

Consider a very slow network connection. Is effectively delaying the page loading for 8 seconds worth it?

No, but I didn't say it was was a good idea

Having the delay in that circumstance is much, much worse than a FOUC.

I agree

Flashes are distracting. IMO, it's not the delay that's the problem, but the fact that it lasts eight seconds. The limit should be 500 milliseconds, at most.

the original code is to prevent FOUC, that 8 second delay is sort of a fallback if the js hasn't unhidden the body

Well that explains it. I constantly hear people say, "AMP is about increasing pages speed" but that has not been the case for me for over 50% of the time.

That's likely due to amp-font, which will wait a certain amount of time for custom fonts to load before continuing with a fallback browser font (see: https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-font)

8 seconds is not a reasonable delay, and AMP pages work perfectly fine if the JavaScript is blocked. Which is going to annoy users more -- a slight delay in a font's loading or an 8-second delay in the entire page's loading?

I suspect that Google is trying to get most users to not block their JavaScript by making their access to "the Web" unbearable if they do it. (For other types of user punishment, see the other article on that site: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2016/11/removing-your-site-from-amp... )

I put "the Web" in quotes, because a "standard" that requires you to load JavaScript from Google's servers, lets other sites serve your content while spoofing the URL, attempts to fundamentally change the way navigation on the entire Web works (portals) without input from other browsers, and that most people have to be coerced to use by reducing their traffic if they don't implement it, can't seriously be considered a real standard.

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