Brave’s De-AMP feature redirects Google-hosted AMP pages to publishers’ pages

Brave browser will soon redirect web pages, which use Google’s AMP technology, to the publisher’s website automatically. AMP, which stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, is a Google technology that Brave believes is harmful to privacy, security, and user experience.

Google claims that AMP is improving the user experience by improving performance when loading AMP-powered web pages. Pages are served from Google servers, and Google uses prefetching techniques and its own servers to serve AMP content. Pages loaded using AMP appear to come from the publisher’s website, but they are not.

In the past, we have highlighted various techniques for avoiding AMP pages. Anti-AMP extensions are available for most browsers. Firefox users can refer to Redirect AMP to HTML browser users Chromium version of the extension for their browser.

Brave Software highlights the following issues with Google’s AMP technology:

• AMP is bad for privacy — AMP pages give Google more information, since the content is served from Google. Google penalizes publishers for not using AMP by reducing search visibility.
• AMP is bad for security — AMP content is loaded from Google, but AMP makes it look like the content is coming directly from the publisher.
• AMP encourages monopolization of the Web — AMP content gives Google more control over the Web, using “no arbitrary standards.” Google controls the design and technology used by AMP pages, and this benefits the company’s core business, advertising.
• AMP is bad for performance and usability — Google’s claim that AMP-powered pages load faster is only true for “average performance.” AMP pages can load more slowly than regular pages served from a publisher’s website (which Google disclosed to the Department of Justice).

Google is already working on AMP 2.0, although Google doesn’t call it that. The next version uses Google’s proposed Signed Exchange and WebBundle technologies and will result in “more of the Web being served from Google’s servers” and “giving users less control over how they interact with that content,” according to Google. brave.

Brave finds Signed Exchange and WebBundles to be problematic from a privacy, performance, and user control standpoint.

As of Brave 1.38, and now available in the Beta and Nightly browser versions, De-AMP is enabled in Brave automatically by default.

With De-AMP enabled, Brave attempts to parse links directly to redirect the load to the publisher’s website immediately; this is the case of Google Search among other pages. Brave will also look for AMP HTML markup to identify AMP page loads. Brave intercepts the request and automatically redirects it to the publisher’s website. The company notes that Brave does this before the Google AMP scripts are fetched and loaded.

Brave Software plans to extend protection in Brave 1.40 by expanding the browser’s privacy debounce feature to include AMP URLs.

Now you: What is your opinion about AMP?

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