January 2026 Work Log (Patreon)

Hi everyone! Here's everything I worked on during the month of January, exclusively for Patreon supporters.

Just the Browser

In case you missed the previous announcement post, Just the Browser is a new project that removes AI features and other annoyances from desktop web browsers. It received a lot more attention than I anticipated, including media coverage in The Register, PC Gamer, ZDNet, Linux for Everyone, Lifehacker, and several other places. The main website has received over 90K visitors, and the GitHub repository is close to 2K stars.

That attention also brought a lot of bug reports, pull requests, and general suggestions that I have been sorting through. In the first few days, GitHub user pludi helped add Chrome/Chromium support on Linux, another person fixed the script on Linux distros that don't have the sudo command, and a few minor installation and configuration bugs were fixed. I also set up the releases feed with RSS links on the website, so there's an easy way to be notified when the configuration files (or other project resources) are updated.

Most of the bug reports and issues did not share enough technical details, so I'm now making use of GitHub's issue forms feature. When someone creates a new issue for the installer or documentation, they are prompted to select their operating system and affected web browsers. This cuts down some of the initial back-and-forth to figure out the problem.

There was one architectural issue that became apparent after a few days: configuring group policies in Firefox with a JSON file was not reliable at all. Firefox app updates would often delete the configuration file—I could never duplicate that problem on macOS, but it did happen to me on a Windows PC. It seems like that method is intended mostly for Linux, or situations where an IT department is deploying Firefox updates alongside a JSON file.

To fix this problem, I switched the Firefox configuration file to a Configuration Profile (.mobileconfig) on macOS and Windows Registry configs on Windows, which are the same methods already used for Chrome and Edge. The system-level configuration also made it easy to add support for all Firefox variations on macOS, including Developer Edition and Nightly. The automatic script has been updated to delete any existing JSON files (except on Linux) before proceeding with Firefox modifications, so the JSON files won't override the current config methods.

There's still more work to be done, especially on Linux where Flatpak-based browsers, Microsoft Edge, and atomic distributions are not fully supported. There are also some lingering bugs on Home editions of Windows that I haven't been able to replicate yet. This initial version seems to be working well for most people, though.

The Spacebar

I published one article on The Spacebar in January: That time Apple sent everyone a U2 album.

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