If you use Google searches on a smartphone, Google search includes links to AMP pages if the website has support for it. AMP pages are served directly from Google’s server for faster loading. Now Brave has decided to ditch AMP. It will bypass AMP and redirect users to the original web page if possible. The browser will also have URLs to show the URL of the original page in the address bar. Brave calls this feature De-AMP.
Brave claims that AMP pages harm users’ privacy, security, and internet experience. With AMP, Google is controlling the direction of the web. So, the Brave browser will redirect users away from AMP pages before the page is rendered.
The De-AMP feature is now available in Brave’s Nightly and Beta versions. The feature is enabled by default in the upcoming 1.38 Desktop and Android versions. Soon De-AMP will also be added to the iOS browser.
Each AMP page source contains the link to the original URL of the page in the canonical URL tag. So, the browser will look for it and will redirect users to the original URL before rendering the AMP page. It will also rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from visiting AMP pages.
AMP was released back in 2015 and is an open-source HTML framework developed by Google with an aim to make the web experience faster. It asks web publishers to have a lightweight copy of web pages to offer a lightning-fast experience on mobile devices. Google keeps a copy of the web page on its servers and server the copy when a user wants to access the page from search results.
AMP pages are served directly from Google’s servers, so Google has control over it. Users think they are interacting with the publisher while they are actually interacting with pages served by Google. We know how badly Google tracks internet activity. This is the reason Brave is ditching AMP support.
I personally think that Brave is a bit late. Google already stopped sending users to AMP pages from Google news and sends users directly to publishers’ websites. Initially, Google used to highlight AMP pages in search results with a lightning bolt icon. Now Google doesn’t do that. The Top Stories carousel in search results was initially only for AMP pages but Google now also lists regular HTML pages in that section. It shows that Google has already stopped forcing AMP in most places.
What do you think about AMP and Brave’s new De-AMP feature? Let us know your views in the comments.
