Brave announced a new feature for its browser on Tuesday: De-AMP, which automatically skips every page rendered with the Google Accelerated Mobile Pages frame and instead takes users directly to the original website. “Whenever possible, De-AMP will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from fully visiting AMP pages,” Brave said in a blog post. “And where that’s not possible, Brave will monitor how pages are retrieved and redirect users away from AMP pages before the page is even rendered, preventing AMP / Google code from loading and executing.”
Brave framed De-AMP as a privacy feature and did not comment on its position on Google’s online version. “In fact, AMP is bad for users and the web as a whole,” the Brave blog post said, before explaining that AMP gives Google even more knowledge of users’ browsing habits, confuses users and can often be slower than normal web pages. And he warns that the next version of AMP – so far simply called AMP 2.0 – will be even worse.
“In practice, AMP is harmful to users and the network as a whole.”
Brave’s position is particularly strong, but the tide has turned hard against AMP over the past few years. Initially, Google created the framework to simplify and speed up mobile websites, and AMP is now run by a group of open source contributors. This was controversial from the start, and to some it smelled like Google trying to gain even more control over the network. Over time, more and more companies and users became concerned about this control and became irritated by the idea that Google would give priority to AMP pages in search results. In addition, the rest of the Internet eventually figured out how to make good mobile sites, which made AMP – and projects like Facebook Instant Articles – less important.
A number of popular browser applications and extensions make it easier for users to skip AMP pages, and in recent years publishers (including the parent company of The Verge Vox Media) have refused to use it fully. AMP has even become part of the antitrust fight against Google: a lawsuit alleges that AMP has helped centralize Google’s power as an advertising exchange and that Google is making non-AMP ads slower to load.
In a statement to The Verge, Google spokeswoman Lara Levin said AMP is an open source framework and continues to be useful to developers. She said “Brave’s allegations are misleading, confusing a number of different web projects and standards, and repeating a number of false claims.”
However, no one has taken up AMP as strongly as Brave. De-AMP is somewhat reminiscent of the Mozilla Facebook Container extension it created in 2018 as a way for Firefox users to prevent Facebook from tracking them online. This is a statement of values in the form of a new function. Google has also been a target for Brave for years; Brave has published blog posts complaining about Google’s privacy features and even gone so far as to create its own search engine. Brave has long been charged as a browser in the first place for privacy, so Google is the logical villain you should choose.
Of course, despite the lock and the development of Brave, it holds only a small part of the browser market and Chrome continues to dominate. So no matter how much the internet turns against him, AMP will not die until Google kills him.
Updated, March 21, 9:20 AM ET: This article was updated with Google commentary.
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