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"
]
}
}
}Stupid to run random scripts you find online, but browser makers push users into it.
My son wants to eat "Chinese" food with chopsticks, but he can only really use a fork, so we adapt the chopsticks. He'll be able to use them eventually, but not everyone has a) the desire, nor b) the dexterity.
Making it easier to do what users want with a computer without telling them 'just learn to program' (or script in this case) is actually a good thing imo.
A computer is meant to be programmed by the user. That is its raison d'être from the very beginning and why it is called like that.
Normie users would be better off reading some detailed step-by-step instructions on how to do it by hand using built-in methods than to run random code from the internet that can be malicious.
My mom is 75 years old and barely knows how to use a web browser to begin with. There is zero chance I encourage her to run random pwsh scripts from the internet.
God forbid we're going to start giving them AI agents to do this kind of stuff for them. God help us.
Knowing where to look and which settings are relevant, for yourself, is a crazy ask of even very computer savvy users.
It was chrome, downloading a multi GB file without any sort of UI hints that it was doing so. A generative AI file.
Is this why chrome uses so much ram? They’ve just been pushing up the memory usage in preparation for this day, hoping I wouldn’t notice the extra software now running on my (old, outdated) system?
[0] "small" in comparison to ChatGPT, but still a bulky download
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46616033
Interesting project.. and props for spending the time to figure out all those settings and how to flip them off (for all 4 major browsers too!)
I like the goal of stripping browsers back to basics, but I'm not sure why I'd run a third-party script to flip low-level browser and system settings I can change myself.
From a security point of view, that feels, not great?
This might work better as a simple guide with screenshots, so people can see and control exactly what’s being touched.
I can see the use of LLMs and machine learning tools like TTS, translators and grammar checkers to be integrated to browser, but only depending on local models or better, like Firefox's case to CPU optimized local models.
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.
A local LLM that I explicitly bring up to ask a question and dismiss (ie no CPU or RAM usage) when I'm done consulting it is nice. A piece of software I'm using interrupting what I'm doing to ask me a useless and annoying question or to make an unsolicited change to my workspace leaves me thinking about permanently uninstalling it.
I will never want automatic tab groups or automatic anything else. I don't even want an "integrated" desktop environment - I use i3 to get away from that. I hate all the useless bullshit half baked features that are constantly shoved in my face.
If the modern web was compatible with it I'd use a text based browser for 90% of what I do online. And if that were the case I'd still welcome a built in machine translation feature because it's an incredibly useful tool.
It's still relatively new in FF and I don't think I've seen anyone complaining about it annoying them with popups, even though it absolutely does throw up an interrupting overlay, especially on mobile.
The flow is 1) you drag a tab over another tab and it suggests a name for the tab group and 2) you click on a tab group and another button offers to suggest more of your tabs you can add to the group. That's less intrusive than Firefox Translations are by default.
It's much more efficient on system resources than the larger LLMs downloaded by browsers for other tasks.
There is Harper as local grammar checker; an amazing project, but it is only in English and not yet able to replace the mentioned tools: https://writewithharper.com/
The need for this is mainly on work machines that are locked down; if admin mode is necessary then it's DOA...
A local MITM proxy that doesn't require elevated rights and which filters out everything unwanted, starting with ads, would be nice I think.
Search for the Terminal in your applications list and open it.
Next, copy the below command, paste it into the window (Ctrl+V or Cmd+V), and press the Enter/Return key:
& ([scriptblock]::Create((irm "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/corbindavenport/just-the-browser/main/main.ps1")))
For anyone else on firefox, save yourself some effort and just download this https://github.com/corbindavenport/just-the-browser/blob/mai...
Should be Ctrl+Shift+V
- Use of analytics tends to replace user trials/interviews entirely, trading away rich signals for weaker ones
- Analytics can be used to justify otherwise unpopular or ill-advised changes
- When combined with certain changes (e.g. making features harder to access), the numbers can be “steered” in a particular direction to favor a particular outcome and better enable the last point (“Looks like nobody’s using that thing we hid behind an obscure feature flag! Guess we’re safe to remove it entirely now!”).
In theory telemetry/analytics have strong potential for improving software quality, but more often than not they’re just massaged and misused by product managers bent on pushing the software a particular direction.
