The Future of AMP — JS that doesn’t block the main thread?
At ComparetheMarket.com we are constantly optimising the speed of our site.
We were an early adaptor of Google’s AMP technology, sold on the mobile page speed win’s it promised.
Due to how early we were in using this technology we have faced many challenges on the way. I wanted to look at if the future would be a smoother process, and what new features are coming up.
What is AMP
The AMP Project, started by Google, stands for “Accelerated Mobile Pages”.
It is targets mainly the mobile version on websites. It uses a number of best practice optimisation techniques. As soon as a AMP html page appears in a google search it (google) builds (renders) the page and stores this in it’s own cache, meaning that as soon as the user clicks on the page it is fully loaded and there, there is no on-page-load rendering.
The future of AMP
To look at the future of AMP I wanted to first look at the process which shapes how the technology evolves.
It is not a completely perfect or polished technology, instead, it is a work in progress something which is constantly being improved.
Open Source / AMP’s Development Process
AMP’s open source project currently has over 520 contributors, including 3 people in my team at ComparetheMarket.
The project is open for anyone to view the source code on github, to see exactly how the technology works.
Not only can you view the code but you can also raise issues and fix bugs in it.
Collaboration on new features
It is not just small changes that you or the community can contribute to. Even large new features are developed in collaboration with those outside of google.
Amp stories has been a significant new feature which has been recently developed.
The development of this heavily involved 6 publication organisations, usually rivals, working together to create the code, generate ideas and fix each others bugs.
Custom Javascript off the main thread
One of our major challenge of ours has been the inability to add custom Javascript to our AMP pages.
But this may be set to change. Earlier this year, at AMP conf, google announced it was working on the ability to add author-written Javascript to your AMP pages.
They are trying to build a type of javascript that runs in web workers and is server side rendered.
This means this type of JS would not block the main thread and would actually solve many issues for non-AMP websites.
They are proto-typing this with Preact, a library compatable with React but only 3KBytes.
They are using this framework not only for it’s size but also because optimised for virtual DOM.
They are doing this with full working visibility, out in the AMP open source code base, which is open for anyone to contribute to.
“We expect to create and open-source libraries for advancing the art of off-main-thread JS computing”.
If they succeed in this then they may solve a much larger problem that developers have the web. This means the future of AMP may also be the future of the web and being open source means you can be involved in shaping this.
This article has been from the script of a presentation I gave as part of my team (Marketing IT) at ComparetheMarket.com. You can also find it on my own blog site at: http://lebrunblack.com/index.php/2018/05/15/amps_future/
