Just the Browser

For anyone interested

This is the shell script it runs on Mac/Linux: https://github.com/corbindavenport/just-the-browser/blob/mai...

For FireFox it downloads this: https://github.com/corbindavenport/just-the-browser/blob/mai...

  {
    "policies": {
      "DisableFirefoxStudies": true,
      "DisableTelemetry": true,
      "DontCheckDefaultBrowser": true,
      "FirefoxHome": {
        "SponsoredStories": false,
        "SponsoredTopSites": false,
        "Stories": false
      },
      "GenerativeAI": {
        "Enabled": false
      },
      "SearchEngines": {
        "Remove": [
          "Perplexity"
        ]
      }
    }
  }

The second sentence in the Getting Started section invites you to follow the manual guides instead of running the 3rd party shell scripts. I think this is a good way to do it -- have both options and tell people about them right at the start of the process. Is there some other way you wish they'd share this info?

There seems to be quite a lot missing from the Chrome configuration too

Seems like this is for the people that need to execute random powershell scripts they don't understand in order to turn of telemetry and copilot on Windows because reading about the registry and group policy is too much for them.

It's an AI model file, part of an upcoming local AI API. It can be very useful for on-device AI though, stuff like parsing and analyzing text from an image such as a receipt of groceries, which is actually an app I'm making currently, so it helps if everyone has such a model.

This is why I use Firefox. In case where I have to use something chromium based (because Cloudflare hates Firefox, apparently), I use Brave.

Interesting. Do you have more specifics? I don't use Chrome or it's derivatives, but this is the first I've heard of it doing that.

Don't ever use Chrome. Go for Brave or Vivaldi, they're far better than Chrome.

It explicitly doesn't, though they don't explain why not. It's not an on/off device distinction because it disables Firefox's automatic tab groups too.

A lot of anti-AI backlash seems to exempt machine translation, which as far as I can tell is just because it's been around for so long that people are comfortable with it and don't see it as new or AI-y, which imho spells doom for a lot of this- in ten years automatic tab groups will seem just as natural and non-intrusive as machine translation.

Indeed. For translation, local LLMs are a straightforward privacy win. Not that they're getting much credit for that.

Administrator access or sudo is required because the configuration paths (C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox on Windows, /etc/firefox/policies/ on Linux) are protected. The browser guides explain the manual install and uninstall process for anyone who doesn't trust the script.

I feel this way even more about this approach to PowerShell scripts. At the very least you could code sign [1] your script. Most PowerShell devs run with the execution policy RemoteSigned for multiple reasons. Instead of pulling your script down from the web and dangerously converting it to a string to call (with &) you can download it as a real file and Invoke-Command (icm) it. Dangerous eval versus correctly running a script.

Sure, Authenticode signing certificates aren't always cheap, and signing your script doesn't protect the script from compromise without other good security practices, but it would still show some attention to detail on PowerShell and some attempt to avoid malware compromising your script.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...

I feel like wishing for UI innovation is using the Monkey's paw. My web experience feels far too innovative and not enough consistent. I go to the Internet to read and do business not explore the labyrinth of concepts UI designers feel I should want. Take me back to standards, shortcuts, and consistency.

> invented pull-down refresh that literally every app and mobile OS uses now

I'm forced to use WhatsApp for a local group, and for some reason, when in the group chat, when I pull up to ensure that I see the latest message, that stupid app opens an audio-recording thingy at the bottom as if I wanted to send an audio note to the group.

Who designed that? Has that person been fired?

Also, I wish that on Windows "windows" weren't able to provide their own chrome and remove the title bar. Add some things to it yes, but fully replace it? No thank you.

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

I think "yes" and "a bit", in that order. The early days of the web and mobile, where everything was new, are gone. In those days, there was no established pattern for standard UX. Designers had to innovate.

It makes sense that we have a lot less innovation now. There's probably room for a lot more than we see, but not for the level that was there in the early days of the web.

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

Would it happen to be HTML Manual of Style: Clear, Concise Reference for Hypertext Markup Language by Larry Aronson? [1]

From the description:

> This book introduces HTML, the program language used to create World-Wide Web "pages", so that users of Mosaic and other Web browsers can access data. Forty to 50 new "pages" are being added to the WWW every day and this will be the first book out on the subject.

Forty to fifty new "pages" per day! </Dr. Evil air quotes>

[1]: https://welib.org/md5/d456fbbef6aee150706c6a507a031593

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

To an extent, yes. The ecosystem has matured. The things that work have been discovered, the things that don't have been discarded.