All this to say, I don't think Mozilla is doing much with all the telemetry data it's gathered all these years
I grew up on DOS, and my first browser was IE3. My first tech book as a kid was for HTML[1], and I was in absolute awe at what you could make with all the tags, especially interactive form controls.
I remember Firefox being revolutionary for simply having tabs. Every time a new Visual Basic (starting with DOS) release came out, I was excited at the new standardized UI controls we had available.
I remember when Tweetie for iPhone OS came out and invented pull-down refresh that literally every app and mobile OS uses now.
Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing?
[1] Can someone help me find this book? I've been looking for years. It used the Mosaic browser.
Some stuff has been solved. A massive number of annoyances in my daily life are due to people un-solving problems with more or less standardized solutions due to perverse economic incentives.
99.5 % agree, because I would love to try SAAB:s drive-by-wire concept from 1992: https://www.saabplanet.com/saab-9000-drive-by-wire-1992/
From what I've read the test drivers also thought the car was too difficult to drive, with the joystick being too reactive. I wonder how much of that could be solved today with modern software and stability control tech.
I can't find it now, but I do remember a similar prototype with mechanical wires (not electrical) that was supposed to solve the regulatory requirements. That joystick looked more like a cyclic control from a helicopter.
Also funny that they had the ability to swap to the passenger to drive it. So acceleration/break for one person, steering for another? Really not a good idea.
I do agree changing things for the sake of change isn't a good thing, but we should also be afraid of being stuck in a rut
"Stuck in a rut" is a matter of perspective. A good marketer can make even the most established best practice be perceived as a "rut", that's the first step of selling someone something: convince them they have a problem.
It's easy to get a non-QWERTY keyboard. I'm typing on a split orthlinear one now. I'm sure we agree it would not be productive for society if 99% of regular QWERTY keyboards deviated a little in search of that new innovation that will turn their company into the next Xerox or Hoover or Google. People need some stability to learn how to make the most of new features.
Technology evolves in cycles, there's a boom of innovation and mass adoption which inevitably levels out with stabilisation and maturity. It's probably time for browser vendors to accept it's time to transition into stability and maturity. The cost of not doing that is things like adblockers, noscript, justthebrowser etc will gain popularity and remove any anti-consumer innovations they try. Maybe they'll get to a position where they realise their "innovative" features are being disable by so many users that it makes sense to shift dev spending to maintenance and improvement of existing features, instead of "innovation".
So, we are "stuck" with something that apparently seems to work fine for most people, and when it doesn't there is an option to also use something else?
Not sure if that's a great example
Sometimes good enough is just good enough
Is my digital life at a natural end now?
even if it is true (is it a myth by any chance?), it does not mean that alternatives are better at say typing speed
Even if there was a new layout that did suddenly allow everyone to type twice as fast, what would we get with that? Maybe twice as many social media posts, but nothing actually useful.
Whether it does slow people down, as a side effect, is not as well established since, as another person pointed out, typing speed isn't the bottleneck for most people. Learning the layout and figuring out what to write is. On top of that, most of the claims for faster layouts come from marketing materials. It doesn't mean they are wrong, but there is a vested interest.
If there was a demonstrably much faster input method for most users, I suspect it would have been adopted long ago.
You might, but you'll never really know.
I mean, steering wheels themselves were once novel inventions. Before those there was "tillers" (a rod with handle essentially)[0], and before those: reigns, to pull the front in the direction you want.
Although, one thought I had is that there's nothing wrong with experimenting with non-standard interfaces as long as you still have the option to still just buy, say, a Toyota with a standard steering wheel instead of 3D Moebius Steering or whatever. The problem is when the biggest manufacturers keep forcing changes by top-down worldwide fiat, forcing customers to either grin and bear it or quit driving (or using the Web) entirely.
Take mobile interfaces. When touchscreens arrived, we genuinely needed new patterns. A mouse pointer paradigm on a 3.5" screen with fat fingers simply doesn't work. Swipe gestures, pull-down menus, bottom navigation—these emerged because the constraints demanded it, not because someone thought "wouldn't it be novel if..."
The problem now is that innovation has become cargo-culted. Companies innovate because they think they should, not because they've identified a genuine problem. Every app wants its own navigation paradigm, its own gesture language, its own idea of where the back button lives. That's not innovation, that's just noise.
