Just the Browser

> aims to remove: Most AI features, Copilot, Shopping features, ...

I grew up on DOS, and my first browser was IE3. My first tech book as a kid was for HTML[1], and I was in absolute awe at what you could make with all the tags, especially interactive form controls.

I remember Firefox being revolutionary for simply having tabs. Every time a new Visual Basic (starting with DOS) release came out, I was excited at the new standardized UI controls we had available.

I remember when Tweetie for iPhone OS came out and invented pull-down refresh that literally every app and mobile OS uses now.

Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing?

[1] Can someone help me find this book? I've been looking for years. It used the Mosaic browser.

I had a look at what it actually does in the Firefox settings and all it seems to do is to disable one AI feature flag, change the default search engine, and then set a few other flags that are changes that you may or may not want to make, unrelated to AI. Not sure you want to run a 3rd party shell script just to do that…

A few weeks ago I noticed some mysterious app was killing my (poor) internet downloading a large file.

It was chrome, downloading a multi GB file without any sort of UI hints that it was doing so. A generative AI file.

Is this why chrome uses so much ram? They’ve just been pushing up the memory usage in preparation for this day, hoping I wouldn’t notice the extra software now running on my (old, outdated) system?

It's not "just the browser". It doesn't disable all the "features". In fact, it disables single-digit number of "features" in each of the browsers, i.e. mostly useless.

Properly deshittifying browser takes effort, such as Ungoogled Chromium or Pale Moon. That effort is underfunded, and projects like this are honeypots to distract from serious attempts at doing it.

I don't believe someone can understand the problem, and make _this_ in good faith.

Firefox:

"Something that hasn't been made clear: Firefox will have an option to completely disable all AI features. We've been calling it the AI kill switch internally. I'm sure it'll ship with a less murderous name, but that's how seriously and absolutely we're taking this."

https://mastodon.social/@firefoxwebdevs/115740500373677782

Does it also remove Firefox's translation models that uses local CPU? I find that feature very useful and totally obliterated my dependence on Chrome's translate features. Models are surprisingly good, especially for languages like English, Spanish and German.

I can see the use of LLMs and machine learning tools like TTS, translators and grammar checkers to be integrated to browser, but only depending on local models or better, like Firefox's case to CPU optimized local models.

> Windows: Open a PowerShell prompt as Administrator

The need for this is mainly on work machines that are locked down; if admin mode is necessary then it's DOA...

A local MITM proxy that doesn't require elevated rights and which filters out everything unwanted, starting with ads, would be nice I think.

That's a nice idea, but I'm hesitant to use automatic installation scripts like this, even if I review them carefully. I prefer manual steps – downloading the file, placing it in the correct directory. Also, I use custom profile directories for my web browsers, so this script wouldn't apply to my setup.

  Search for the Terminal in your applications list and open it.
  Next, copy the below command, paste it into the window (Ctrl+V or Cmd+V), and press the Enter/Return key:

   & ([scriptblock]::Create((irm "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/corbindavenport/just-the-browser/main/main.ps1")))

For Firefox, I think that disabling the telemetry and the studies is not going to help Mozilla improve the browser.

> No. Just the Browser uses group policies that are fully supported by web browsers, usually intended for IT departments in companies or other large organizations

This is cool! I was expecting a script, which tend to be brittle. This is a great way to do it.

I like how the bash script to install this starts with getting sudo access :)

If you go through the manual steps on mac os, the file gets deleted when Firefox is updated.

Is there a way to persist the file even after updates?

Suggesting bash/curl'ing to get a 12 lines JSON file is just... Not great. We've seen a shitload of developers account getting compromised (with all the supply chain attacks) and developers account turning evil.

Also there's absolutely zero need to be sudo to put a JSON config file for Firefox on Linux.

You're basically bash/curl'ing the kitchen sink, with all the security risks that entails, executing a shell script as root (which may or may not be malicious now or at some point in the future), just to...

Put a 12 lines JSON file in a user's Firefox config folder.

Way to go my "fremen" brothers [1].

[1] the "fremen" in Dune as those who adore the Shai-Hulud

I noticed that Safari is not mentioned - is it because is not relevant on Desktop or because it didn't go through the same enshittification process as the other two major browsers?

It'll be good to just use the browser again, so I will def be trying this out. But I can't help but feel that for simple dumb questions it's a lot easier to just ask AI bots instead of searching on a web browser. Does this just depend on the context? Example most recently I wanted to know how many miles would a pair of running shoes last. AI can answer this instantly (hooray instant gratification) and googling something like this would take longer. And of course this is why they shove this stuff on the browser.

I guess then, the browser and AI just serve different purposes now?

there are already a bunch of electron and chromium projects that give you just a simple and highly performant browser sandbox.

can you remove webrtc, localstorage, web workers, and customize fonts?

How intrusive is AI in a browser that you feel you need another browser that advertises no-ai? Is it a privacy thing? Like for me in edge, it is completely out of the way.

Nice touch - seeing the Windows 95 IE favicon took me back for a while.

would be great to block all cookie popups. Pry would need to be a chrome extension

Really cool!!

What is sad is that we need anti-AI measures.

Google and others really ruined the web.

I also today tried Qwant and for the first time, in a long while, the results Qwant delivered were objectively better than from Google Search. What the heck is Google doing?

Just give me a Chromium based browser make it open source and a verifiable build and I’ll pay you twenty dollars.

[dead]

I mean this is an Anti-AI move. I am not saying you should join the pro ai but hating on AI just because its AI is not a good look