I think it'll take another big leap in hardware form factor (Apple Vision being an example of an attempt at it) for us to see meaningful UI changes.

[1] Sounds difficult without any other detail.

But it would be funny if it's this: https://archive.org/details/teachyourselfweb00lema/page/n9/m...

Fun fact: Opera had a tab functionality before Firefox. In fact a little-known browser called InternetWorks from the 90s is thought to be the first that had them.

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

I agree mostly with your sentiment. But I still think there is still some work being done. For example the Arc and Zen Browsers. I never used Arc because it is closed source. But it sure looked beautiful. And Zen I tested, but it seemed laggy. I think I might give it another go to see if some of the performance issues have been fixed.

> The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing?

There is more than enough of it. Now it is, of course, AI agents. Before that, Material Design was quite innovative. Interestingly, with the raise of search engines and later LLMs, we are getting back to the command line! It is not the scary black window where you type magic incantations, it is a less scary text field where you type in natural language, but fundamentally, it works like a command line.

It is a good thing? For me, it is a mixed bag, I miss traditional desktop UIs (pre-Windows 8), but I like search-based UIs on the Desktop, an I am not a fan of AI agents: too slow an unpredictable, and that's before privacy considerations. When it is not killing performance, I find Material Design to be pretty good on mobile, but terrible on the desktop. That there is innovation doesn't mean it is all good.

> Are those days permanently gone?

Yes. When coming from DOS, all the UI/UX that could have been created has been created. What we have now is a loop of tries to refresh the existing but it's hard, mainly because it's now everywhere and it has reached maturity.

As an example, the "X" to close and the left arrow for back won't be replaced before a long time, just like we still have a floppy to represent save.

Cars have tried to refresh their ui/UX but they failed and are now reverting back to knobs and buttons.

It seems that VisionOS is a place where innovation could come but it's not really a success.

Eventually we reach some kind of local maximum for UI/UX. So much of these things are a function of the relative immaturity of the platforms. They're all also pretty low hanging fruit.

In some ways, this is happening at the moment with AI and LLMs. The tools available, how we prompt them, etc are all "UI/UX innovation" if you believe these things have a use.

If we have a huge platform shift in the future (LLMs, AR/VR, ???), we may start from zero and go through "inventing tabs" again until that platform becomes maximally optimised.

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

No. You just need to look outside of desktop computing, and computing in general.

For example, I'm getting into CAD and 3d printing. Learning it reminds me of when my father learned to program in the late '80s, or when my grandfather telling me about how he got his Model A up to 50 mph.

Remember: Desktop computers and the web are ultimately tools for a purpose, and that purpose isn't always "nerd toy." We (the nerds) need to find and invent our toys every generation or so.

New UI paradigms will revolve around how to best interact with AI.

Paradigms for existing forms of computer interaction (keyboard, mouse, touch) are pretty much solved.

> The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing?

It's still a thing but it went off the rails, see Apple and their latest no-contrast UI.

GNOME seems to try, though people hate them for it

I think UI innovation requires truly novel interaction mediums. Likely, the only innovations left are predicting user behavior using AI, so essentially putting what you're looking for right in front of you before you even knew you wanted it. I haven't seen anyone do this well yet.

I remember what it was like before tabs, when there was that Multi Document Interface (something like that) instead, so you had the main parent window but then each page was its own window within it that you could resize, minimise, maximise…

Like the AOL browser, come to think of it.

Tabs in Firefox were such an unfamiliar thing.

I went through the same (or at least very similar) experience. I loved that.

New apps were announced in blogs, and people downloaded them to try them out. I remember downloading Opera, using it for a few days or weeks, and then going back to Firefox.

New things do come around. Chrome's new split view tabs is pretty slick new "UI control".

Chrome's Whats New seems like half AI stuff and half UI features for people who have tons of tabs.

Can we stop innovating on UI for existing problems?

The standard affordances for most well-known problems are long settled. Unless you're solving an entirely new class of problem, maybe you don't need to reinvent a large number of wheels, again. We're all tired of the triangular wheels coming out.

Which makes it funny that the request for UI innovation is prefixed with a quote that amounts to "but what if browsers were permanently frozen ca. 2012?". Mind, I can sympathize with some of the thoughts behind the request, even if I disagree - but you can't ask for a stop in new features & problem classes to be accompanied by continued UI innovation.

That is, as my art teacher used to say, "intellectual wankery in the disguise of creativity".

Vivaldi has pretty good default UX features. They are following Opera advances and keep pushing for UX innovation.

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

I don't think these are permanently gone, but the corporations failed us, and also the "not for profit" fakers such as Mozilla.