However, I'd have to push back on the car analogy: steering wheels were an innovation over tillers, and a crucial one. Tillers gave you poor mechanical advantage and required constant two-handed attention. The steering wheel solved real problems: better control, one-handed operation, more space for passengers. It succeeded because it was genuinely better, and then it standardised because there was no reason to keep experimenting.
The web needs more of that approach: innovate when there's a genuine problem, then standardise when you've found something that works. The issue isn't innovation, it's the perverse incentive to differentiate for its own sake.
You're right that it's not going to be better designs, but paradigm shifts.
We still don't know what it means to provide input to a mostly self-driving car. It hasn't been solved and people continue to complain about attention fatigue and anxiety. Is the driving position really optimal for that? Are accident fatalities reduced if the driver is sitting somewhere else? Even lane assist still sucks on traditionally designed cars. Is having to fight a motorized wheel to override steering really all that safe?
Light switches may be reliable and never go away, but we have many well-established everyday examples of automatic lights: door switches, motion sensing, proximity sensing, etc. You never think about it and that's the point.
The labyrinth of ways to interact with the temporal path between pages is a cluster. History, bookmark, tab, window,, tab groups.
There are many different reasons to have a tab, bookmark, or history entry. They dont all mean the same thing. Even something as simple as comparison shopping could have a completely different workflow of sorting and bucketing the results, including marking items as leading candidate, candidate, no, no but. Contextualizing why I am leaving something open vs closing it is information ONLY stored in my head, that would be useful to have stored elsewhere.
Think about when you use the back button vs the close tab button. What does the difference between those two concepts mean to you? When do you choose to open a new tab vs click? There is much to be explored and innovated. People have tried radical redesigns, havent seen anything stick , yet.
I'm not saying your hopes are bad, exactly. I'm interested in what such workflows might look like. Maybe there _is_ a good UX for a web shopping assistant. I have an inkling you could cobble something interesting together quite fast with an agentic browser and a note-taking webapp. But I do worry that such a app will become yet another way for its owner to surveil their users in some of the more accurate and intimate areas of their lives. Careful what you wish for, I reckon.
In the meantime, what's so hard about curating a Notepad/Notes/Obsidian/Org mode file, or Trello/Notion board to help you manage your projects?
the web is a document structure, but browsing it doesnt need to be linear.
We had that ability in Chrome, through Chrome Apps. You could make a browser app, load pages in webviews, with the whole browser frame customizable. Then it was removed.
We had an ability to make a new innovative browser, until Google infested all the standartization committees, and increased complexity of standards on a daily basis for well over a decade. Now they monetize their effort on making Chrome by removing adblockers and enforcing their own ads, knowing full well that even keeping a fork that supports manifest v2 is infeasible for a free open-source project.
There is no way forward with the web we have right now. No innovation will happen anymore.
There's a similar amateurs-do-too-much effect with typography and design. I studied typography for four semesters in college, as well as creative writing. The best lessons I learned were:
In writing, show, don't tell.
In typography, use the type to clarify the text - the typography itself should be transparent and only lead to greater immersion, never take the reader out of the text.
Good UI follows those same principles. Good UX is the UI you don't notice.
The UX is also awful.
But I think this is a compounding problem that spans generations of applications. Consider the page convention — a great deal of the writing content we typically publish, at a societal level, will be digital-only so why are we still defaulting to paper document formats? Why is it so fucking hard to set a picture in?
And it's that kind of ossification and familiar demand that reinforces the continuum that we see, I think. And when a company does get creative and sees some breakthrough success it is constrained to nascency before it gets swallowed by conglomerate interests and strangled.
And Google's alternative ecosystem has all of these parallels. It's crazy to see these monolithic companies floundering like this. That's what I don't understand.
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.
Also, I despise telegram (just as much as X), because in Germany both are rotten to the core in terms of user base, worse than WhatsApp.
Signal or Threema would be great, and I voted for Signal, but the majority uses WhatsApp.
I used to use Telegram, but ever since Covid and the whackos that found their "truth" over there I say no thank you.
