Brave aims to remove AMP from its web browsers with a new feature called De-AMP, which ensures that users visit a publisher’s URL rather than Google’s.
De-AMP will be enabled by default in version 1.38 of Brave’s desktop and Android browsers, with plans to bring it to iOS soon.
The team behind Brave believes that users are better off without AMP, saying it compromises their privacy and leads to a worse experience.
Brave said in the announcement:
“AMP hurts users’ privacy, security, and internet experience, and just as badly, AMP helps Google further monopolize and control the direction of the web.”
De-AMP will “protect” users by stopping the execution of AMP HTML and sending visitors directly to the publisher’s page.
In a blog post, Brave elaborates on the claims that AMP is harmful and explains how De-AMP can make web browsing safer.
How Brave’s De-AMP feature works
Brave’s new features will neutralize AMP in two key ways:
- Rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from accessing AMP pages.
- Redirects the user from the AMP page before the page is rendered, preventing code from being executed.
De-AMP will target problematic URLs by modifying fetched pages that frequently link to AMP pages, such as Google’s search results.
These types of pages will be modified in the browser to rewrite all AMP links with the publisher’s URL.
Additionally, Brave will look for AMP HTML tags on page load and load the publisher’s version of the URL when AMP tags are detected.
A future update will extend Brave’s existing debounce functionality to detect when an AMP URL will be accessed and navigate to the publisher’s version of the page instead.
Why AMP is Bad (According to Brave)
Brave’s argument that AMP is harmful to users is as follows:
- privacy: AMP allows Google to see what pages people view on the web and how those pages interact.
- Safety: When users are still under Google’s control, they think they are interacting with a publisher’s site.
- monopoly: Serving web content from Google’s servers via AMP, Brave believes it further cements Google’s monopoly on the web.
- Availability: Brave believes AMP can actually make pages slower and harder to interact with.
Too little too late?
It’s worth noting that Brave goes to great lengths to block AMP pages, but one can’t help but question its timing.
AMP’s popularity has declined in recent years due to Google’s own efforts.
For example, Google News now sends users directly to the publisher’s site instead of an AMP page.
The Top Stories carousel in search results, which used to be exclusive to AMP, now includes regular HTML pages.
Google even stopped using a special lightning bolt icon to highlight AMP pages in search results.
In other words, users are landing on AMP pages less often than in previous years, which feels like an untimely update.
If nothing else, this is yet another nail in the coffin for a page technology that seems to be falling out of favor across the web.
source: brave
Featured image: rudall30/Shutterstock
