[Aissen]

I've defended it in the past when it used to be faster (combined with pre-loading) than most websites, on mobile. Nowadays, it should be quite easy to optimize a website enough to be faster than the AMP version, but it seems not many websites are even trying…

[ec109685]

Not true. Sites can’t safely preload and pre render non-amp pages, so non-amp pages will never be as fast as amp pages.

[zaarn]

What websites need to not only regularly preload+prerender other webpages but also webpages outside their trustzone? And when does the performance of half a millisecond matter?

[ec109685]

Latency to remote servers isn’t half a millisecond. A click off from google would normally take a second or two to render and be much worse at the p95 page load time.

With AMP, this is cut down to tens of milliseconds.

[erikpukinskis]

> A click off from google would normally take a second or two to render

The question isn't what do people normally do. The question is what's possible without Google's help. 200ms click-to-render is not difficult.

Google can get that down to 20ms or whatever with AMP, but for 99.999% of sites, Google's monopoly position is not the thing holding you back from faster loads.

[zaarn]

Not in my experience; AMP has no latency benefit. Additionally, this doesn't really answer the question other than "Google needs this". What other websites need to do AMP on their end?

[mtgx]

I'm pretty sure there were multiple comments about being able to make an AMP-alternative with regular HTML that's just as fast from the very first AMP-related post on HN. It may even have been the top comment for some of the first posts.