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Just the Browser: tools to remove AI and other bloatware from Chrome, Edge and Firefox (justthebrowser.com)

submitted 3 days ago by dantheclamman@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] guywithoutaname@lemmy.world 50 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

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.ml 29 points 2 days ago (3 children)

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.world 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] flying_sheep@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I literally got banned from the “awfulsystems” Lemmy instance for suggesting that Firefox isn't horrible. No exaggeration, there was nothing else to my comment than a polite suggestion that Firefox is pretty good actually.

If that ban isn't driven by hate, I don't want to see how real hate looks like.

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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

Firefox's (local, FOSS) 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. I can see it being a useful feature.

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. Plus there's the unfortunate truth that many people that Firefox is trying to win over ("normies") now expect features like that.

The hate is so overblown. Everyone is so negative and absolutist about everything all of the time. It's exhausting.

[–] Baguette@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 2 days 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.zip 1 points 2 days ago

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