Stop the slop by disabling AI features in Chrome Most of today’s desktop web browsers come with a ton of built-in AI features, but the good news is that, in most cases, no one is forcing you to use them, and you can at least hide them from view. Removing the most egregious AI tools from Chrome is pretty simple, but it requires a few steps. Make the Gemini button go away By …
Chromium is obviously very capable in its own right without the constant proprietary nudges toward using their opinionated search results.
For me, I'll gladly pay for a decent search engine. Kagi.com.
I can second Vivaldi. No AI crap, older extensions (like fully functional uBlock Origin) still work since they still support Manifest v2 and it's not a MAGA Techbro browser that secretly adds invisible referrers to your urls like Brave was doing till they got caught (along with all the other things, 'privacy browser' LOL).
Why not go further and DITCH anything related to GOOGLE?
Ok, there are time when we need them but doing something simple like watching Youtube via a Private window or better still, on a VM that does nothing else. That plus a VPN can hide your activity from Google very effectively
> Why not go further and DITCH anything related to GOOGLE?
I have as much as I can. For email and online drive, I've gone to Proton. For search, it's obviously Kagi. For browser I've gone to WaterFox, which is FireFox without the AI enshittification.
However, sometimes I have to log into something for work, banking, or health that needs something Chromium based because those f@#$ers have the worst codebases with decades of technical debt. And in that case I use Vivaldi.
I sometimes get commenters going 'OH NO IF YOU HAD ALL THE INTEGRITIES you would not use anything Chrome based at all!1' and yeah, that's probably right, but in practice I do need to schedule my health care and pay my property taxes without getting hit with massive fines, so I will use Vivaldi for that.
A big tech company that has repeatedly lied to and mislead users, who refuse to provide any customer service at all --even with their own purported AI product-- for their users, has introduced the idea of "Settings" that would allow a user to avoid Alphabet's voracious white elephant and not allow it to scarf up that crumb of data.
So they've likely sponsored helpful articles in tech publications that helps locate those intentionally-obscured settings to try to build veracity of their functionality so household techs might think the changes will be effective.
Absolutely no question that those "Settings" will be respected. The beings at Alphabet have heard about humans at tech conferences, so will use reassuring language while "harvesting" the data inputs "for quality-control purposes".
Zero-trust indeed.
Irrespective of browser, if you search using DuckDuckGo, the default url is now with AI...
Without...
I like Search Assistant. It's easily ignored but, by the power of AI, can provide comedy gold.
This was the result of asking "how many ants per human":
There are approximately 2.5 million ants for every person on Earth. This means that with an estimated global ant population of 20 quadrillion, there are about 20 ants for each human.
The core concept is not wrong there. There are billions of humans on Earth. There are very few actual people.
I personally am just one of the tiny, and infinitely replaceable, cogs that make up the background noise of humanity. It's quote comfortable once you know where you stand.
Have to say I installed Vivaldi on the phone a couple of months ago (phone being a device I use only when I don't have my laptop nearby, which is rare). Didn't notice immediately that the default search was startpage but did notice that the relevant search results took some scrolling to get to with the first results being (can't remember what they were) something I didn't want. Being lazy I continued with startpage and continued noticing the irrelevant results and only this week got round to changing the search to google whereby normal search resumed.
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
Thank you so much! I've been using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine in all my browsers for some years now, so I was very disappointed when an "AI" search started popping up without my being able to decline it and save all the energy and water required for it.
And migrating from Chrome to these Chromium browsers is fairly painless in that you can copy your profile from Chrome to your favour of Chromium and most things transfer with the exception of saved passwords and session data. Made me breathe a sigh of relief when my 40ish windows and several hundred (getting on for a thousand?!) tabs (yes I'm doing it wrong - tabs aren't bookmarks, but then I bookmarked my then tabs a few years back so they are like L3 cache, with the current tabs L2 cache, to be visited again one day).
Nice to be on Linux most of that AI garbage is not there to disable. Only the help me write trash added in the udm trick as well I have extension on my real browser that already does that. The Chrome only gets used when there is absolutely no choice when a web site does not work in any of my other browser. Too bad all the other search engines I have tried are not even more pieces of junk than Google has become or I would never use it as well.
There's a nice touch from Google. One of the AI mode settings is:
AI Entrypoint Disabled on User Input
Hide the Omnibox entrypoint for AI Mode while user is typing. – Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS
And the choices are "Default", "Enabled" or "Disabled".
So: if I want to disable the AI Entrypoint on User Input, do I need to set "AI Entrypoint Disabled" to "Enabled"?
I've said it before and will gladly repeat it - used Waterfox for over a year now and been really happy with how it performs.
As for Chrome - why use Chrome itself at all? If you have to use a Chromium-based browser, either switch to Ungoogled Chromium or Vivaldi.
