Webpage acceleration tech deemed harmful by rivals
Brave, the browser maker, and DuckDuckGo, the web search service, have both taken aim at AMP, Google’s controversial web publishing framework. Brave on Tuesday introduced a feature called De-AMP that lets those using the Brave browser avoid Google-hosted AMP pages and go straight to publisher content on standard web pages. De-AMP will rewrite fetched web pages that link to AMP pages so their links point to the publisher versions of those pages. Brave’s browser, which uses a modified version of Google Chrome’s Chromium, will watch for when AMP pages are being loaded and stop them before they can render. Doing so prevents Google’s AMP scripts and images from being fetched and executed while also reducing the ad giant’s ability to see web traffic and understand where it’s going. And in Brave 1.40 – the current version is 1.37.116 – the plan is to extend Brave’s debouncing capability to detect when AMP URLs are about to be visited, and instead send users to the standard version of the page. DuckDuckGo on Tuesday said its app and extensions now protect against Google AMP. Those loading or sharing a Google AMP page via DuckDuckGo’s iOS, Android, or Mac apps, or using its Chrome or Firefox extensions, will see the publisher’s regular webpage instead of the Google AMP version. AMP, as Google describes it, is a way to create web pages using a subset of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, along with unique markup and a CDN for caching.
