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Google's Effort To Speed Up the Mobile Web (ampproject.org)

Posted by Soulskill on from the hit-the-turbo-button dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Google has officially taken the wraps off its AMP project — Accelerated Mobile Pages — which aims to speed up the delivery of web content to mobile devices. They say, "We began to experiment with an idea: could we develop a restricted subset of the things we'd use from HTML, that's both fast and expressive, so that documents would always load and render with reliable performance?" That subset is now encapsulated in AMP, their proof-of-concept. They've posted the code to GitHub and they're asking for help from the open source community to flesh it out. Their conclusions are familiar to the Slashdot crowd: "One thing we realized early on is that many performance issues are caused by the integration of multiple JavaScript libraries, tools, embeds, etc. into a page. This isn't saying that JavaScript immediately leads to bad performance, but once arbitrary JavaScript is in play, most bets are off because anything could happen at any time and it is hard to make any type of performance guarantee. With this in mind we made the tough decision that AMP HTML documents would not include any author-written JavaScript, nor any third-party scripts." They're seeing speed boosts anywhere from 15-85%, but they're also looking at pre-rendering options to make some content capable of loading instantaneously. Their FAQ has a few more details.

2 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Related article by mork · · Score: 3, Informative

    NY Times had an article about the cost of mobile ads, the article also had some interesting data about load-times and how much data was javascript, videos, images, embeds etc.
    http://www.nytimes.com/interac...
    Posting as its related to the efforts described above

  2. Re:Why would I help Google with 'open source'? by hvdh · · Score: 4, Informative

    Just yesterday I measured data use of Germany's biggest gossip news site (bild.de) on my smartphone (Android 5.1 with stock browser), cached and uncached (browser cache cleared, browser restarted) with and without ad blocking (using AdFree host list). The phone was on Wifi / DSL.
    Here's the result:
    uncached load (first visit) with ads: 2.4MB data, 26s (!) until the display goes from white to some content
    uncached load (first visit) without ads: 1.7MB data, 11s until the display goes from white to some content
    cached load (second visit) with ads: 272KB data, 2s
    cached load (second visit) without ads: 45KB data, 2s