Re:Please Make Google AMP Optional
by pcwalton on Saturday June 10, 2017 @06:21PM
(#14529514)
From my perspective as a browser developer, AMP is an unfortunate disincentive to make anything faster unless Chrome already did it. Google bans things that are slow in Chrome from AMP, even if there's no good reason for them to be slow in the first place.
An example is off-main-thread animations. There's no intrinsic reason why animating, say, background-color should be slow. A lot of sites empirically do this sort of thing. But that animation is banned in AMP [1], because it's slow in Chrome (and in other browsers). Even if I work on making it faster, it'll stay banned until Chrome catches up (due to Chrome's market share), thus negating the incentive to make it faster in the first place. Without this competition, Web developers and users lose.
An example is off-main-thread animations. There's no intrinsic reason why animating, say, background-color should be slow. A lot of sites empirically do this sort of thing. But that animation is banned in AMP [1], because it's slow in Chrome (and in other browsers). Even if I work on making it faster, it'll stay banned until Chrome catches up (due to Chrome's market share), thus negating the incentive to make it faster in the first place. Without this competition, Web developers and users lose.
[1]: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-ani...