Hate Google's AMP Pages? Brave Browser Will Bypass Them
If you prefer to avoid Google-hosted AMP pages, the Brave browser is working to filter them out.
On Tuesday, Brave Software announced it’s creating a feature called "De-AMP," which will help users automatically bypass a Google AMP page and instead visit the content’s original source.
Brave claims the AMP framework can undermine user privacy and extend Google’s control over the internet. “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,” the company added.
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, and represents Google’s effort to load web pages faster and with less data. Introduced in 2015, the HTML framework operates by stripping down existing web pages to a smaller file size, which can then be hosted over Google servers as cached versions.
For years now, Google has been using AMP to serve pages for news articles and other content from numerous publishers via Google search and news results. However, not everyone is a fan of the technology because it can sometimes strip out important components to a web page, such as the comments section or a photo gallery.
Critics have also pointed out the technology gives Google more insight and control over the user’s web experience since AMP pages are cached on Google’s servers. This can deprive news publishers of metrics to their own content.
On Tuesday, Brave piled on with the criticisms, and claimed Google knows AMP pages don’t always load faster than native websites, citing an ongoing antitrust lawsuit from 16 US states against the tech giant.
“Though Google touts AMP as better for performance, internally Google knows that 'AMP only improves the ‘median of performance’ and AMP
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