Mobile web browsing isn’t always an enjoyable experience, and more times than not it can all boil down to the speed at which pages load. The answer to this is accelerated mobile pages, or AMP, which in the shortest description possible, basically makes it so that pages load a lot faster. Today Google has announced that they’re bringing the AMP standard to Google+ on the mobile web (Google already applies AMP to Google News), so that users can load things up quicker and instead of spending time waiting around for load times to complete, they can jump back into the conversations, threads, and communities they like to interact with.
What’s worth noting is that this won’t work for all web pages that you open up from Google+ on the mobile web, rather the supported AMP links will only be for some articles, such as the one in the gallery below. Over time though, chances are that more articles and websites will support the AMP standard and lessen the limitation. If you’re worried about not knowing which articles or web pages will support the accelerated mobile pages from Google+, Google has made this easy to identify as there will be little lightning bolt icons that appear in the bottom left corner of a post image that are meant to show that article is an AMP article.
While page load times may not be an issue for everyone, those that do live in places where internet connection speeds may not be as quick will appreciate the four times faster load times, which will not only speed up their experience in enjoying content but also potentially help them eat up less data, and that’s never a bad thing. In regards to less data, Google states that AMP articles also use about ten times less data than loading up a regular article, and if you’re browsing Google+ on your phone through a mobile web browser instead of the app on a constant basis, ten times less data use can really add up. As the support for AMP is just now being rolled out to Google+ on the mobile web, Google’s plans are to continue adding support for more publishers and platforms in the near future, although they didn’t specifically mention how long of a wait it would be.
