Just the Browser claims to tame the bloat without forking
- Reference: 1768835331
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/01/19/just_the_browser/
- Source link:
[1]Just the Browser is a new project by developer [2]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- [3]enshittified browsers that there are multiple forks of the big names. For Firefox, there are [4]Waterfox and [5]Zen as well as [6]LibreWolf and [7]Floorp , and projects based off much older versions of the codebase such as [8]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 [9]Chinese-owned Opera , and from some of the people behind the original Norwegian Opera browser, [10]Vivaldi .
[11]
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 [12]stop using Brave Browser – an article that The Reg FOSS desk has [13]previously cited. Those with long memories may have encountered Davenport's work nearly a decade earlier, though. Way back in 2014, The Register [14]described him as an enfant terrible for running Windows 95 on a smartwatch.
[15]
[16]
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 [17]48.5 million lines of code and Mozilla Firefox isn't much smaller at [18]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.
[19]Coming soon: We interrupt this ChatGPT session with a very special message from our sponsors
[20]Firefox 147 brings GPU boost, tidier tabs, and video that follows you around
[21]Brave refurbishes Rust adblocking engine for reduced memory footprint
[22]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 [23]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. ®
Get our [24]Tech Resources
[1] https://justthebrowser.com/
[2] https://corbin.io/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/30/tech_monopoly_doctorow/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/04/waterfox_firefox_fork/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/02/zen_firefox_fork_alpha/
[6] https://librewolf.net/
[7] https://floorp.app/
[8] https://www.palemoon.org/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2016/07/18/no_12bn_opera_buyout/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/vivaldi_5_7/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aW5jOVep7AKPD7pP5geqkQAAAAM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[12] https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/03/zorin_os_173/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2014/10/07/chap_runs_windows_95_on_android_wear/
[15] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aW5jOVep7AKPD7pP5geqkQAAAAM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[16] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aW5jOVep7AKPD7pP5geqkQAAAAM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[17] https://openhub.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest/languages_summary
[18] https://openhub.net/p/firefox/analyses/latest/languages_summary
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/17/openai_chatgpt_ads/
[20] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/14/firefox_and_tbird_147/
[21] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/06/brave_refurbishes_rust_adblocking_engine/
[22] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/26/disable_ai_features_chrome/
[23] https://github.com/corbindavenport/just-the-browser/
[24] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
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).
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.
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.
That's been the case since some websites said "best viewed with Internet Explorer".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People who care about this stuff do not run Chrome.
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?
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.
Thanks
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
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.