Brave browser rolls out new feature to bypass Google’s accelerated mobile pages

Privacy-focused browser Brave said it is introducing a new feature called De-AMP, which will bypass accelerated mobile pages (AMP) and take users directly to the website of the content publisher. AMP was created to help content publishers offer a faster browsing experience, however, privacy advocates believe it is harmful to user privacy, and security and above all gives more power to companies such as Google to monopolise how people access content on the web. 

AMP is an open-source HTML framework that was originally created by Google in 2016 to help content publishers offer a better experience to customers such as faster page loading. It also gave publishers access to distribution on multiple platforms and prominent placement on Google services.

De-AMP will rewrite links and URLs to stop users from going to AMP pages of a website. In cases where D-AMP is unable to rewrite URLs, it will redirect users away from AMP pages before they are rendered. According to Brave, De-AMP is already live in the browser’s Nightly and Beta versions. It will be enabled by default in the upcoming 1.38 version for desktop and Android. An iOS version is expected to launch soon. 

Also read: Privacy focused Brave Browser breaches the 50 million monthly active users

Brave’s privacy team flagged some of the privacy and other usability concerns of AMP in another blog. Brave argued that AMP gives Google more information on which websites users are visiting and how they interact with them. Brave’s biggest worry is that AMP allows Google to force its controls and arbitrary non-standards to benefit its advertising systems. “AMP is one of many Google strategies to further monopolise the web.”

Though AMP improves website performance by using preloading and serving pages from Google’s faster servers, Brave’s privacy team argues that AMP is bad for usability. According to Brave, Google’s AMP only improves the ‘median of performance’ and in many cases, AMP pages take more time to load than many publisher websites that use their own speed optimisation techniques. 

Google has announced changes to how tracking in browsers works as it plans to phase out third-party cookies by 2023. Google is reportedly working on an upgraded version of AMP-based on Signed exchanges (SXG) that will allow Google Search to prefetch content while preserving users’ privacy.