Google unveils plan to make the mobile web faster
On Wednesday, Google announced a new open source project to speed up the mobile web, much like Instant Articles on Facebook. AMP, Accelerated Mobile Page Project, aims to make mobile web pages load instantly without having publisher fork over controls of their ads. The project is live on Github for any publisher or developers to integrate it directly into their sites.
AMP is launching with over 30 media partners including Mashable, The Huffington Post, Time, and VOX to name a few. Along with media partners, the project is working with tech platforms and social services like Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and WordPress. The project is using existing web technologies, which can easily be integrated into any website or service without any heavy lifting. The project uses cached pages so when a user clicks on a link the page instantly loads. Google has developed a better and new caching system than before, and plans to host a majority of the cached pages on its own servers.
Google AMP’s will start to appear in search results in the coming days, but there are ways to preview it. So far, I’m highly impressed with how quickly the pages load, and why it took this long for publishers and tech companies to think about how to serve pages faster. While this is a Google project, it’s open sourced and anyone from us to joe blow could add this to their site without much effort.
This project could have larger effects on the world-wide web, as more users are asking for faster load times and less data being used. This technology could be used to load any static web page almost instantly and with half the data in many cases. There is of course many problems stopping this from happening, but I could hope that any and every web page instantly loaded like these articles.
Tell us in the comments below what you think about AMP, and if you’d like to see us use it in the near future!