Google’s AMP coming tomorrow
According to Ad Age Google’s Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) system is launching February 24th, 2016.
AMP is a delivery mechanism that gets a web page to the user on average 85% faster than standard mobile web pages, delivering content the second you tap as opposed to some content, then a resized image causing all that content to get pushed down, then a mysterious delay as some Javascript is loaded and attempts to connect to an ad tracker, then a refresh of the screen with the first page looking good, oh wait another delay…. and now the screen is dimming and we get a note about the privacy policy…
The Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed, and the Washington Post are expected to be the preliminary early adopters of AMP, however as it’s a Google open source project you can expect to see extremely efficiently delivered pages of all types shortly thereafter.
On the content host side, interstitials, page takeovers, and a lot of what makes rich site content are gone. Which begs the question of how much faster AMP actually would be over a page that didn’t have a tracker, a comment system, 3-5 ads, etc.
According to Ad Age, a Google spokesperson is claiming that the AMP-enabled sites will show up differently in a search, but that preferential ranking will not be given to these sites.
How websites that make money off of displaying advertisements and page takeovers will come out of this is a question. Probably the answer is they’ll turn to thinly veiled advertising in articles, but maybe this will be the dawn of a much faster internet.
If you’re worried this is just a Chrome or Android thing, according to the AMP HTML development Github page (which honestly might be me barking in the wrong direction)
Supported browsers
In general we support the 2 latest versions of major browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari and Opera. We support desktop, phone, tablet and the web view version of these respective browsers.
Beyond that the core AMP library and builtin elements should aim for very wide browser support and we accept fixes for all browsers with market share greater than 1 percent.
In particular, we try to maintain “it might not be perfect but isn’t broken”-support for the Android 4.0 system browser and Chrome 28+ on phones.
We’ll see… let us know if you run across any AMP content before tomorrow.
[Ad Age]
