Brave on Tuesday announced a new feature for its browser: De-AMP, which automatically skips any pages rendered using Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages framework, instead taking users directly to the original website. “Where possible, De-AMP will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from fully accessing AMP pages,” Brave said in a blog post. “In the unlikely event that Brave will observe the page being fetched and redirect the user from the AMP page before the page is rendered, preventing the AMP/Google code from being loaded and executed.”
Brave sees De-AMP as a privacy feature, and has made no secret of its stance on Google’s version of the web. “Actually, AMP is bad for users and the web as a whole,” Brave’s blog post said, before explaining that AMP gives Google more insight into users’ browsing habits, confuses users, and is often more confusing than regular web pages. slow. It also warns that the next version of AMP — so far just called AMP 2.0 — will be even worse.
“Actually, AMP is bad for users and the entire web”
Brave’s stance is particularly tough, but the trend against AMP has turned tough over the past few years. Google originally created the framework to simplify and speed up mobile sites, and AMP is now managed by a group of open source contributors. It’s been controversial from the start, and has been smelt by people like Google trying to exert more control over the web. Over time, more and more companies and users became concerned about this control and were outraged at the idea of Google prioritizing AMP pages in search results. Plus, the rest of the internet has finally figured out how to make good mobile sites, making AMP and projects like Facebook Instant Articles less important.
Many popular apps and browser extensions make it easy for users to skip AMP pages, and in recent years, publishers (including borderline Parent company Vox Media) has completely stopped using it. AMP has even become part of the antitrust fight against Google: A lawsuit alleges that AMP helped centralize Google’s power as an ad exchange, and that Google slowed down the loading speed of non-AMP ads.
Still, no one has pursued AMP as hard as Brave. De-AMP is somewhat reminiscent of Mozilla’s Facebook Container extension, which was created in 2018 as a way for Firefox users to stop Facebook from tracking them on the web. It is a value statement in the form of a new feature. Google has also been a target of Brave for years. Brave has published blog posts complaining about Google’s privacy features and even built his own search engine. Brave has long touted itself as a privacy-first browser, so Google was a logical villain choice.
Of course, despite all of Brave’s bluff and development, it only captured a small portion of the browser market, with Chrome continuing to dominate. So no matter how much the internet is against it, AMP won’t die until Google kills it.