The actual reason why I use an IM is the HOA, as I said. Else I do not have and do not need an IM, except for my ejabberd server + Conversations clients so that devices can send me status updates, like "backup completed successfully".
It's the only IM I have used that works most of the time, is not Google or Meta, is free and is easy enough to get working for normies.
I'd use IRC, XMPP or Matrix but then I cannot contact the non-tech friends I want to chat with from time to time.
And even then, if the spammer buys premium, they can still message you!
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.
There's no reason to "learn" a UI or use shortcuts on most sites, because they change everything around every few months.
I see people reminiscing about tabs in firefox, well today a majority of the top websites don't even allow you to open links in new tabs! The links aren't even real links anymore, and everything's a webapp. ( and by top websites, I mean social media, not the top sites used by the HN crowd. Sites like YT, FB, IG, and TT ).
I try to interact with the "UI" of websites as little as possible these days. I use RSS readers for as much as possible. Any time I get a popup on any site, I get mad. I don't care about news updates, software updates, or offers. Anything that pops up at me, or moves around before I can click it, looks like a scam to me. Even if it's "legitimate". The modern web feels like an arcade game that's trying to waste my time.
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>
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.
Browsers could start by simply improving the controls they do ship with, such has date pickers and selects. They’re all shit. Slightly more complex perhaps would be a combobox. LMAO, we don’t even have comboboxes.
And if you really want to get fancy, rich-text textareas that return standardized, semantic HTML. Also, decent tables with sorting/filtering wouldn’t go amiss.
Standardize some HTMX features into HTML while you’re at it, you’ve got a full-blown revolution.
But it would be funny if it's this: https://archive.org/details/teachyourselfweb00lema/page/n9/m...
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11177063-creating-cool-w... - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1097095.HTML_for_Dummies...
Why would it be funny though? Am I missing something?
Since you mentioned Mosaic, this came to mind. There are also a handful of OReilly books. I think it'd be funny because you gave us basically nothing to work with, so for her to pluck the exact right one from the thousands of possibilities would be impressive, lol.
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.
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.
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.
Paradigms for existing forms of computer interaction (keyboard, mouse, touch) are pretty much solved.
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.
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.
Designers decided that scrollbars that shrink to super-thin columns when not in use were better. Maybe... but often it results in shrunken scrollbars that require extra work to accurately hover over and expand.
Designers decided that gray text on gray backgrounds were easier to read, and there was even a study to "prove" it... which resulted in idiots picking poor contrast choices of gray-on-gray, without understanding the limits on this idea.
I will say that the current push for accessibility is forcing some of these "innovations" back onto the junk heap where they belong. I was annoyed the first time an accessibility review complained about the contrast of my color choices on a form once... but once I got over my ego, I have to admit they were right; the higher-contrast colors are easier to read.
Honestly, I could endlessly vehemently express my frustration to any designer that find this "cool".
/* rant /
Those designer never had to scroll to a long, long scrollable section of a page to reach the end and sadly discover that the "end" button doesn't work, because of course the browser goes to the end of the page, not the end of the scrollable section.
And of course, the scrollbar is 2 pixels wide (I took a screenshot to measure it) and it's only visible if I put my mouse in the section.
And of course, it's right next to the scrollbar that the dev decided to put the Action Icons for each item in the scrollable section.
1 Pixel left, open the popup to delete the item, 1 pixel right, scrollbar.
And of course, if I increase the zoom on my browser, everything grows, except the scrollbar.
I can have icons the size of my fist on a 27" screen but those scrollbar stay thinner than an uncooked spaghetti.
/ end of rant */
It's still a thing but it went off the rails, see Apple and their latest no-contrast UI.
Apple has the unfortunate burden of needing to shepherd millions of developers over to this new paradigm (AR) before it really exists, and so is shoving Liquid Glass onto devices that don't really benefit from it.
But in practice people are generally not happy about lots of new experimentation going on. By definition, most of the results suck. In retrospect we get to stand in awe of those that survived the evolutionary battle and say "wow browser tabs" and "wow pull to refresh" and forget the millions of other bad ideas that we tried.
Bruh, I just want to be able to read the text on my phone.
That's my point about people swooning about the days of UI experimentation. There's a reason we don't do it once we figure out good solutions to problems (experimentation is hard and mostly bad).
