Skip to content
Tech News
← Back to articles

Browser De-Slop

read original more articles
Why This Matters

Browser De-Slop offers a method for users and organizations to strip away unnecessary features and bloat in modern browsers through policy files, enhancing privacy, performance, and control. This approach is especially relevant for enterprise environments and privacy-conscious consumers seeking a leaner browsing experience. By disabling telemetry, AI features, and pre-installed extensions, users can significantly improve security and reduce resource consumption.

Key Takeaways

Browser De-Slop

Modern browsers ship with an insane amount of bloatware.

You can point and click in the browser settings to disable most of it. Or, you can de-slop the browser by force using a policy file.

Policy File Locations

To get started, create a JSON file at the appropriate path for your distribution. Here’s a few that I’m aware of:

Distribution Browser Path FreeBSD Chromium /usr/local/etc/chromium/policies/managed/policies.json FreeBSD Firefox /usr/local/lib/firefox/distribution/policies.json Ubuntu Chrome /etc/opt/chrome/policies/managed/policies.json Ubuntu Chromium /etc/chromium-browser/policies/managed/policies.json Ubuntu Firefox /etc/firefox/policies/policies.json RedHat Chromium /etc/chromium/policies/managed/policies.json RedHat Firefox /etc/firefox/policies/policies.json

Allegedly, these policies are also supported on Windows via Group Policy and MacOS using plist files. I wouldn’t know, since I use a real operating system.

Firefox

You should read the docs for each option to understand what it does. My configuration here does a few things:

Disables all extra functionality (Pocket, Relay, homepage widgets)

... continue reading