Brave Web Browser Announces It Will Bypass Google AMP Pages

The Brave privacy focused web browser has announced that it will soon bypass Google's AMP pages by default.

Brave is rolling out a new feature called De-AMP, which allows Brave users to bypass Google-hosted AMP pages, and instead visit the content’s publisher directly. AMP harms users' privacy, security and internet experience, and just as bad, AMP helps Google further monopolize and control the direction of the Web.

Brave's De-AMP feature will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from visiting AMP pages where possible. In cases that is not possible, the browser will watch as AMP pages are fetched and redirect before the page is rendered, preventing Google's code from being loaded and executed.




In a post, the company explained why it opposes Google AMP...

-----
Why is AMP Harmful?
In practice, AMP is harmful to users and to the Web at large.

First, AMP is harmful to privacy. AMP gives Google an even broader view of which pages people view on the Web, and how people interact with them. AMP encourages developers to more tightly integrate with Google servers and systems, and penalizes publishers with decreased search rankings and placements if they don’t, further allowing Google to track and profile users.


Second, AMP is bad for security. By design, AMP confuses users about what site they’re interacting with. Users think they’re interacting with the publisher, when in actuality the user is still within Google’s control. User-respecting browsers defend the site as the security and privacy boundary on the web, and systems like AMP intentionally confuse this boundary.

Third, AMP furthers the monopolization of the Web. AMP encourages more of the Web to be served from Google’s servers, under Google’s control and arbitrary non-standards. It also allows Google to require pages to be built in ways that benefit Google’s advertising systems. AMP is one of many Google strategies to further monopolize the Web, and build a Web where users serve Google, instead of websites serving users.

Finally, AMP is bad for performance and usability. Though Google touts AMP as better for performance, internally Google knows that “AMP only improves the ‘median of performance’ and AMP pages can actually load slower than other publisher speed optimization techniques” (as revealed in Google’s disclosures to the DOJ, pg. 90). In many cases AMP is so bad for performance and usability that Web users literally pay money to avoid AMP.
-----

De-AMP is now available in the Nightly and Beta versions of Brave and will be enabled by default in the upcoming 1.38 Desktop and Android versions. An iOS update will be coming soon after.