UPDATE: This article has been updated with a statement from Google. –Paul
Brave announced today that it is rolling out a new feature called De-AMP that lets users bypass Google-hosted AMP pages and navigate directly to the content’s publisher.
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“AMP harms users’ privacy, security and internet experience, and just as bad, AMP helps Google further monopolize and control the direction of the web,” the Brave Privacy Team writes. “AMP pages are served from Google’s servers, though designed to look like they’re coming from the original publisher’s site.”
AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, is a non-standard subset of HTML created and used by Google, ostensibly to improve website performance, mostly via preloading. But Brave says that AMP is harmful to privacy and security, and to the web in general. It gives Google even deeper insights into which web pages people are viewing and how they interact with them. It fools users into believing that they are interacting with the original sources of content. And if offloads more and more of the web to Google servers, from which AMP pages are served.
AMP is also bad for performance and usability. “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,’ as revealed in Google’s disclosures to the DOJ, pg. 90,” Brave notes. “In many cases, AMP is so bad for performance and usability that web users literally pay to avoid AMP.”
De-AMP is now available in Brave Nightly and Beta builds, and it will be enabled by default in the upcoming 1.38 Desktop and Android versions (and on iOS soon after).
Google has issued a statement regarding Brave’s stance on AMP.
“These allegations are misleading, conflate a number of different web projects and standards, and repeat a number of false claims,” a Google representative told me. “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.”
dftf
<p>I’m not sure I agree with the "AMP is also bad for performance [,…] and AMP pages can actually load slower [than visiting the site directly]" assessment. I nearly-always find the AMP versions <em>do </em>load-faster than visiting the site-directly, even in browsers where I have ad- and tracker-blockers running.</p><p><br></p><p><em>However</em>, AMP versions of sites often <em>don’t function correctly</em>: they are fine if you just want to read the text on the page, but I find most interactive-elements, like embedded videos, comment-sections, charts and forms, are usually broken. So I’d also not shed-a-tear to see AMP disappear, either.</p>
dftf
<p>Many news-articles you click on in <em>Google Search </em>or<em> Google News</em> within a browser on a mobile-device will take you to an AMP version of a site: if you look at the URL, it will start something like amp.google.com rather-than the normal URL you’d expect for that website.</p><p><br></p><p>If you have installed an app for a news site, you won’t get AMP versions in there. Nor will you in any desktop-browser, unless you’ve installed an add-on or extension that modifies the way your browser reports itself and was to tell <em>Google </em>you’re running on a mobile-device.</p>
dftf
<p><em>Edge </em>on Windows, macOS or Linux won’t show AMP sites by-default no. No desktop browser should.</p><p><br></p><p>If you mean <em>Edge </em>on Android then due to its low usage-share, Google likely just assume you’re on a desktop and go to the non-AMP site. Same as for <em>Firefox: </em>many sites I visit in the Android version load-up the desktop version of a site, as the sites see "Firefox" or "Gecko" when the request for the page is made and so only go for the desktop site as at 0.5% share it’s very-unlikely a Firefox user will ever be on a mobile-device. (On Apple devices, due to the forced use of the WebKit engine, this might not be the case there.)</p>