Just the Browser claims to tame the bloat without forking

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 …

[Doctor Syntax]

I fear his de-enshittified browser is going to run up against enshittified web sites that have forgotten the web is supposed to be a universal platform and fail in a wide variety of ways against a browser that isn't in their select list. In some cases the failure is outsourced to Cloudflare.

[b0llchit]

That is why you "vote" with not visiting the enshittified sites. Any and all site requiring scripts just to view anything should always be skipped. You should have a capable ad blocker (and Privacy Badger) installed. Any and all site not serving pages and data from their own domain/site are suspect (I'm talking about CDNs and how they are not trustworthy).

[Doctor Syntax]

Two problems with that.

I can and do, as far as possible, do that but I doubt that being voted against in that way is a metric that the site's owners see and will, therefore, react to. It does not have the desired effect. Example: over the weekend the logo at noai.duckduckgo.com stopped scaling and now fills most of the screen. The non non AI version still scales properly. In this case, there is a substitute, Startpage but I doubt either site will have noticed my switch of allegiance.

The other is that it closes off useful options to which there are few alternatives. Example: I've always used streetmap.co.uk for UK mapping. Unlike many sites which are no more than street maps* it actually fielded OS maps which are much more than street maps although it could zoom in to become a street map.. It seems to have disappeared. I've found another site which also has OS maps but doesn't work in my preferred browser.

* i.e. they show and name the geometry of streets, possibly buildings but nothing else. OpenStreetMap is pretty good but still not a replacement for the OS.

[Peter Prof Fox]

A good OS-capable map site

National Library of Scotland is marvellous. Free.

1 Find where you want by modern or older place name or Lat/Long.

2 Select the background maps category ESRI/OSM/Lidar

3 The world'd yer lobster! 3 lots of OS to chose from just to start.

[Benny Cemoli]

Re: A good OS-capable map site

And all I get is a stupid "Confirm You're Human" Choose the curtains, or Choose the Clocks and when I do and hit the button to Confirm I get, "Time limit exceeded. Please refresh the page." lather, rinse, repeat and they've successfully DOSed their own site. What a freaking joke.

[Pascal Monett]

Re: "Confirm You're Human"

I would love a "Confirm We're useful" check on websites I might try out of curiosity.

Pipe dream, of course.

[Csmy]

Re: A good OS-capable map site

Which is grand if I want to see the mapping of the uk before I was born.

[The Organ Grinder's Monkey]

Re: A good OS-capable map site

Upvote for the National Library of Scotland suggestion. Really enjoy the way that you can centre it on a location & then use a slider to go back through previous OS etc maps to see how a place has changed over the last few hundred years.

Eg, if this works:

https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=14.0&lat=51.28690&lon=1.18900&layers=6&b=175&o=100

[Csmy]

They've(os maps) gone from bing too.

[S4qFBxkFFg]

The FixMyStreet map which appears when reporting problems is surprisingly useful here, at certain zoom levels, it looks very much like an OS map (although I can't verify if the data are the same, or how up to date they are).

[Tron]

As you may have noticed in elections, your vote is generally irrelevant.

If you need to visit the site for information not available elsewhere, you have no choice. And yes, this is sometimes outsourced to 'human checks' which either loop and fail or tell me I am not a human being.

[MachDiamond]

"That is why you "vote" with not visiting the enshittified sites. "

That works up to the point where you have no choice. If I'm having issues with a web site and it's barking at me to install Chrome, I either skip them or have to use a dedicated computer for that purpose if I can't go elsewhere.

[JulieM]

Thank you for travelling with Bloggs' Buses

You are making a huge assumption that the content users are seeking is available anywhere else that's not enshittified.

It's like the signs they have on buses, thanking passengers for travelling with this particular bus company to a destination that is not served by any of the other bus companies.

[Ian 55]

No scripts

A fine demand.

Problem is that given the number of slop bots hammering websites to steal text, putting them behind *something* to stop the fuckers getting through can become necessary.

[Len]

If I'm not mistaken,the whole point of this particular initiative is to NOT create a new browser by forking an existing one but disabling a bunch of features in the existing browser. Unless a website insists on checking if specific sloperations are running (if those are even exposed to web servers, I doubt many are) there is no way for a website to mistreat you if this is implemented.

[KitD]

Indeed, and (for Chrome on Linux at least), the features being removed were only really around AI enablement.

