Brave Is Bypassing Google AMP Pages Because They're 'Harmful To Users' (theverge.com) 75
Brave announced a new feature for its browser on Tuesday: De-AMP, which automatically jumps past any page rendered with Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages framework and instead takes users straight to the original website. The Verge reports: "Where possible, De-AMP will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from visiting AMP pages altogether," Brave said in a blog post. "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." Brave framed De-AMP as a privacy feature and didn't mince words about its stance toward Google's version of the web. "In practice, AMP is harmful to users and to the Web at large," Brave's blog post said, before explaining that AMP gives Google even more knowledge of users' browsing habits, confuses users, and can often be slower than normal web pages. And it warned that the next version of AMP -- so far just called AMP 2.0 -- will be even worse.
Brave's stance is a particularly strong one, but the tide has turned hard against AMP over the last couple of years. Google originally created the framework in order to simplify and speed up mobile websites, and AMP is now managed by a group of open-source contributors. It was controversial from the very beginning and smelled to some like Google trying to exert even more control over the web. Over time, more companies and users grew concerned about that control and chafed at the idea that Google would prioritize AMP pages in search results. Plus, the rest of the internet eventually figured out how to make good mobile sites, which made AMP -- and similar projects like Facebook Instant Articles -- less important.
Brave's stance is a particularly strong one, but the tide has turned hard against AMP over the last couple of years. Google originally created the framework in order to simplify and speed up mobile websites, and AMP is now managed by a group of open-source contributors. It was controversial from the very beginning and smelled to some like Google trying to exert even more control over the web. Over time, more companies and users grew concerned about that control and chafed at the idea that Google would prioritize AMP pages in search results. Plus, the rest of the internet eventually figured out how to make good mobile sites, which made AMP -- and similar projects like Facebook Instant Articles -- less important.
Brave! (Score:3, Informative)
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This has been available for years via extensions. I'm not sure building it into the browser is necessarily the best idea. I suppose making it the default is quite valuable.
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Brave is stupid here. More than half the world depends on highly stripped, optimized, and compressed web pages. No, good mobile sites are not about whether it looks good on a screen, it's about whether you can afford to view them. AMP actually cuts browsing cost substantial
AMP makes sharing links a challenge. (Score:5, Informative)
Re: AMP makes sharing links a challenge. (Score:3)
This is the absolute worst part of AMP. But if you use the share link feature, rather than going to the address bar and copying from there, you can tap "copy link" or something like that and you'll get the unadulterated link in your clipboard.
Jesus dystopian Christ (Score:5, Insightful)
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My web browser has one job: interpret HTML/CSS and show me the thing. If it comes to it, I'd rather write my own web browser than have Google decide how I get to perceive the web.
Javascript is a convenience and AFAIK seems required for AMP. If you want to insert ads server side, fine. They won't be running unchecked third-party s0cripts.
Re:Jesus dystopian Christ (Score:5, Informative)
I'd rather write my own web browser than have Google decide how I get to perceive the web
Just a quick check. Have you read the standard for current HTML/CSS? Not including JS, all the different HTML5 parts added together makes a standard that is thousands of pages long. It is impossible at this point for any one person to know the complete standard, it is just not a doable thing. You, by yourself, can never write your own HTML5 compliant browser. Not only that, the HTML5 standard is considered a "living standard" so it's changing all of the time, thank you Google. So even if you and a team got together to write a browser that implemented maybe 60% of the standard today, by the time a year or so goes by, you'll maybe have high 50%-ish compliance. This is literally why Microsoft just gave up and why Mozilla has such a hard time. Google has literally thousands of engineers working on new standards to add to HTML all the time. You cannot win, Chrome is the Web at this point. Chrome is the standard at this point and everyone else is just reskinning Google's code base save for Mozilla.
