AMP was designed for mobile websites, but if you are on a slow internet connection, using AMP pages to browse the internet on your desktop can speed up browsing a lot, and it can help you in minimizing the data consumption. In this post, we will discuss how you can get AMP on Google Chrome Desktop version.
But why is it useful?
AMP pages are optimized for low size and smallest possible load time. Moreover, following are some other benefits of viewing AMP pages on desktop:
- AMP pages remove most of the useless clutter from webpages.
- These have less number of advertisements and usually lower number of trackers compared to standard, old-school web version.
- AMP pages are comparatively cleaner and hence, they have a much better readability.
- Ads on AMP pages are a lot faster and non-intrusive.
To compare, Here are screenshots of some AMP and non-AMP screenshots on a desktop version of Google Chrome.
Using AMP pages on Desktop version of Google Chrome
To browse AMP pages on Google Chrome, you can install AMP Accelerated Mobile Pages Reader from Chrome Web Store. Once installed, by default, you won’t see any changes made on web pages. To enable AMP browsing, click on its icon in Chrome’s Toolbar and under default, select AMP version if available.
Once done, the extension will redirect you to the AMP version of a website if there exists one.
If for some reason, you need an alternative, Desktop AMP is worth a look; it is not as full featured as above, but it can get the job done.
Also, you can use an extension called Detect AMP to detect if a webpage is available in AMP or not. If a web page is available in AMP, the extension will show a bolt icon, to view the page in AMP, you can click on it.
Fun little trick
You can add a ‘/amp‘ at the end of a web page to go to the AMP version of the page manually. If there is an AMP version, Chrome will take you to it. But if the site is not available in AMP, you will see an Error 404. In such case, you can go back to the original page.
Have you used AMP on Google Chrome’s Desktop Version? Did you like it? Know about any other AMP related extensions that others should know? Share with others in the comments below.
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