Just the Browser - Just the Browser
justthebrowser.com
Remove AI features, telemetry data reporting, sponsored content, product integrations, and other annoyances from web browsers.
      • katy ✨@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        2 hours ago

        not sure about swiping but vivaldi definitely does have tab stacking/grouping (customisable) and vertical tabs; librewolf either has it by default since they baked in tab groups into upstream or it’s able to be enabled in about:config! i just don’t know if it’s officially in yet since i mostly use nightly.

  • guywithoutaname@lemmy.worldEnglish
    371·
    12 hours ago

    FYI if you want to edit the Firefox policies directly and save it in /etc/firefox/policies/policies.json, this is the file they are using

      "policies": {
    "DisableFirefoxStudies": true,
    "DisableTelemetry": true,
    "DontCheckDefaultBrowser": true,
    "FirefoxHome": {
      "SponsoredStories": false,
      "SponsoredTopSites": false,
      "Stories": false
    },
    "GenerativeAI": {
      "Enabled": false
    },
    "SearchEngines": {
      "Remove": [
        "Perplexity"
      ]
    }
  }
}`
    • flying_sheep@lemmy.mlEnglish
      272·
      8 hours ago

      This shows how unhinged the whole recent hate on Firefox is. Turning off GenAI is literally one single setting AND Mozilla is doing things infinitely better than others (e.g. the translation feature is completely local, and having a chatbot in the sidebar is opt-in)

      • cley_faye@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        29 minutes ago

        This shows how unhinged the whole recent hate on Firefox is. Turning off GenAI is literally one single setting

        We heard of that “kill switch” way, way after the general outrage. Also, other software and services have an “AI killswitch” that conveniently fails to work from time to time, and is fixed only when people notice it.

        It’s not unhinged to point finger at someone doing something that, from experience, as always turned bad. Also, if you think the hate (I use your word, I’d say distrust) for Firefox is only related to the recent “AI” push, you’re severely misinformed.

      • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        54 minutes ago

        I get a lot of hate for it but some AI inclusions are genuinely good.

        Firefox’s local AI translation is infinitely better than scraping all the info and sending it to Google Translate servers, and nobody will convince me otherwise.

        The screen reader improvements that use AI are good as well. Has anybody here used screen readers for web pages? They are awful. It’s good that someone is willing to improve them. My sister is blind so this matters a lot to me.

        The (locally generated) AI assisted link previews aren’t for me as I imagine they’re unnecessarily taxing on older PCs, but they’re not exactly an evil inclusion. It’s an attempt at adding

        I’m not a fan of the LLM sidebar, but it’s opt-in and you can at least choose open models or even host your own, I guess.

        The hate is overblown.

      • Baguette@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        9·
        7 hours ago

        That’s because the people who are fine or happy with firefox aren’t the type of people to talk about it, the vocal ones are the people that have complaints

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      5 hours ago

      I have my settings in /etc/firefox and a symlink to distro’s /usr/lib/firefox-esr/distribution. Easier to remember.

    • CheerfulPassionFruit@lemmy.worldEnglish
      141·
      11 hours ago

      As a libreworlf user, I’d have to advise some caution to regular users. A lot of sites are broken as images won’t load and “fancier” web apps don’t work super well either. Yes it’s an easy fix, but expecting someone to go look in the config files to get an image to load is too much for a lot of people

    • NotSteve_@piefed.caEnglish
      36·
      22 hours ago

      I really like the Zen browser. It’s Firefox-based, open source and privacy focused with AI removed but it’s also really pretty and is built around vertical tabs

    • in_my_honest_opinion@piefed.socialEnglish
      271·
      2 hours ago

      For those interested

      https://librewolf.net/installation/

      https://codeberg.org/librewolf/issues/issues/1919

      Thanks to @acockworkorange@mander.xyz for the context below.

      The settings that Mozilla packaged in were the main big ones, Claude, ChatGPT etc, it didn’t look like any of them were locally hosted or even if a locally hosted model could be chose. Local AI… where the model itself and all the token are processed on either your own machine or another machine controlled by you certainly isn’t violating privacy, but as I said the choices on offer were none of these.

      LibreWolf by default gets rid of anything that seeks to abuse your right to privacy, you won’t even find Google or Bing in your search engine. Naturally this will also apply to AI providers. Unfortunately, at the moment, we can’t trust Mozilla and by extension with AI items so these things were removed. That doesn’t mean you can’t install third party AI extensions.

      Also you can host your own search engine for even more privacy.

      https://docs.searxng.org/index.html

      • acockworkorange@mander.xyzEnglish
        2·
        2 hours ago

        The relevant bit from the second link:

        The settings that Mozilla packaged in were the main big ones, Claude, ChatGPT etc, it didn’t look like any of them were locally hosted or even if a locally hosted model could be chose. Local AI… where the model itself and all the token are processed on either your own machine or another machine controlled by you certainly isn’t violating privacy, but as I said the choices on offer were none of these.

        LibreWolf by default gets rid of anything that seeks to abuse your right to privacy, you won’t even find Google or Bing in your search engine. Naturally this will also apply to AI providers. Unfortunately, at the moment, we can’t trust Mozilla and by extension with AI items so these things were removed. That doesn’t mean you can’t install third party AI extensions.