Like you can head over to whatwg's site that compiles the current spec and set your page down button to jump full page with press and set the repeat button when holding down to max and you'll be sitting there for a few minutes scrolling through the entire standard. The HTML5 standard is massive. It would literally be easier by massive measure to try and memorize the OOXML standard than the HTML5 spec. And that's before even adding in JavaScript. The HTML standard is unknowable by a single person and it has been engineered on purpose to be that way. There's just not a "I'll write my own browser". That's no longer a thing. If you want, head over to the Gemini Protocol and read up on the gemtext format. You can literally whip up a client in a few minutes. But the HTML standard is written to ensure, nobody else can ever "write their own". And if some medium sized group does write their own, the standards committee membership is made up to ensure that Google gets to write and approve whatever Google wants as often as Google wants it. Chrome still allows third party cookies and guess what's still a thing? Even though every other browser has stopped allowing third party cookies. As soon as a Facebook lib has been loaded, first thing they check is if third party cookies is enabled. Because Google allows it and the standard is mum on the whole third party cookie because that's Google's bread and butter and Google dictates the HTML/CSS/JS standard.
HTML isn't an independent thing anymore. It's Google. There's some bureaucracy that allows Mozilla/Apple/Microsoft to slow Google down sometimes. But Google is running the show and that's all there is. So there IS NOT a "I'll write my own browser". I think there's got to be a dispelling of this notion that HTML today is roughly the same as HTML in 1998. The full standard has grown something like 1,000 times over since then. Like you could fill volumes of books with the standard if you were so incline to just print the HTML/CSS parts. And you'd have a section of a library if you printed the JS parts along with it. I try my best all the time to convey the sheer size of the current HTML standard. It's really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really big. I don't think people understand the sheer scope of it anymore. Sometimes I think people just think the standard is the same one they learned back in the 90s or early 00s and it is not. Not by a long-shot.
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I'm sure you're right, but in this hypothetical dystopian future, I'm probably not aiming for 100% coverage and compatibility with HTML 5. I might be willing to sacrifice some functionality here or there.
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I'm sure you're right, but in this hypothetical dystopian future, I'm probably not aiming for 100% coverage and compatibility with HTML 5. I might be willing to sacrifice some functionality here or there.
This is neither hypothetical nor the future. It is the actual present, unfortunately.
Re:Jesus dystopian Christ (Score:5, Interesting)
Why bother writing your own browser? (Score:2)
Why on earth would anybody want to write their own web browser in this day and age? Like slack_justyb said above, the standard is so huge, that you'd simply be wasting your time, and whatever you did come up with would be utterly useless for 99.9% of users. The world does not need another web browser (just like it doesn't need another Linux distro or desktop environment). Get involved in the standards that are out there and work to make them better. Chromium and Firefox is more than enough.
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A) It's fun
B) Monocultures are problematic, the world needs more browsers.
Re:Jesus dystopian Christ (Score:5, Insightful)
And what's really sick is that 90% of the time we just want to look at text, which just needs a hand full of formatting tags to look good.
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If a webpage redirects me to google.com/amp/whatever, should my browser not accept that redirect request and send me to the requested site rather than inferring where I want to go?
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AMP is still bad for a bunch of reasons, though.
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The idea was to create a standard set of libraries and metadata for pages, instead of them all importing their own megabytes of buggy Javascript. In theory it's not a bad idea, it reduces load times a lot (all the libraries will be cached and pre-compiled) and makes pages more searchable and more mobile friendly, while disallowing user-hostile crap like pop-overs and cookie banners.
The problem people have is that the libraries are all stored on Google servers, so the browser has to contact them if they are
They're not wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't always agree with the ideas of the Brave developers, but "In practice, AMP is harmful to users and to the Web at large," is very much true. Anything touched by Alphabet is extremely harmful to humanity as a whole.
Re:They're not wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Like...maps. Very harmful to humanity knowing where everything is.
Like...translation. Very harmful to humanity knowing what the other person is saying.
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You mean the web sites that show illegal "we're going to track you" banners every time? Yeah, those are harmful.
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Re:They're not wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
Just don't use them then. don't use maps, waze, translate, android or any of it. Simple.
That's exactly what he's doing, and now he has a browser that makes it easy for him. So why exactly are you butthurt over it? That someone dares to use the web differently than you do?
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Just don't use them then. don't use maps, waze, translate, android or any of it. Simple.
