Malte Ubl

Closure Compiler's advanced mode, besides having the best minification (it is actually a full compiler with many different optimization passes) and being slow, has a feature that often goes untested externally (but is used heavily inside of Google) and that's cross-module-code-motion. So if you split your code into modules, some of which are loaded later, the compiler can figure out which code in the initial download is used, but not yet and move it into the late loaded modules, whereas ordinarily this code gets retained in the initial load, because it looks like it is referenced. A long time ago Malte Ubl demonstrated this with the Splittable add on for Babel. https://medium.com/@cramforce/introducing-splittable-1c882babca7e

https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml https://medium.com/@cramforce/why-amp-is-fast-7d2ff1f48597 https://medium.com/@cramforce/why-amp-html-does-not-take-full-advantag… People here are opinionated about it, but users love it.

That is NOT true. AMP is a lot faster in most cases. "Why AMP is fast" https://medium.com/@cramforce/why-amp-is-fast-7d2ff1f48597 But why the half truth? Can you share the back story?

I appreciate the info! I'm really curious to see where using AMP as a proxy speeds up the page, versus applying similar optimizations on origin server? If it's a cached page (served from any normal CDN), and crafted with similar optimizations [1] wouldn't it be just as fast, without needing to do the URL redirection? Even if it were difficult to convince developers to implement the changes, couldn't many of the optimizations could be rolled into a module like PageSpeed [2]? [1] - https://medium.com/@cramforce/why-amp-is-fast-7d2ff1f48597 [2] - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/ Edit - Reformatted links; I forgot HN doesn't use Markdown.

I never said it was all it does. It's the reason AMP exists, and the reason certain users like it. The "hijacks content" part is by itself unobjectionable, especially with this latest update we're discussing which fixes the URL bar issue. The other server will serve a checksum so Google can't tamper with the contents. That makes it just a free CDN. Is the problem that you do not want Google to see your content at all? You'll need to use robots.txt to ban Googlebot. You can't simultaneously want to appear in Google search results and also not let Google see your website. The required JavaScript is legitimately frustrating, I know. The AMP project has an article about why they did it that way: https://medium.com/@cramforce/why-amp-html-does-not-take-full-advantag… Specifically, it's to prioritize resource loads. I personally don't think their explanation is very convincing. But whatever, maybe it's easier for them to do it this way or something. I don't think Google is doing it to push changes which are profitable for them, though. I legitimately believe they're doing it to make the pages load faster and otherwise be better for the users. I don't even understand how it could be profitable in any other way.