What you need to know
- Brave is rolling out a new feature for its browser that will bypass AMP pages and take users directly to the original website.
- De-AMP is designed to rewrite links and URLs to block pages rendered with AMP.
- It will be enabled by default in the upcoming 1.38 desktop and Android browsers.
Brave joins a growing number of organizations that want Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to be obsolete. It announced a new feature that allows its browser to automatically skip Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), and it’s been unabashed in denouncing the “harmful” frame.
In a blog post, Brave explained that the new De-AMP is designed to let users skip pages rendered with AMP and navigate directly to the original site. It avoids AMP pages by rewriting links and URLs.
In the unlikely event that “Brave will monitor the page being fetched and redirect the user to the AMP page before the page is rendered, preventing the AMP/Google code from being loaded and executed,” the company said.
The new feature will be enabled by default in the upcoming desktop and Android mobile browser version (v1.38), with iOS devices soon to follow. That said, it’s now available on Nightly and Beta builds.
In addition to these steps, Brave plans to introduce another way to bypass AMP pages. It will extend its “existing debounce feature to detect when an AMP URL will be accessed and navigate the user to the real version of the page.” This feature will be released in version 1.40.
Brave aims to allow De-AMP to maintain users’ privacy, security, and internet experience, describing AMP as “harmful to users and the entire web.”
It noted that AMP gives Google a broader understanding of which pages people are interacting with, confuses users about the sites they’re visiting, and allows Google to further monopolize the web. Brave even warns that the next version of AMP will be even more harmful.
The latest move is yet another nail in the coffin for AMP. A group of online publishers, including Vox Media and Bustle parent company BDG, recently announced the cancellation of AMP due to the impact on their ad revenue.
Google wasn’t immediately reached when Android Central reached out for a statement, but the company told The Verge it disagreed with Brave’s allegations. A company representative said the views were “misleading, conflating many different web projects and standards, and repeating many false claims.”
When Google introduced AMP in 2015, it touted the framework’s ability to load mobile web pages faster. However, Brave claims that “AMP is bad for performance and usability” and “only improves performance by the median”.
Brave has been outspoken about Google’s privacy practices, and last year it launched its own search engine to challenge the search giant. However, with Brave’s small share of the search and web browser markets, these efforts are unlikely to erode Google’s dominance.