That's exactly what he's doing, and now he has a browser that makes it easy for him. So why exactly are you butthurt over it? That someone dares to use the web differently than you do?
He didn't state in the comment I was responding to that he was doing that did he? So that's your assumption. Also what makes you assume i'm butthurt over anything? He was butthurt over those services so i was simply telling him since he is butthurt over those services then just don't use them. It's that simple. no one is forcing anyone to use them either you do or you don't.
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The "no one is forcing anyone" argument is tired and unhelpful.
In most web services, we understand that users are the product, sold to ad agencies. We're not getting anything for free, there is an implicit contract by which we pay for their services by allowing them to attempt to sell things to us. When Google or any other big provider renegotiates the terms of that contract, we are allowed to voice our displeasure, rather than just walking away. That's how this all works. And that's how things change for t
Re:They're not wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
I didn't state it, because it's irrelevant, but I don't use Google Maps if I can avoid it. It's irrelevant because me not using it doesn't make it not harmful. The full page interruptions that won't even let you reject all tracking at all, let alone as easily as you can accept all tracking, are illegal, and their getting away with that flagrant violation of the law is a major problem. Also, people send me links to Google Maps when they could send me standardized geo: urls instead. Google is too big for its own good. It needs to be broken up into smaller independent entities, if just to bring the cockiness level down a bunch of notches. Calling my sentiment "butthurt" is like telling me to let other people steal shit and that I can just not steal shit if I don't want to. Google is being evil. I'll call that out, even if the Google shills mod me down for it.
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I use Brave. They're disabled.
This could have been in Firefox (Score:2)
But Firefox has Pocket and sells VPN access. Tradeoffs, I guess.
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As a Firefox user since it was called Phoenix this may be what gets me to switch my browser.
Re:This could have been in Firefox (Score:4, Insightful)
Mozilla still gets almost all of their funding from Google's not-a-monopoly money.
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>"But Firefox has Pocket and sells VPN access. Tradeoffs, I guess."
I am not sure I see a tradeoff. Pocket is disabled with a single setting. And who cares if they sell a VPN service? I agree they are distractions, but Mozilla is trying to find ways to continue to exist. It isn't easy in a Google-dominated world.
Besides, my original posting linked to a page which showed the Addon that blocks AMP in Firefox. Easy peasy. I do agree that is something that Firefox should allow natively, though.
Two major sins, really (Score:3, Interesting)
It adds a bunch of fluff, Google CDNs; and not-invented-here incompatible tweaks; but doesn't actually do anything, in terms of load times, page sizes, etc. that perfectly normal web pages aren't eminently capable of if you just don't add dependencies to a dozen different ad brokers and 3rd party analytics libraries and size your assets like everyone has a 100/100 link to a copy of your page a handful of milliseconds away.
This isn't to say that the...somewhat idiosyncratic...product of years of design by comittee that is modern web standards is some sort of engineering ideal; but when you combine the fact that most of what was valid back when 9600 baud modems were the target is still valid and supported(sometimes with modest syntactic changes) and things like javascript engines are about a zillion times faster than they used to be you really don't need some deeply suspect pseudostandard to get good performance.
Re:Two major sins, really (Score:5, Interesting)
but doesn't actually do anything,
You're missing the point. It's not about doing anyting useful, it's about a web designer being able to show off how convoluted they can make something. They can put this on their CV and say, "I did that".
Recruiters eat it up.
Re: Two major sins, really (Score:2)
I would avoid hiring anyone who thought AMP experience was something valuable enough to put on a resume. That's like a developer putting Word on their resume.
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...and size your assets like everyone has a 100/100 link to a copy of your page a handful of milliseconds away.
Gives a good justification for dial-up never coming back, and investing in a minimum broadband speed. Much like the push for gaming realism justifies the current direction of GPU development, and always-on connections justify games with a likewise necessity.
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"doesn't actually do anything, in terms of load times, page sizes, etc. that perfectly normal web pages aren't eminently capable of if you just don't add dependencies to a dozen different ad brokers and 3rd party analytics libraries and size your assets like everyone has a 100/100 link to a copy of your page a handful of milliseconds away."