[The Organ Grinder's Monkey]

Upvote for "sloperations", though in this context slurperations might be equally appropriate?

[SnailFerrous]

That's been the case since some websites said "best viewed with Internet Explorer".

[Doctor Syntax]

We got rid of that (basically, remote applications by Windows developers) a long time ago and had a time and when sites did a good job across multiple platforms (real developers). We then had sites which were extremely fancy, displayed text in dark grey over black but only worked with very few browsers (graphic designers and beancounters). What we seem to have now is sites that depend heavily on particular frameworks and if the framework developers (I'm looking at you, PHP) can't be arsed to test against a particular browser, check for that and if it isn't on their list of the blessed they just display a message telling the user their browser isn't up to date even when it is.

I don't see much chance of escaping from the present situation. There was a brief golden age and now it's all gone to shit.

[DrewPH]

Ahem... PHP is server-side. It does not generate markup or client-side script.

[frankvw]

"Ahem... PHP is server-side. It does not generate markup or client-side script."

True. Instead it's the PHP developer who tells the server-side PHP what to output and render at the client size. And therein lies the problem: the vast majority of PHP devs knows all about PHP but pitifully little about how to create client-agnostic HTML or scripts.

I got involved with professional website development at the start of the browser wars. This was in the days when what we now call "progressive enhancement" was still called "graceful degradation". We were constantly aware of cross-browser problems, such as the fact that <marquee> was only supported on IE, while frames could only be used on Netscape Navigator, so we learned not to rely on a feature's availability but ensured that we wrote markup that would render a proper (if not identical) user experience on all different browsers.

PHP devs, by and large, don't do that. They mostly live at the server side and write code that works server-side, where there is no need (or awareness of the need) for cross-platform client testing. If you're lucky they include some drop-in framework that wraps some sort of generic fluid layout around the output they generate and plonks in some JS and CSS that replaces a desktop-type navbar with a mobile-device-type dropdown menu, but at that point they consider the job done. By and large they don't test cross-browser at all.

And that's a problem.

[DrewPH]

A problem generally avoided by employing front end devs as well as PHP devs...

[Liam Proven]

> fail […] against a browser that isn't in their select list

No, because in this case, the browser is unmodified upstream Chrome, Edge or Firefox.

It is the 100% original browser. Nothing added, no extensions, no filters, no proxies, just some features turned off.

[Doctor Syntax]

There was a period a few weeks ago where visiting the Guardian with the usual blocking in place caused the browser to crash. If blocking is turned off then we really do have enshittification of the web.

We currently seem to have an arms race between those browser features and addons that attempt to protect the user and web sites, or maybe frameworks, that attempt to overcome that. The user is caught in the middle.

So, to some extent, are developers who need to use the frameworks; even my own instances of Nextcloud can't run with my preferred browser because of what looks like the attitude of PHP developers. I seriously doubt that NC developers wish to restrict access but, quite wisely, they're not going to jump ship because of PHP limitations.

[graemep]

What PHP limitations affect what browser you can use? PHP can return whatever HTML, JS, etc. you want, with whatever headers you want.

it might be the fault of a framework or library they use. Most likely a front end framework.

[Bluck Mutter]

hmmm....

For years I have run firefox with Ghostery, Origin Ublock and Noscript running (i.e. everything blocked) and I have been able to browser "The G" fine.

I am on Linux but that shouldn't matter.

Bluck

[DrewPH]

PHP is server-side. It does not generate markup or client-side script.

[eldakka]

> PHP is server-side. It does not generate markup or client-side script.

Surely that depends on what the PHP is coded to do?

I wrote an entire CMS in bash scripts, cgi-bin, but they returned to the broswer HTML pages, so the bash scripts created client-side HTML, CSS and JS for the browser.

Are yo usaying you can't do that with PHP? Use server-side PHP to generate HTML, CSS and JS for the client browser to run/parse/display?

[DrewPH]

I'm just fed up of PHP being demonized when we should instead be demonizing bad front end developers. They may or may not be using PHP, but it's their lack of care with markup and client side scripting that's the problem.

[graemep]

Which does make me wonder whether it is useful.

There are lots of forks of those browsers which do a lot more but are still compatible, or you can just change the settings yourself. People who cannot change a few settings are unlikely (and should not be encouraged to) run a CLI script from downloaded from github.