So why do they even bother providing a function that CLEARLY does not work? A simple dialogue box stating what you have said above is surely more honest, and useful?
Anyway, this was the latest version and it doesn't work. Prolly only "tested" on windoze, I guess . . . .
If you are really looking for some kind of sensible browser comparison I would thoroughly recommend
https://privacytests.org/
Although Waterfox as well as Pale Moon are unfortunately missing!
And if one is able to read German directly or have it translated somehow to what one can understand i can recommend the pretty thorough browser tests done by Mike Kuketz, a german security consultant:
https://www.kuketz-blog.de/brave-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil1/
https://www.kuketz-blog.de/waterfox-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil16/
And these are just two of several possible starting points; and he has some additional pretty interesting articles about browsers, privacy and security. And of course there are lots and lots of other browser comparisons out there ...
And Waterfox as well as Vivaldi do not really perform that good in these tests. LibreWolf, Brave or Pale Moon as well would be among my first choices. Jm2c! ;-)
I'm running Chrome on Windows and I don't have any of that stuff either. I switched to DuckDuckGo when it became apparent that Google was trying to make it difficult to avoid AI searching (with DDG it's just an option and they honour it). Don't know why one poster thought that DDG results were poor. They seem to fine to me.
While it's all well and good that the option is there at the moment, the history of tech is littered with "this feature was used by only 2% of users, so it's unimportant and we dropped it". Heck, the other week I was trying to find an email and I found an email that was related but not in a continuous thread with the message I was looking for. It was only then that I realised that Outlook had either hidden or completely ditched the ability to search by date. And given that it was three years ago and I'd have to wait for Outlook to download all the email headers from several months every time I hit "END" to get to the end of the list, I was just "sod this" and installed Thunderbird....
Most of my healthcare providers (as an example) have gone "digital|paperless|electronic". Which means I now must not just choose to use their web portal to access documents. It is possible to still get paper via snail mail. But, they (as part of a larger group) make the process as hard as possible and they have an insider planted in the USPS to slow and reduce reliability of service.
They do not make their own web portals, they use what is part of whichever of a few healthcare information systems are available. These invariably are tuned to Chrome (would have been IE back in the Fool's Golden Era). So in order for me to obtain what little support there is, I have to be using the right supported browser (and the right supported OS) which must be up to date. LTS versions may be branded as outdated.
I never mention Linux nor Firefox when these web portal house of cards have fallen over as I am trying to retrieve some important document. The browser agent clearly states Windows and Chrome or Edge in the most recent accent I can find. Just so the support session can continue past the initial gateway checks. Sometimes the support scripts try to push the above noted system's app, so be prepared to have tried that. Still I have had support sessions end in "try again later" "there must be some temporary issue".
To support my end of the deal; I have Edge, Chrome, Chromium, de-googled Chromium, and Firefox (in reverse order of preference) updated automatically and ready to try for the support script agent.
Unfortunately, There are many everyday service providers that have gone down this path. I must retrieve my paystub from systems like this. I must retrieve tax support documents like this. Only my water service has not gone this way. It is coincidence that is one of the lowest cost services?
I only use Chrome or Edge or whatever spying browser as a last resort. Firefox is now being considered contaminated and is in the process of being phased out of regular use. It may come back again depending on another turnaround or not.
I for one really enjoy using their server-side AI gumpf, so long as I’m not paying a penny for it. Generate expensive summaries of every web page I look at, feed my stuff through AI constantly… as long as it’s costing them money I’m good, I’m happy to waste their expensive resources. Eventually a lot of it will become like Alexa or Google Assistant, where it bleeds money with no profitability in sight.
This is also why I click on ads for companies or politicians I dislike. It only takes a second and it costs them money. Sure, it’s petty and makes little difference, but every little bit adds up.
I am on my way to BestBuy to purchase a Windows laptop. (Please don't ask why, everything else here is Linux or a Mac)
The last time I did that it took hours to completely (I hope) rid Win11 of Copilot, Dropbox, all the AI crapola, to set it up for local login only, without a Microsoft account, and be ready for dual boot to Ubuntu or Mint...
I wish I had taken notes at the time. A similar guide to this deGeminification article would be useful.
Happy New Year everyone.
I don’t use Chrome or Windows, just Safari on my Mac or iPhone. I certainly don’t want AI anywhere near my emails. However, being obliged to choose Google as the ‘best’ search engine I was heartily fed up with results oriented at either commerce or popular culture. (Try searching for an Italian word, for example and it will return a pizzeria in Brazil.) When ChatGPT came along I realized I could avoid all this crap and get a focussed response that had links for me to check the sources (I’m a scientist and take nothing on trust.).
Google clearly realized this too, and, if I formulate the question well enough, it generally saves my having to go to ChatGPT. So I suggest that a little realism is called for regarding AI and Search. We’re not talking about a feature for 2% of users here, but a complete transformation of search engines. I for one welcome this.
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