Because everyone has access to people capable of doing that?
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Doesn't it take more effort to put a dozen ad brokers in your page than not to put any in?
Re: Two major sins, really (Score:2)
Just measure it. Whenever your page loads go over a hundred KiB or so, there should be some sort of pipeline check to reject the build.
It's not that people can't do it. It's that they're fucking lazy and their bosses like it that way. Bosses don't want to spend money on quality software. They believe that software is throwaway and that you should move fast and break things.
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Appeasing someone internally who is demanding a dashboard of rich engagement metrics or something, on the other hand, is likely to be a problem.
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that perfectly normal web pages aren't eminently capable of if you just don't add dependencies to a dozen different ad brokers and 3rd party analytics libraries and size your assets like everyone has a 100/100 link to a copy of your page a handful of milliseconds away.
Yes. It's targeted at news sites. And Google ranks pages that implement AMP higher in search results. It's mafia style tactics, but it works and everyone should take advantage of it.
AMP has two halves - the browser side and the edge caching side. If Brave implements both, it could be a win. Loading the page does not even require the client sending an HTTP request to the origin server or leaking your true IP address. And they can selectively ignore tags that they deem bad for privacy or make it configu
add-on (Score:5, Informative)
I have been using this add-on since the start of AMP push https://www.daniel.priv.no/web... [daniel.priv.no]
Works on Firefox, Chrome and Edge, do not need to use a "crypto" browser for this :D
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I prefer Decentraleyes. It allows the page to load in AMP mode, which usually easier to navigate and cuts some of the user-hostile stuff, but uses local copies of the libraries to preserve privacy.
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Ya'll know the crypto component is easily disabled, right?
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Ya'll know the crypto component is easily disabled, right?
I know i don't have to in Firefox, Midori or Epiphany Brave is google chrome under the hood.
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No, Brave is Chromium open source under the hood, and if you don't understand the distinction, go back to the playground and let the adults talk, ok?
Kill it with fire (Score:2)
AMP is one of the worst ideas ever concocted. It needs to die yesterday.
I have had a de-AMPing app installed on my phone for years and years. However it still constantly sneaks in via vectors like Google Discover.
Privacy and control (Score:3)
> "In practice, AMP is harmful to users and to the Web at large," Brave's blog post said, before explaining that AMP gives Google even more knowledge of users' browsing habits"
Yes, this is very true. It is just too bad Brave is based on Google's browser base/engine, which Google still controls and to which Brave is amplifying that control (pun intended). If you DO care about not letting Google have so much influence and control, then you won't use any browser based on Chromium and will use Firefox, instead.
https://www.ghacks.net/2019/08... [ghacks.net]
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So Brave has left in the harmful bits of Chromium? First I've heard of that.
Re:Privacy and control (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole thing is arguably harmful in that Google uses it to push their vision of the web over standards bodies to the detriment of users.
On one hand we have Apple, they don't implement features everyone wants. On the other, we have Google, they implement features no one wants. And then there's Firefox, they have completely lost their way. They eliminated plugin functionality people were using and never replaced it, they keep re-enabling Pocket in every new FF version after I disable it in an effort to collect PII, they change the interface every six months or less, and they've been ignoring bugs which have persisted for years.
The web is a massive shit show today.
Re: Privacy and control (Score:2)
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every update of firefox feels like april's fools day indeed, chromium is open source chrome without most of the google shenanigans no one wants, and brave is basically chromium with an incorporated working ad-blocker. i actually use all of them.
The web is a massive shit show today.
the web has always been an improvised evolving mess but we have seen much, much worse. remember internet explorer? and as a former web developer i could tell a lot of horror stories from safari :O) actually, i would say that in retrospect google chrome has been one o
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And then on another hand, we have web developers, who perpetuate the problem by embracing every damn stupid feature Google and Mozilla give us, and use them shamelessly to help make their designs "POP".
I die a little more inside every time a web site tells me my web browser is "out of date" or "not supported".
Re:Privacy and control (Score:5, Funny)
So Brave has left in the harmful bits of Chromium? First I've heard of that.
