Yeesh, thanks for the downvotes on an actually measured result.
I'm trying this in Firefox nightly (stylo enabled, webrender not).
Even on an old phone over throttled internet, that page is faster than real HN for page transitions, but the same happens on 100Mbps WiFi with my Nexus 5X, or on LAN with my desktop.
In all cases, that site is significantly faster than real HN in loading and rendering (I can see the real HN's icon slowly load on every page refresh — that page doesn't do that).
If you get different results, you're probably using Chrome, which is over-aggressively caching.
On a slow laptop on a reasonably fast connection (university WLAN) using FF 57 Beta the clone is slower. It is slightly faster than real HN at showing the orange bar and the tan content box (which I find quite jarring), the text then pops in noticeably later. Some pages also appear to first show error pages that then get replaced with content. (This even happens on repeat visits to a page, where this seems to cheat and take the comments from cache instead of checking for new ones)
I'm trying this in Firefox nightly (stylo enabled, webrender not).
Even on an old phone over throttled internet, that page is faster than real HN for page transitions, but the same happens on 100Mbps WiFi with my Nexus 5X, or on LAN with my desktop.
In all cases, that site is significantly faster than real HN in loading and rendering (I can see the real HN's icon slowly load on every page refresh — that page doesn't do that).
If you get different results, you're probably using Chrome, which is over-aggressively caching.