Just the Browser: A Smart Way to Tame Browser Bloat

The promise of Just the Browser sounds good. Rather than fork one of the big-name browsers, just run a tiny script that turns off all the bits and functions you don't want. Just the Browser is a new project by developer Corbin Davenport. It aims to fight the rising tide of undesirable browser features such as telemetry, LLM bot features billed as AI, and sponsored content by a clever lateral move. It uses the enterprise management features built into the leading browsers to turn these things off. The concept is simple and appealing. Enough people want de-enshittified browsers that there are multiple forks of the big names. For Firefox, there are Waterfox and Zen as well as LibreWolf and Floorp, and projects based off much older versions of the codebase such as Pale Moon. Most people, though, tend to use Chrome and there are lots of browsers based on its Chromium upstream too, including Microsoft Edge, the Chinese-owned Opera, and from some of the people behind the original Norwegian Opera browser, Vivaldi. Another fairly prominent Chrome-based browser is also the reason why Davenport's name might be familiar. Back in 2023, he wrote an elegant list of reasons to stop using Brave Browser – an article that The Reg FOSS desk has previously cited. Those with long memories may have encountered Davenport's work nearly a decade earlier, though. Way back in 2014, The Register described him as an enfant terrible for running Windows 95 on a smartwatch. We are regular users of some of these alternative browsers ourselves, but maintaining such a fork is a big job. Modern browsers are vast. Chromium weighs in at about 48.5 million lines of code and Mozilla Firefox isn't much smaller at 44.75 million. Just disabling the unwanted features does seem like a much easier route – and because these policies are intended for human managers, they are quite readable. The entirety of the Firefox changes that Just the Browser makes is: { "policies": { "DisableFirefoxStudies": true, "DisableTelemetry": true, "DontCheckDefaultBrowser": true, "FirefoxHome": { "SponsoredStories": false, "SponsoredTopSites": false, "Stories": false }, "GenerativeAI": { "Enabled": false }, "SearchEngines": { "Remove": [ "Perplexity" ] } } } The browsers will tell you what policies are in effect. In Firefox, enter about:policies into the URL bar; in browsers based on Chrome, it's chrome://policy/. After you've applied a policy to your settings, your browser's dialog box may include a warning. For us, Chrome said: Your browser is managed by your organization If your browser already is managed by an organization, of course, you're going to have to persuade the powers that be. Good luck with that, and if you find a way, let us know in the comments. Coming soon: We interrupt this ChatGPT session with a very special message from our sponsors Firefox 147 brings GPU boost, tidier tabs, and video that follows you around Brave refurbishes Rust adblocking engine for reduced memory footprint Stop the slop by disabling AI features in Chrome The Just the Browser site supports Windows, macOS, and Linux, and offers installation instructions that boil down to "paste this into a terminal." For older techie types, this is an unwelcome move – but no problem, you can also download the settings files, look at them for yourself – as you can see above, they're not very long – and apply them to your browser manually. The code is all available on GitHub. We like the idea. So long as the browsers continue to have policy settings that control such things, and so long as they really do honor them, it's tough to see a downside here. ®