Brave is just re-compiled Chromium source code. What's different? Unless you go through all the many thousands of lines of code ... who knows.
... and it works. *facepalm*
But, here's what I do know:
When I first tried Brave, nearly 3 years ago, one of the things I didn't like was there didn't seem to be any way to change the location of the browser cache. I posted a question on their support forum and got a reply from one of the "developers" who seemed to be genuinely puzzled and couldn't understand why I would want to do such a thing.
After some back and forth trying to explain why I want to change the location of the browser cache and pointing out that every major browser (even pitiful old Internet Explorer) has had this feature since forever, I was told that someone had already submitted a request for this and I could track it at [some url].
Fast forward to today. I check the support url and the request for user configuration of the browser cache is still open and nothing has been done. The only discussion on the issue has been someone who tried to create a symlink from the default cache location to a RAM disk, but somehow the symlink is reset every time you start Brave. The entire discussion got derailed talking about that, and nothing else.
Then it occurred to me, Brave is really just Google Chrome. What if I just used the same command line switch that Chrome uses? So I search the interwebs for "change chrome browser cache location", I find the appropriate command line switch
These idiots don't even understand how their own browser works. Have they actually done any development work on Brave? Have they actually done anything other than a search/replace in the source code, changing all occurances of "Chrome" to "Brave"?
Ramdisk (Score:3)
mount -t tmpfs -o size=512m tmpfs $HOME/.cache/google-chrome/Default/
Throw it in a shell script wrapper and exec chrome
I don't see the problem.
Windows (Score:2)
If you are so concerned with privacy that you are putting caches in ram disks, you've got a lot of other problems if you are using Windows. Browser cache is the least of your problems.
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>"These idiots don't even understand how their own browser works. "
That's because it *isn't* their own browser. It is Chromium with only a tweaked UI. And whatever Google does to it, all these Chrom* browsers get, whether they know it or not, want it or not, or understand it or not. And those crying "but Chromium is open source", yeah, it is in NAME ONLY. NOBODY gets to really influence what goes in it except Google.
That is not a good thing.
The proliferation of these many, many Google-controlled brow
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I've been able to sign up with Digital Ocean and others with just payment information, wh
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Google sponsored projects (Score:2)
It's Google. Assume it's not in your best interest and reject it outright.
Then study it carefully. In some very rare cases, something Google is pushing is actually beneficial to non-Google users. It's rare though, so if you don't have the time, just reject it as a general sanity rule for your privacy.
Unpopular opinion (Score:3)
Re:Unpopular opinion (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree. The idea of AMP is good - relying on Google's implementation is bad. If they want to be the privacy browser, AMP can help - your request and IP never reach the page host as it's designed for edge caching. They just don't want to run edge-caching servers. If they implement their own version of AMP server-side, they can protect users' privacy AND accelerate page loads.
But they must make absolutely sure that the URL of the original page is the one that shows or gets shared out. A one-click button to de-amp the page and go to the true URL would be fine.
Amp obscures the open nature of the internet (Score:4, Insightful)
I received a phishing email yesterday via Gmail that was encoded in AMP. It made it impossible to look at the source behind the convincing phishing attempt to see where the links really pointed. If we're going to obscure the source of an email, why don't we just encrypt them and be done with it?
Daily Shared news, I strip of AMP links first (Score:2)
About time (Score:2)
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>"About time Somebody stepped up to Google's dictatorship."
Are you kidding? They have ZERO moral high-ground because they base 99% of their "offering" on Google Chromium, giving Google almost complete control over how Brave interprets and displays the web.
Besides, with addons, both browsers, Firefox and Chrom*, (there really are only two multiplatform browsers now) could already block AMP and have been able to for years.
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>" extensions are not basic functionality -- which is especially important on mobile where you cannot install extensions at all."
Firefox mobile has extensions, including Adblock.
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>"Firefox mobile is slower than a retarded tortoise on drugs."
It is true that Firefox mobile is a mess. It was pretty damn good when it was updated to Quantum, then last year they "did" something to it. Hopefully they are working on that.