We need a new web - one developed by the people, for the people. Whenever corporations jump in, they try to skew things to their favour, which almost always means in disfavour of the people.

Adding an AI button is not an innovative feature

VR gaming had this experience. AR is about to.

If pull-down refresh were invented today it would definitely be called an anti-pattern and the evidence of the regression of Apple.

I'm not convinced that's their goal any more. The number of users turning off or ignoring AI features is probably considered a problem, not a signal.

Every single thing for the past 10 years has had (opt-out, which most people didn't) telemetry and that correlates with a decline in quality, not improvement.

And not giving IKEA access to cameras in your home won't let them improve the furniture.

One could hope if it happens enough they'd be jostled out of the McNamarra fallacy tarpit they've ended up in, though maybe that is too optimistic.

They don't care about improving the browser anymore. They just want to make it into an AI browser.

For Firefox they had a decade+ to stop making useless wasteful choices that killed any good will towards the company.

I still use Firefox but I, frankly, feel it's stagnated. On mobile I'm in the process of changing habits to something else (auto reflex sometimes still opens Ffox, but lately I'm circling back to opera, which I stopped using on desktop what... 20 years ago?)

All this to say, I don't think Mozilla is doing much with all the telemetry data it's gathered all these years

Vivaldi, Librewolf, Palemoon and Zen Browser (the latter I'm not 100% sure about) have all committed to add no AI features, for some definition of AI.

do you carefully review those files you've downloaded and placed into said correct directory, or do you just double click an YOLO your way through the install? at least a bash script allows for you to read it vs a pre-compiled binary installer. either way, you are trusting code created by someone else.

Manual steps are linked to in the second sentence of the Getting Started section.

I hope someone tells the Mozilla CEO.

That's an interesting observation. Apple doesn't really have an AI offering, so they have nothing to stuff into Safari. In general Apples failure to produce an AI offering might turn out to be an advantage long term.

Probably both? I did find its omission spoke loudly. I use it every day on desktop. The only enshitification I have to worry about is Alan Dye’s hit and run crimes against usability.

(in case anyone is looking to exploit this: user `corbindarvenport` is available if you want to do some typosquatting)

The website explains each setting that would be turned off, which I find rather informative.

Free and open-source browsers based on Chromium: Brave, Dooble, Falkon, Otter, qutebrowser, Supermium, ungoogled-chromium

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Free_an...

Aren't preferences stored in per-user JavaScript (text) files?

Half of the websites will stop working if you did that.

And you might as well just fork chromium for that purpose.

It's not a privacy thing because it also disables on-device AI features too.

I've been using Kagi for several years and find it much better than Google. I've not been tempted to go back, like I always was with DuckDuckGo and others.

It seems like Qwant is ad supported[0], yet I don't see any ads in my first couple searches. I wonder if this is a, "the first hit is free", situation, or my ad blocker just took care of it. I do wonder how this will play out long-term.

Qwant did bring up a page when I tried the second search to make me slide something to verify I'm human. That was enough of an annoyance that I will stick with Kagi.

[0] https://help.qwant.com/en/docs/overview/how-does-qwant-make-...

> What the heck is Google doing?

Inflating stock prices.

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

This is an extremely aimless rant. Simply claiming group policies are not enough for an average user or at the very least is not a good start, is misleading. Unless you can back it up with data, your comment is in bad faith.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."y

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What a rude thing to say. No one is forcing you to use it.

It's silly to treat this like a totalizing partisan issue where everything must be clearly "pro-ai" or "anti-ai".

Browsers are currently incentivised to add a bunch of new features outside their traditional role. Some people prefer to keep the browser's role simple. It's not ideological and it's not "hating".

Most of the "AI" features added in Firefox makes no sense. They provide very little value to most people, but they are unreasonably hard to disable. Other than jumping the AI bandwagon, I have yet to understand why Mozilla keeps pushing AI features.

Microsoft and Google I can understand, they have AI products they desperately need to monetize or push to as many users as possible, because management bonuses are tied to CoPilot or Gemini adoption.

I don't see it as hating on AI, just because it's AI. It's not wanting pointless AI features in products that don't need them. I've pretty much disabled anything in the ml namespace in about:config in Firefox, because the features are distracting, but provide absolutely no value to me.

> but hating on AI just because its AI is not a good look

why not? All things being equal non-AI solution is better. "it is current hyped thing" should bring some downward correction

and of all things to hate, AI hate is harmless and at least partially justified

I gaurantee you there will be a very popular niche that focuses entirely on being anti-AI, and it will always be around.