[billdehaan]

Years ago (1999-ish), I ran Opera (the pre-Chinese version) in a Microsoft development shop where everyone else ran Internet Explorer.

When other devs sent me a link, I often got a completely different (and better, IMO) page than what they got. I usually got a clean, lightweight page of content in about 2 seconds (this was when a 1MB DSL line was fast), while they would literally spend 45 seconds or more (I timed it) downloading the same page because of all the popups, side banners, and even worse, music that autoplayed.

Seriously, their pages would be 80% advertising, and 20% content. This was in the days before ad blockers, and advertisers were using all new new "cool" nonstandard HTML features that Opera didn't support, or disabled by default.

If the Just the Browser lacks support for noisy advertisers, I suspect that end users will find themselves willing to adapt.

[Rich 2]

If you want a fantastic example of web page bloat, take a look at a random page from dictionary.com or thesaurus.com - the actual useful content is literally a rounding error in terms of the overall size of the page text - the pages are ludicrously bloated with goodness-knows-what

I know this because a while ago, I wrote a script to crawl thesaurus.com to create a thesaurus database for vim. The result works very well btw

[MachDiamond]

"run up against enshittified web sites that have forgotten the web is supposed to be a universal platform and fail in a wide variety of ways"

I've run across this numerous times to the point where I have a miniPC with Cinnamon whose only job is to run a Chrome browser. I hadn't been able to find competitive online software that wasn't optimized to run only on Chrome. For the particular functions, there just isn't anything else that can run stand-alone or for a price that let's me resell the outputs to my customers. I'd never install Chrome on my daily drivers.

[JessicaRabbit]

Quite the assumptions being made there... Google did their best recently to neuter ad blockers, I wouldn't be surprised if they approach this threat to their enshittification in the same way.

[Anonymous Coward]

People who care about this stuff do not run Chrome.

[stiine]

really? I hadn't noticed.

[LBJsPNS]

You still run Chrome?!

[Long John Silver]

My Firefox - 147.0 (64-bit) - running under Linux (Linux Mint 22.3 - Cinnamon 64-bit,) is, seemingly, under my complete control; there is no 'organisation' supervising my use of computational devices. Nevertheless, I do encounter "Your browser is managed by your organization."

I suspect that the operating system has features/protections interpreted by Firefox as coming from an organisation.

Does anyone know?

[Irongut]

Click the message and it will show you what policies are in effect.

I have the same message but the policies are not from my organisation. They were created by me blocking HP "security" and "secure browsing" extensions that my HP laptop tried to install automatically.

[Long John Silver]

Thanks

[Hubert Cumberdale]

Anything that claims to improve security by fundamentally breaking security through installing its own certificates to act as a MITM is an absolute fuckup of an idea that needs to be killed.

[Anonymous Coward]

omni.ja

"Does anyone know?"

There are some advanced settings that are enabled by default in Firefox's omni.ja.

You can unzip the omni.ja and view the default advanced settings that are preselected.

Or view them under about:config after selecting to show only modified settings

[Anonymous Coward]

The Enterprise Policies service is inactive.

says FF

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The Enterprise Policies service is inactive.

You need to log out and log back in sometimes for the new policies to work.

[An_Old_Dog]

Wow

I make a shedload more settings changes to a freshly-installed Firefox instance than this project does.

What I would be delighted to see is a program which overwrites Firefox's unwanted-by-me function code with zeros so that some Firefox update or malware could not accidentally or intentionally re-activate those functions.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Wow

You might be interested in using Firefox user.js files then as they can be a lot more granular and have many more options than enterprise .cfg files.

Do a search for firefox user.js files. There are lots of projects on GitHub to look at.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Wow

> overwrites Firefox's unwanted-by-me function code with zero

Trouble is -- that's _extremely_ malware-like behaviour. That'd trigger all sorts of protection systems.

Which leads us back to code forks and alternate browsers... And what this is trying to avoid.

[eldel]

I don't get the hatred for Brave. Yeah - so the author is a total shitstain that shouldn't be allowed out in civilised company - but that doesn't make the software bad. As long as you aren't accepting the ads and aren't partaking in the crypto scam what's the problem. I'm not aware of any actual privacy issues with it.

In all honesty I have to admit that I don't always live by that outlook - I wouldn't buy one of the fascist shitstain's cars for instance.