> Yeah: most experiments fail and even the ones that ultimately succeed have rough edges.
Vista / Aero 2.0 already did Liquid Glass. At least they had the decency to ship a "turn this shit off" toggle that actually worked.
Apple really has to bite the bullet somehow here if they want to get everyone over to what they see as the next computing paradigm.
I think if I had a really improved version of Apple vision I would still want non transparent windows that are clean and easy to read, not floating holograms with glass like distortion?
It would be interesting if someone had a way to throw a couple hundreds thousand designers and developers into an environment where they have to find solutions so we could get a head start before the relevant hardware goes fully mass-market...
Oh wait, I have them all off. So what will AR do for me?
Turns out that interaction shift actually enabled a lot.
IMO any individual (like you or I) are unlikely to immediately conjure up every possible high-value idea that AR makes possible.
Not saying those ideas necessarily exist (though I suspect they do), just that your lack of imagination isn't evidence against them existing and being discoverable in the next 10-20 years.
Replace a keyboard only in space constrained situations. Otherwise I'll use a keyboard thank you.
Like the AOL browser, come to think of it.
Tabs in Firefox were such an unfamiliar thing.
The question is why aren't they a feature of the window manager instead of the application. We should be able to have windows with tabs from different applications.
Actual MDI applications feel so dated. It made more sense when there wasn't a unified task bar kinda thing (which when you think of it, is kinda like tabs as well)
Chrome's Whats New seems like half AI stuff and half UI features for people who have tons of tabs.
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.
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.
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".
IMO this should never have existed. if X or whatsapp or some site wanted pull-down to refresh they can implement it. 99.99% of sites do not need it.
Now, WhatsApp have a pull-down feature that starts a voice note or voice chat or something ... it's awful, if you scroll down in a chat it is really easy to trigger by accident.
They also have a big button at the bottom right to start some sort of recording. Were they trying to get people to start recordings by accident? Does that help them somehow?
He has one going right now.
The only reason pull-to-refresh got accepted is that it came so early that the UX of smartphone app wasn't well established. Before pull-to-search or pull-to-whatever had a chance.
> nihilistically
It's quite nihilistic to think history doesn't exist and things were born as they are currently.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20201204045158/https://www.fastc...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120331181045/http://android.cy...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/vbt6d/pull_to_r...
It's on a desire trail. Users discover it by scrolling up. Which, presumably, most users do?
Discoverability is more than simply visual cues. Seeing other people do it counts.
I would however download a new browser that promises to not have all these bad features and has stripped them straight from the source code. For example, I switched from Chrome to Brave because it blocks ads.
Is there a way to persist the file even after updates?
This is cool! I was expecting a script, which tend to be brittle. This is a great way to do it.
"Something that hasn't been made clear: Firefox will have an option to completely disable all AI features. We've been calling it the AI kill switch internally. I'm sure it'll ship with a less murderous name, but that's how seriously and absolutely we're taking this."
“AI must be clear and understandable. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off.”
I'm not hopeful.
Also there's absolutely zero need to be sudo to put a JSON config file for Firefox on Linux.
You're basically bash/curl'ing the kitchen sink, with all the security risks that entails, executing a shell script as root (which may or may not be malicious now or at some point in the future), just to...
Put a 12 lines JSON file in a user's Firefox config folder.
Way to go my "fremen" brothers [1].
[1] the "fremen" in Dune as those who adore the Shai-Hulud
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...
In Linux (and in any sane system) there is no need for elevated privileges just to alter your browser settings.
There doesn't seem to be any way to set per-user group policies, so unless you're installing firefox in a user-controlled directory, it will require elevated privileges.
[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-usi...
I guess then, the browser and AI just serve different purposes now?
And you might as well just fork chromium for that purpose.
Yes browsers should be used for browsing, those half websites can run on something else.
Google and others really ruined the web.
I also today tried Qwant and for the first time, in a long while, the results Qwant delivered were objectively better than from Google Search. What the heck is Google doing?
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-...
Inflating stock prices.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Free_an...
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.
The whole "average user" agenda is already a smell. Nice to see you writing your first non-question here.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."y
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".
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.
Microsoft shoving LLMs into literally everything, including Notepad, is what people are currently hating, because it isn't quite ready.
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