Google AMP

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) has begun to see some widespread usage across the internet - atleast for the sites that I visit. I have always been skeptical regarding the AMP project, but I must admit that the AMP powered websites I visit using my phone are indeed fast to load.

AMP enabled pages are just HTML pages extended with AMP specific properties, such as amp-boilerplage and sets a number of restrictions to increase speed. The restrictions are however very restrictive, meaning that not all applications can be AMP enabled.

Restrictions include:

1. No JavaScript apart from the JavaScript provided by AMP. Thats right, AMP powered pages cannot have homemade or third party JS.
2. No input elements, i.e. no form support. AMP powered pages are one direction only.
3. No external styles or inline styles, only style within a single style tag. In addition, the limitation for the style is 50kb.

Due 1. and 2., AMP targets to make content-heavy pages load very fast: news-sites, blogs, etc.

Google also provides AMP caches, where the content of a site can be loaded even faster. When googling for content on a smartphone or tablet, one can see that a site is AMP enabled by looking at the lightning icon.

Although I prefer to use AMP powered content on my phone, I do not believe this is the way forward. One should improve the performance of one’s one site using standard techniques, such as reducing the number of DOM elements and reducing the number synchronous scripts.

Todays site are typically very slow due to all the garbage that is pulled in from external sites. This includes ads and especially modal windows showing up and blocking the page.