Brave is bypassing Google AMP pages because they’re ‘harmful to users’

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Brave announced a new feature on Tuesday called De-AMP, which automatically jumps past any page rendered with the Accelerated Mobile Pages framework and instead takes users to the original website.

Brave framed De-AMP as a privacy feature and didn't mince words about it's stance toward the web. It warned that the next version of the software will be even worse.

Brave's stance is a particularly strong one, but the tide has turned against them over the last couple of years. A group of open-source contributors manage the framework that was originally created to simplify and speed up mobile websites. It was controversial from the beginning and smelled like a company trying to exert more control over the web. Over time, more companies and users became concerned about that control and were not happy with the idea of the search engine ranking the pages in search results. The rest of the internet eventually figured out how to make good mobile sites, which made the projects like Facebook Instant Articles less important.

A number of popular apps and browser extensions make it easy for users to skip over AMP pages, and in recent years, publishers have moved away from using it altogether. There is a lawsuit that says thatAMP helped make non-AMP ads load slower, and that it was part of the antitrust fight against Google.

Brave was the hardest person to go after AMP. De-AMP is similar to the Facebook Container extension created by Mozilla in order to prevent Facebook from tracking users across the web. A new feature is a statement of values. Brave has been a target for years, too, as it has published blog posts complaining about the privacy features of Google and even built its own search engine. Brave is a privacy-first browser, so it makes sense that it would choose a villain.

Brave holds only a small portion of the browser market, and Chrome continues to dominate. Even if the internet turns against it, it won't die until it's killed.