Facebook brings fast web pages from Instant Articles to Messenger

Facebook is releasing Instant Articles for its Messenger chat app. As a result, users can see the faster web pages in the chat application. Until now, Instant Articles only worked in the regular Facebook app.

The Instant Articles have a flash sign to indicate that they belong to that category of web pages, a Facebook executive said in the announcement. The feature works for web pages that users and bots share in Messenger, Facebook’s chat app that 900 million people use worldwide, according to the social network.

The feature will work in the Android version of the chat app from this week, while the iOS version should follow in a few weeks. Whether and when the feature will work for the Windows Phone version of the app is currently unknown.

When site publishers offer articles in Instant Articles, they contain less design and code than regular web pages, allowing Facebook to load them faster on mobile devices. This should reduce loading times and therefore increase the chance that users will actually read the articles. The hosting is done on Facebook servers.