Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (or AMP for short) debuted a couple of months ago, and in the intervening time, we’ve seen an increasing number of popular websites (including Ausdroid) supporting the standard for accelerated browsing on mobile. AMP is basically a subset of HTML, allowing for fairly complex rendering and layouts in mobile websites, while reducing a lot of the cruft that the web has accumulated; there’s limited Javascript and CSS, meaning that pages are tiny, load quickly, and can be readily cached by Google (and others) to make them even faster. In many cases, they load instantly.
While Google+ doesn’t really see an awful lot of use against the juggernauts Twitter and Facebook, some do still insist on using it, and Google has now added AMP support to Google+. When web pages are shared, if they have an AMP version, they’ll show with a little lightning bolt over the top. The move was announced by Google’s John Nack (on Google+, of course):
Fast Web pages rock, and we’re making Google+ an even better place to read great stories by adding support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (https://www.ampproject.org/). Now when you browse G+ on the Web on your phone, look for the little lightning bolt icon to load articles up to 4x faster, using up to 10x less data. Enjoy, and stay tuned as we add support for more platforms and publishers in the near future.
We doubt too many people will notice this change, or care if they do, but it’s a neat little addition to Google+ either way.
I’ve clicked a few AMP pages here and there and they really are fast. Good experience.
Unfortunately, like Allo, this is another failure for Google. No one actively use it.