[jgarbo]

Exactly...

I don't care if the dev is a goat cuddler; does the code work? Ferninand Porsche was a Nazi: don't buy Porsche! Henry Ford financed HIlter: don't touch the F150! This childish nonsense is real bigotry (yes look it up). I run Brave with everything turned off, never see ads, never use AI, fast, private (with Tor). Who's praising FF after Mozilla admits it will sell ALL your data, searches, bookmarks for profit?!

[Mockup1974]

>so the author is a total shitstain that shouldn't be allowed out in civilised company

Look, I also hate Javascript, but you're being way too harsh.

[T. F. M. Reader]

Not individual configuration

I've looked at the GitHub repo. My main interest is FF on Linux which is what I use.

I am allergic to the installation method that curls a shell script from a random place and pipes it to the shell, as root, but I've looked at his main.sh.

I was initially surprised that it required sudo. It does, because the whole notion of policies in FF is for an organization's IT who may wish (or be ordered) to "lock down" the browser for users who are not allowed to administer their own computers. The most common policy used in examples in FF documentation is "block access to about:config". The main.sh script works by creating /etc/firefox/policies/policy.json, which is why it requires sudo. I think (can't be bothered to check) that if policies.json exists it will be silently overwritten, presumably clobbering all the (other) existing policies. [I may be mistaken - I only gave it a cursory look.]

In short, it looks dangerous, and it changes policies for everyone on a multi-user (Linux) machine, not individual preferences. It is not clear to me what value it provides to an organization's IT who may well prefer to write their own policy.json with many more settings and install that.

Luckily, FF policy documentation seems to list the about:config entries affected, for each policy setting. I think I'd prefer that to de-enshittify my own browser experience. Here is an example for GenerativeAI - search for "Preferences Affected".

Aside: since I use Brave on the phone I checked the linked anti-Brave rant, too. I am thoroughly unimpressed.

[ragnar]

Re: Not individual configuration

With Brave or the rant?

[DCdave]

No Powershell script for me thanks

Just downloaded the Firefox json and installed manually, job done, thank you kindly.

No need to do due diligence on the Powershell script that way, plus Chrome is mandated by the org, so changes there probably wouldn't work, not that I use it anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

user.js

For those of you that don't want to modify Firefox settings for everyone on the PC and don't want to run as root you have the option of making changes on a per-profile basis by using a user.js file and dropping it in the root of the user profile directory.

You have much more control and hundreds more settings you can preset with a user.js file than you can do with an enterprise policy in firefox.

Here is an example of a very detailed user.js file that is commented so you can understand what each advanced preference does and you can add to it by adding your custom settings from about:config.

I suggest you create a new profile using Firefox CLI and before you open the browser from the newly created profile directory you can drop the user.js file in the new profiles root in the ~/mozilla/<profile name> directory. Be sure to make the user.js file readable/writable only to you with chmod 600 or it can fail to set the settings.

https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/

[AnonymousCward]

Best of luck, Microsoft already sabotaging it!

I wish the dev the best of luck, but for some browsers, it's already being degraded in the name of security theatre and market segmentation.

On Windows, Microsoft Edge has gradually gated more and policies behind proof of enterprise control. Take disabling the shopping assistant, if Edge is logged in with a Microsoft Account, the machine-wide policy JtB applies will be ignored outright. Same with some of the Copilot disablement policies. Bearing in mind that Home versions of Windows require a Microsoft Account to work and Edge will automatically sign in with said account for convenience... you can see where I'm going. Programmatically disabling the features needed to prevent the JtB policies from being ignored is itself gated behind either being domain joined, AAD joined or MDMed. Of these three, MDM is very fakeable but that's entering hackish privacy script territory, which IMHO defeats the point of the project.

Thankfully, macOS doesn't expose the choice of mechanism used to allow for this kind of discrimination (everything is just a profile payload, irrespective of how it is being deployed) and Linux has too many potential enterprise enforcement mechanisms to accurately track if a machine belongs to a home or business user. This means it's unlikely Microsoft will be able to implement the same level of sabotage for these platforms but they'll still be able to ignore them when a personal account is logged in on the browser.

It's also likely that Google will tell sysadmins to "just use Enterprise Core, it's free and applies to phones/tablets too" applying similar gating to Chrome in the future.