On Tuesday, Brave launched De-AMP, a new feature for its browser that automatically skips over any page generated with Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages framework and redirects users to the original website. In a blog post, Brave stated, “Wherever practicable, De-AMP will rewrite links and URLs to prevent visitors from viewing AMP pages altogether.” “In the event that this isn’t possible, Brave will monitor page fetching and redirect users away from AMP pages before they’re even rendered, preventing AMP / Google code from being loaded and run.”
De-AMP was framed by Brave as a privacy feature, and the company was forthright about its feelings regarding Google’s vision of the web. “In practise, AMP is bad to consumers and the Web as a whole,” Brave’s blog post stated, before going on to explain that AMP offers Google even more information about users’ browsing patterns, confuses users, and is typically slower than standard web sites. It also cautioned that the future version of AMP, dubbed AMP 2.0 so far, will be even worse.
