Brave says Google’s AMP pages are harmful, launches De-AMP

Brave Software, Inc., the company behind the free and open-source web browser Brave, has launched a new feature in its browser called De-AMP, which allows Brave users to bypass Google-hosted AMP pages, and instead visit the content’s publisher directly.

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and was originally created by Google as a competitor to Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News. It is optimized for mobile web browsing and intended to help web pages load faster. However, Brave said that AMP is harmful to users’ privacy, security and internet experience:

“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.”

Brave wants to protect users from AMP with the help of De-AMP, which will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from visiting AMP pages altogether, redirecting users to the publisher versions of pages instead of the AMP version. And in cases where that is not possible, Brave will watch as pages are being fetched and redirect users away from AMP pages before the page is even rendered, preventing AMP/Google code from being loaded and executed.

De-AMP is now available in Brave’s Nightly and Beta versions and will be enabled by default in the upcoming 1.38 Desktop and Android versions, and will be released on iOS soon after.