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Comment by three_seagrass | Hacker News Reader

So tl;dr: Traditional HTML+JS ads have always needed an extra second delay to load because of cross-domain UX degredation, but because AMP is pre-caching pages, they're able to pre-cache the ads too?

Is that what I'm reading?

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I believe that the idea is that if the ad is amp, you can be sure it will load fast and not impede the ux of the page, whereas if it's html/js, you can't. It isn't about whether it is cached or not.

But this sounds like a technical limitation that makes sense? This entire comment chain is mostly people interpreting the lawsuit as claiming this was a deliberate artificial delay for business reasons and getting outraged about that, not a technical issue.

It's a little murky. If the status quo comes with a cost, because of practical uncertainty, and you provide an alternative that eliminates the uncertainty (and the cost), and then you use the elimination of the cost to prefer your own method... at minimum, that feels "not fair."

Why would it be unfair? A lot of UI delays come from uncertainty, it’s often a significant technical issue.

Because you eliminate uncertainty by imposing your own standard, the adoption of which financially benefits you.

An unbiased viewpoint acknowledges that bad people doing bad things for selfish reasons, can have both positive and negative results.

There's further details about it here: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/3133

And yeah, it's a technical issue.

So taking websites hostage and demanding a ransom in the form of an amp link. Thanks.

If the top-line goal is to make the page as responsive as possible, I'm a little stumped as to what the alternative would be beyond delaying the loading of arbitrary html and JS. Can you think of a way to load arbitrary HTML immediately and not cause any page responsiveness issues on, say, a three year old Android device?

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