Brave browser fixes the internet, can now bypass Google AMP pages
What you need to know
A new Brave browser update will bypass Google AMP pages.
The new browser will automatically skip Google AMP and take users directly to the destination URL.
AMP has long been something privacy advocates have claimed should be avoided.
No more clicking through a Google search and seeing an AMP page.
Brave, a popular web browser across multiple devices, has announced a new feature that will allow users to bypass Google AMP pages when clicking through from Google searches.
The new feature, which is available as part of the latest Brave Nightly and Beta releases, will prevent Google AMP pages from being displayed and instead forward users to the original destination address instead. The announcement came via blog post.
Brave is rolling out a new feature called De-AMP, which allows Brave users to bypass Google-hosted AMP pages, and instead visit the content’s publisher directly. AMP harms users’ privacy, security and internet experience, and just as bad, AMP helps Google further monopolize and control the direction of the Web.
Brave will automatically redirect users where possible and they’ll never even see the AMP page. That also means that Google code will not be expected on-device, preventing it from running any of the tracking activities that it is known for.
Brave will protect users from AMP in several ways. Where possible, De-AMP will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from visiting AMP pages altogether. 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.
Google AMP now effectively offers a cached version of the web page that people would normally access. Google says that’s supposed to increase performance, which it can do. But it also allows Google to have more visibility of what people are accessing, something that privacy advocates have long railed against.
Brave says the new feature is rolling out to those Nightly and Beta builds on the desktop now and an updated iOS app will be available soon.
