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 pages can actually load slower than other publisher speed optimization techniques,’” Brave said.
In response, the company created the De-AMP feature, which will be turned on by default in the upcoming 1.38 version of the Brave browser for both desktop and Android users.
“Where possible, De-AMP will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from visiting AMP pages altogether,” the company said. “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 currently rolling out as an optional feature to the Beta and Nightly builds for the browser. “If you are on Nightly or Beta and do not see the feature enabled, you may need to restart your browser for the changes to take effect,” the company added. "Users who wish to continue visiting AMP versions of pages can continue to do so by going to brave://settings/shields and disabling De-AMP."
However, Google objected to Brave's claims about AMP, calling them inaccurate. In a statement, the company said: “These allegations are misleading, conflate a number of different web projects and standards, and repeat a number of false claims."
Google added: "AMP is an open source framework that was collaboratively developed with publishers, tech companies, and Google as a way to help web content load faster– at the time it was created, it took 19 seconds on average to load a mobile webpage on a 3G connection. Today, AMP continues to be a helpful way for websites and publishers —especially those without large development teams— to easily create great web experiences.”