In this blog post, I will be telling you about AMP and how does Brave protect users from Google AMP.
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 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.
Also Read: Why Google AMP is Harmful to Content Publisher
De-AMP is now available in our Nightly and Beta versions and will be enabled by default in the upcoming 1.38 Desktop and Android versions, and will be released on iOS soon after.
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.
How Does Brave Protect Users From AMP?
Brave protects users from AMP in three steps.
First, Brave will modify fetched pages that frequently link to AMP pages, so that links point to the publisher versions of pages instead of the AMP versions of those same pages. Examples of such pages include Google Search.
When De-AMP is enabled in Brave, these pages will be able to interact with these pages as normal, just with the benefit of never being forced (or tricked) into visiting AMP pages.
Second, Brave has modified Chromium to watch for when AMP pages are being loaded. When De-AMP is enabled, Brave will look for the AMP HTML markup in pages as they’re being loaded (and before they’re being rendered).
If Brave sees an AMP page being loaded, the browser will stop loading the current page and instead load the “true” version of the page.
This is done before the page is rendered, preventing Google’s AMP scripts and images from being fetched and executed, dramatically reducing the amount of information Google learns about your browsing.
Also Read: How to Watch Novela E & News Channels on StarTimes ON
Finally, Brave plans a third-step to protect users from AMP pages. Brave will extend our existing debouncing feature to detect when AMP URLs are about to be visited, and instead navigate users to the true version of the page.
This work is under development and is planned for version 1.40.
De-AMP Feature Enabled in Settings
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.
