What do you want to know

• Brave is rolling out a new feature for its browser that will bypass AMP pages and take users directly to the original website.
• De-AMP is designed to rewrite links and URLs to block pages rendered with AMP.
• It will be enabled by default in upcoming desktop and Android 1.38 versions of the browser.

Brave has joined the growing chorus of organizations that want Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) gone. He announced a new feature that allows his browser to automatically skip Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs), and he didn’t mince words to denounce this “harmful” framework.

In a blog post, Brave explained that the new De-AMP is designed to allow users to browse pages rendered with AMP and navigate directly to original websites. It works by rewriting links and URLs to avoid AMP pages.

In cases where this is not possible, “Brave will monitor page fetching and redirect users away from AMP pages before the page is even rendered, preventing AMP/Google code from loading and executing,” a said the company.

The new feature will be enabled by default in future versions of the browser (v1.38) for desktop computers and Android phones, iOS devices will follow soon after. That said, it is now available on Nightly and Beta builds.

In addition to these steps, Brave plans to introduce another way to bypass AMP pages. It will extend its “existing debounce function to detect when AMP URLs are about to be visited, and instead direct users to the true version of the page.” This feature will be released in version 1.40.

Brave aims for De-AMP to preserve users’ privacy, security, and internet experience, describing AMP as “harmful to users and to the web in general”.

He noted that AMP gives Google a broader view of the pages people are interacting with, confuses users about the site they’re visiting, and allows Google to monopolize the web more. Brave even warned that the next version of AMP will be even more harmful.

The latest move is yet another nail in the coffin for AMP. A group of online publishers, including Vox Media and parent company Bustle BDG, recently announced a decision to remove AMP as it weighs on their ad revenue.

Google wasn’t immediately available when Android Central was contacted for a statement, but the company told The Verge it disagreed with Brave’s allegations. A company representative said the bullet points “are misleading, confuse a number of different web projects and standards, and repeat a number of misrepresentations.”

When Google launched AMP in 2015, it touted the framework’s ability to load mobile web pages faster. However, Brave claims that “AMP is bad for performance and usability” and that it “only improves median performance.”

Brave has always spoken out about Google’s privacy practices and launched its own search engine last year to challenge the search giant. However, since Brave only has a small share of the search and web browser markets, these efforts are unlikely to hurt Google’s dominance.