      • gustofwind@lemmy.worldEnglish
        68·
        22 hours ago

        I’d recommend switching to something like Bitwarden for your passwords so you can take them with you and also switch your stuff around if you ever want to

      • Albbi@piefed.caEnglish
        6·
        18 hours ago

        You can switch to WaterFox and it seamlessly uses the FireFox sync to use all your passwords. Very easy drop in replacement.

      • MunkyNutts@lemmy.worldEnglish
        14·
        21 hours ago

        I’ve been using Librewolf for some months now. You can migrate your Firefox profile into Librewolf, that’s what I did and it retained my passwords. I’m not very tech savvy but it does have some kinks, my browser clock is off I’ve tried tinkering with it but gave up. And especially with the Resist Fingerprinting enabled it seems to not retain my 2 factor id for sites when I ask it to remember me.

        • acockworkorange@mander.xyzEnglish
          2·
          2 hours ago

          The clock is part of their fingerprinting resistance strategy. It doesn’t provide correct timezone info to sites.

        • bootleg@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          5·
          6 hours ago

          Your browser clock is not off. LibreWolf, Tor Browser, Mullvad Browser etc. set your browser’s reported timezone to GMT to not reveal which timezone you’re actually in.

          And I don’t understand what you’re talking about in the last sentence.

          • Passerby6497@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            27 minutes ago

            Sounds like a cookie isn’t being saved, so they have to enter their 2fa every time instead of having the site trust the browser

        • The Octonaut@mander.xyzEnglish
          126·
          19 hours ago

          it’s got settings

          Well yeah, Librewolf is basically nothing but settings.

          Firefox settings.

          Confuses me no end when people rage against Mozilla and then recommend a product that cannot exist without Mozilla.

          • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zipEnglish
            21·
            4 hours ago

            A software has roughly three parts: core functionality, UI, default settings. Zen does the UI part and default settings different.

          • Nindelofocho@lemmy.worldEnglish
            112·
            12 hours ago

            Whats confusing about it? People took something that was going bad and made it good again. Thats the benefit of open source. Even if Mozilla goes closed source the already existing forks can continue

            • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              50 minutes ago

              Even if Mozilla goes closed source the already existing forks can continue

              Theoretically yes, practically no. Maintaining a secure modern web engine that’s up to date with - and a part of - setting web standards is something that costs tens of millions per year. Sometimes this even spills into the hundreds of millions.

              Random fork projects don’t have the resources to do that.

    • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      15 hours ago

      I switched from Firefox to Librewolf about a month ago and it’s been wonderful. I can’t imagine what it would take for me to switch back to Firefox. I’ll probably ride Librewolf until the project dies or gets corrupted.

  • kali_fornication@lemmy.worldEnglish
    581·
    22 hours ago

    given what “edge” means among the teens these days, microsoft really should go back to the old browser name…microsoft goon

        • thejml@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          12·
          20 hours ago

          I think we should go back to Netscape.

          You know, like Landscape or Manscape, this is Netscape, where it automatically trims out all the AI, Trackers and Ads.

      • Vince@lemmy.worldEnglish
        22·
        22 hours ago

        Marketing sucks, IE was forever tainted. Like now, even if Copilot ran entirely on solar power and cured cancer, solved all hardest math problems, somehow achieved world peace and solved hunger, etc, people would still hate it.

  • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    221·
    19 hours ago

    Great move for those that don’t want to migrate, but I’d recommend just switching to Vivaldi if you like chromium browsers, librewolf if you are used to Firefox, and if you use edge you aren’t even reading this so whatever.

    Edit: I guess if you can get this to work on a work computer where edge is your only browser option perhaps, that would be nice.

    • dantheclamman@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      7·
      14 hours ago

      If you’re familiar with the controversy around the Honey coupon addon, there are a lot of parallels in terms of privacy, ethics etc.

    • AmbitiousProcess (they/them)@piefed.socialEnglish
      27·
      21 hours ago

      It kind of is. For example, Edge will automatically pop up in the corner at checkout and offer coupon codes, most of them will never work, then they’ll steal the affiliate revenue from whoever actually sent you to the site in the first place, or add an affiliate link where it didn’t previously exist, so that the site now has more expenses that are just… paying Microsoft for no reason, making everything you buy more expensive in the long run.

      It pops up whether you want it or not, it’s convoluted to disable, it slows down your browser when it’s running, it financially harms the shops you buy from, and it often just lies about having coupons to waste your time while pretending it’s helping you.

  • Electricd@lemmybefree.netEnglish
    47·
    10 hours ago

    Don’t mind about the AI addition. The worse thing for me is that it doesn’t seem to support custom OpenAI compatible endpoints nor Ollama. Wtf?! This should be the norm for the more privacy conscious community

  • rando@lemmy.mlEnglish
    7·
    22 hours ago

    Would anyone know if this would work for all Firefox derivatives as well? Zen browser in my case. Also would it work for flatpak installations as well?

      • rando@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        14 hours ago

        I see, at least initial read/reviews seem to mention Zen removes Firefox telemetry and AI so that’s good. (I also have waterfox installed but didn’t really use it as main browser)

        Now need to see if flatpak Firefox is supported by this script.