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Google wants to make mobile sites load much faster with the AMP project

October 9, 2015

Google has announced a new open-source project called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) that will enable articles from news publications to load almost instantly on smartphones and tablets. Some of the 30 publishers already taking part in the initiative include Twitter, The New York Times, the Guardian, BuzzFeed, Vox Media, Pinterest and LinkedIn.

Google said that AMP will drastically speed up article loading times on mobile devices by caching the webpage ahead of time. This is done using the company’s high-end servers, which can handle 6 million queries a second. Another method AMP uses to bolster mobile web browsing is by not loading an image or a video until a user scrolls down to it, allowing the top of a page to load much faster. And with much of the Javascript code used on normal webpages absent, articles should not only appear faster but use less battery power.

“The Web today, particularly in a mobile environment, is not really fully satisfying users’ expectations. It’s not as fast as it should be. Pages load slowly, sometimes erratically. It’s not ideal,” said Richard Gingras, Google’s head of news.

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