The mobile web is slow, and Google wants to fix it. The company has announced a new project to simplify mobile pages and make it easier for publishers to create content for phones and tablets.
Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, or AMP for short, is an open source project that will take content from some of the world's largest publishers and automatically optimise it for mobile devices. Google claimed websites signed up to AMP would see their content "load instantly everywhere".
Publishers already signed up to AMP include the BBC, BuzzFeed, Daily Mail, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, The Telegraph, TIME, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.
Mobile web pages take an average of eight seconds to load due to a combination of poor coding and advertising scripts that run in the background. With Facebook already working on a rival service dubbed Instant Articles, Google has been forced to act.
AMP will work by caching articles from partner publishers before stripping out unnecessary code. Editorial will always load before ads and pages should load alongside search results, making opening an article almost instantaneous. AMP works in the background and can be used with any mobile browser.
The service will have a simplifying effect on articles, removing superfluous page features and focussing on the main images and text of the article. Pages loaded through AMP will have a similar look to those on Apple's Reader function in Safari.
The project remains in the early stages of development and is unlikely to launch until early next year. It can be trialled now by going to g.co/ampdemo from a mobile browser. "For many, reading on the mobile web is a slow, clunky and frustrating experience - but it doesn’t have to be that way," Google explained in an FAQ. "If content is fast, flexible and beautiful, including compelling and effective ads, we can preserve the open web publishing model," the company added in a mission statement on the AMP website.
Disclosure: Condé Nast, the publisher of WIRED, is also signed up to the AMP project.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
