Google wants to speed up the mobile web

The delicious irony here. The horribly bloated and slow-loading Verge.com published a story about Google speeding up the mobile web.

Last summer, a Verge.com writing dolt blamed the slowness of the mobile web on browsers and not the disgustingly-designed websites that are bogged down with giant images, trackers, huge CSS files, and a ton of JavaScript.

Google has a new plan to speed up the mobile web

Today, the company announced a technical preview for a system called Accelerated Mobile Pages (or AMP), designed to fight many of the factors slowing and bloating mobile web pages.

Google is trying to fix the problems created by website designers, developers, and probably the ever-present "stakeholders."

If the system works, users should see lighter, faster-loading mobile web pages as a result.

Website owners can do this on their own by limiting or eliminating JavaScript exposure to the browsing-only users and reducing the amount of giant images that get downloaded. With some effort and common sense, you don't need help from Google to make websites load quickly on the mobile web.

http://babyutoledo.com :

• no javascript for the browsing-only user
• smallish images and few images per page
• pages are cached with memcached

I created babyutoledo.com for a local non-profit group to be simple and lightweight. The focus is on the content and the org's purpose. I wanted the reading experience to be comfortable for the users on any device.

I'm sure that I can do more to streamline the pages and CSS to speed up page download speed.

My niche blog sites also use memcached. A few examples:

• http://toledowinter.com
• http://birdbrainsbrewing.com/750/belgian-wit-april-2015
• http://crochet.soupmode.com

Keep it simple and lightweight, and the pages load well on mobile.

I created this static page with no JavaScript as an example of what I would like to see produced by the Toledo Blade. I would pay a hefty digital subscription if I could get pages like this.

http://testcode.soupmode.com/article/post8.html

I also posted it here:
http://toledotalk.com/last-alarm.html

as part of a comment that I posted to Toledo Talk in September 2015 in a thread about the Blade's new mobile format.

Excerpts from my comment:

I don't need a printed paper version. I don't need an app. I prefer one website that responds comfortably on all devices and loads fast with no mountains of JavaScript bilge, no huge irrelevant images, no ads, and no trackers and other gobbledygook that bog down page load speed.

It would be nice if the article page contained a large-ish font size and a lot of negative space. I don't understand why some responsively-designed websites use a tiny, uncomfortable font size on mobile.

I see no need for a bunch of navigation links in the header and footer areas of an article page. No fixed areas. No hamburger or similar menu icons, like I use here. The only link needed is a link to the home page. The reader can find all the site's link cruft on the home page.

Give non-paying customers the hideous views, and give subscribers something worth buying. Until this utopia exists, I'll continue reading with JavaScript disabled, which improves the web-viewing experience a lot.

In that comment, I referenced one of my favorite views on the subject of a bloated web http://motherfuckingwebsite.com :

What I'm saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves.

Websites aren't broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them. You son-of-a-bitch.

Google's project is proof that sites have been overly engineered to a massive fault for too many years. And proof that websites owners have been more concerned

Google project:
https://www.ampproject.org

http://buzzmachine.com/2015/10/07/faster-distributed-web

To view a demo, access this link on a mobile browser and search for a term, such as "Obama."

http://g.co/ampdemo