Agree. To put it another way in hope of driving this home:
It is sad when the brightest minds in the world decide that the fix for "flash of unstyled content" is to show no content at all for close to 10 seconds.
Seriously: 8 seconds mandatory waiting would have been considered slow even 10 years ago and the only reason it passes now is because Google got a stranglehold on most of the web.
If you turn off all scripts AMP has a <noscript> block that disables the 8s timeout. The OP is blocking only external scripts, which not surprisingly looks a lot like a very bad network connection.
(Disclosure: I work at Google on making ads be AMP)
> Why 8s though? That’s well into “give up on loading this page, close the tab and try somewhere else” territory.
That 8s timeout is for loading the AMP JS from the CDN. You want a time limit that separates "you're on a slow connection, keep waiting" and "just give up, it's not worth it". I suspect it was set by looking at network graphs, but I don't know.
What the OP is doing, blocking JS and also ignoring <noscript>, is bizarre, and something you should expect to break sites.
> Perhaps a better option is finding ways to prevent content jumping around so much while assets are loading.
AMP does that very well, but only by taking control of the process of rendering, which requires JS.
No, the page loads perfectly fine if Javascript disabled. It's only if you go out of your way to break the page in the most difficult way possible that the script will fallback to having a delay.
It is sad when the brightest minds in the world decide that the fix for "flash of unstyled content" is to show no content at all for close to 10 seconds.
Seriously: 8 seconds mandatory waiting would have been considered slow even 10 years ago and the only reason it passes now is because Google got a stranglehold on most of the web.
Edit: improve last paragraph