Brave’s De-AMP bypasses ‘harmful’ Google AMP pages

Brave announced a new feature for its browser on Tuesday: De-AMP, which automatically skips which page is being viewed. Google Accelerated Mobile Pages Framework Instead it takes users directly to the original website. “Where possible, De-AMP will rewrite links and URLs to completely prevent users from visiting AMP pages,” Brave Said in a blog post. And in cases where this is not possible, Brave will monitor while pages are fetched and redirect users away from AMP pages before the page is rendered, preventing AMP/Google code from loading and executing.

Brave coined De-AMP as a privacy feature and hasn’t hidden words about his stance on Google’s web version. “In practice, AMP is harmful to users and the web in general,” the Brave blog post said, before explaining that AMP gives Google more knowledge of users’ browsing habits, confuses users, and can often be slower than regular web pages. She warned that the next version of AMP – so far called AMP 2.0 – would be worse.

Brave’s position is particularly strong, but the tide has turned strongly against AMP over the past two years. Google originally create frame In order to simplify and speed up mobile websites, AMP is now managed by a group of open source contributors. It was Controversial from the start And they smell to some like Google trying to exercise more control over the web. Over time, more companies and users became increasingly concerned about this control and bothered by the idea that Google would prioritize AMP pages in search results. Plus, the rest of the internet eventually figured out how to make good mobile sites, which made AMP — and similar projects like Facebook Instant Articles — less relevant.

Number of Popular apps And Browser Extensions It makes it easier for users to skip AMP pages, and in recent years, publishers (including the edge Parent company Vox Media) has moved away from using it entirely. AMP became part of the antitrust against Google: Alleged lawsuit AMP helped centralize the power of Google to ad exchange and Google made non-AMP ads load slower.

In a statement submitted to the edgeGoogle spokeswoman Lara Levine said AMP is an open source framework that is still useful for developers. She said Brave’s claims are misleading, confuse a number of different Web projects and standards, and repeat a number of false claims.

However, no one has gone after AMP as hard as Brave. A bit like De-AMP Mozilla’s Facebook Container Extension, which I created in 2018 as a way for Firefox users to stop Facebook from tracking them across the web. It is a valuable statement in the form of a new feature. Google has been a target of Brave for years as well; Brave posted blog posts complaining about Google’s privacy features and even went further Build your own search engine. Brave has always described herself as The first privacy browserso Google is the logical villain of choice.

Of course, despite Brave’s bravado and development, it holds only a small portion of the browser market, and Chrome continues to dominate. So no matter how much the Internet turns against it, AMP is not going to die until Google kills it.

Update, March 21 at 9:20 a.m. ET: The article has been updated with a comment from Google.