Miskatonic University Press

Recently on Mastodon I saw mention of Just the Browser, a web site that supplies tools and information to “remove AI features, telemetry data reporting, sponsored content, product integrations, and other annoyances” from web browsers, so you have just the browser. It’s a great project.

Instead of going into obscure browser settings and tweaking options this way or that, and then doing it all over again every time you start working on a new machine, you can just do something once (on each machine). This works with system-wide settings that affect all users on a machine. This is meant for organizations who want to control browser settings for all their users—a company might want to restrict its employees from changing security settings in the browser they are mandated to use—but if you’re the only person on your machine, and the only person affected, it still works.

I use Firefox, and in Firefox all this is handled with policies. They can be set up in different ways, but one way that works on all operating systems is to use a policies.json file. Just the Browser gives Firefox configuration instructions that have a sample file and good instructions on where to save it.

This was all new to me, and I was delighted to learn about it. I read the documentation and found how to permanently set many other options that I’ve always had to do by hand. At the moment, this is my /etc/firefox/policies/policies.json file:

  {
      "policies": {
      "DisableFirefoxStudies": true,
      "DisablePocket": true,
      "DisableTelemetry": true,
      "DNSOverHTTPS": { "Enabled": false },
      "DontCheckDefaultBrowser": false,
      "EnableTrackingProtection": {
          "Category": "strict"
      },
      "FirefoxHome": {
          "SponsoredStories": false,
          "SponsoredTopSites": false,
          "Stories": false
      },
      "GenerativeAI": {
          "Enabled": false
      },
      "Homepage": {
          "StartPage": "previous-session"
      },
      "HttpsOnlyMode": "enabled",
      "OfferToSaveLogins": false,
      "SanitizeOnShutdown": {
          "Cache": true
      },
      "SearchEngines": {
          "Remove": ["Perplexity", "Google", "Bing", "eBay"],
          "Default": "DuckDuckGo"
      },
      "SearchSuggestEnabled": false,
      "UserMessaging": {
          "FirefoxLabs": false,
          "MoreFromMozilla": false,
          "SkipOnboarding": true
      }
      }
  }

Unfortunately I can’t control everything about Firefox this way. I still have to configure some things myself, some through Settings and some in about:config (for example, making the scrollbar bigger).

But this does a lot of the most important stuff: turn off the AI, disable tracking, start with the previous session, don’t show any junk on new tabs, don’t show ads and suggestions, use my default DNS server, use my preferred search engine and toss out the ones I never want.

One thing to watch: make sure policies.json is a valid JSON file! If you edit it and miss some punctuation so it’s invalid, Firefox will ignore it and revert to default settings. And once I got something wrong and Firefox lost my session information, but I could recover my tabs through History. Now I’m careful to edit with Emacs or run the file through JSONLint to make sure it’s okay before relaunching Firefox.