Brave is taking Google’s Accelerate Mobile Pages (AMP) to the fore with a new feature called De-AMP, edge report. It is designed to bypass any page rendered with AMP and take the user directly to the original website. “Where possible, De-AMP will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from fully accessing AMP pages,” the company wrote in a blog post.
If that’s not possible, then “Brave will observe when the page is fetched and redirect the user from the AMP page before the page is rendered, preventing the AMP/Google code from being loaded and executed,” it added.
According to Brave, the new features are implemented in the name of privacy, security and internet experience. “In reality, AMP is bad for users and the entire web,” the article states. “Equally bad, AMP has helped Google further monopolize and control the direction of the web.” It added that the next iteration of AMP “will be even worse.”
Google initially promoted AMP as a way to improve the mobile web experience by loading pages faster. However, it has recently been the target of critics who see it as a way for Google to increase its hegemony in the internet advertising market by hosting content on its own servers. A group of publishers recently announced they were ditching AMP, and a lawsuit brought by several U.S. states accuses Google of a monopoly that hurts rivals and publishers in the advertising industry.
Brave promises “best online privacy” through its browser, so attacking Google is certainly part of its business strategy. Despite its efforts, it lags far behind most other browsers in mobile market share and sits in the “Other” category behind Internet Explorer on Statcounter. De-AMP is now available in beta and “will be enabled by default in the upcoming 1.38 desktop and Android releases, and will be released on iOS shortly after,” Brave said.
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