Crawling out of my hole to remind people that with this current update to Firefox (version 144) they've gone and dumped in their lot with a buncha lil AI tools, namely Perplexity as a new search engine.
So if the sound of that leaves your mouth tasting of tar, here's what you want to do:
In the url bar, type in about:config
It'll give you a big scary warning page that you might poke holes in your browser. Good. You want to do that. Click continue.
One by one, you're going to need to put each of these into the search bar in the page, not up top:
browser.ml.enable browser.ml.chat.enabled extensions.ml.enabled browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled
Each of these are gonna have a lil toggle icon on the right hand side that looks like a funky double-ended arrow. Click that and the value next to it should change to false. It all auto saves as you go. Some of these might already be set to false by default and that's peachy.
The next best thing you can do for yourself is to set your default search engine to udm14 or Qwant, but for now, we're just tidying the garden a lil bit.
Edit: This wildly broke containment for a post that was supposed to be me basically ranting and grumbling like an old man on my porch to my homies. If I’ve inspired you to follow through with this, peachy. That was mildly intended. Better yet, I hope I’ve spurred a buncha you on to do your own bit of digging and research.
If you were one of today’s lucky ten thousand to learn something new, I hope you keep doing it. I won’t be here to hold your hand through it, as I simply don’t have the time nor spoons for it, so I implore you to go down your own rabbit hole and chase knowledge with wild abandon.
