05 May 2026 Search

If you go shopping for a printer as an individual, most of what’s on the market is enshittified out of the box. Printers for the home market (with one exception, featured in that viral Best printer 2025 story), are largely point of sale devices for expensive ink cartridges.

The office printer market is different. And it’s not just the big printers. If you’re buying a whole bunch of small printers at once, for bankers, sales reps, or service advisors to have at their desks, you probably have more options. And any shenanigans, malarkey, or other growth hacking on one of those printers means lost time for the employee who’s supposed to use it, and for the IT person who has to come fix it or switch it out. And time is money.

Sometimes the best home printer is a used, reconditioned office printer, but that’s another story. (Recommendations for shops that recondition these welcome, I want to add to my business recommendations page.)

With browsers, there aren’t really home and office products. The same codebase gets shipped for both individual and business users. And that presents a problem for the business users, since the home version is enshittified. It’s not just the Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent thing. Right now all the major browsers are working on an attribution cartel that would report to advertisers that, for example, this guy’s “content” is a more effective context for advertising than any legit site, while also facilitating ad fraud and providing more motivation to do it. (What Happens When The Attribution Cartel Meets Advertising’s Halo Effect? The Hidden Dangers Of Privacy-Preserving Attribution – And A Smarter Solution)

So the mainstream browsers make it possible to, in effect, run a “pro” or “office” version by giving the system administrator the tools to turn the enshittification off. If you’re an IT manager and you want to not have Google Chrome download however many copies of that 4 GB “foundational GenAI model” then you can put the right files in the right place to turn off GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings. There should also be a setting for the attribution cartel stuff—there was for the earlier “Privacy Sandbox” in-browser ad features, and you can even turn off third-party cookies.

You don’t have to be a corporate IT manager to use enterprise management features in the browser. Anyone with a little command-line knowledge on Linux or Mac OS should be able to do it on those platforms, and it looks a little different on Microsoft Windows, but hopefully the Windows Registry stuff should be pretty straightforward for anyone with Windows admin skills.

Anyway, the more that browsers enshittify, the greater the wins from learning and using the enterprise management features. It’s the return of the power user. I have been using the enterprise management features for Firefox and for Google Chrome for a while—turning off browser ad features from the command line—and it should be possible to do something similar for Mac OS. That way someone with homebrew could just

    brew install browserdeenshittification

and it would just do the right thing. If somebody makes this kind of package or tool for other platforms, please let me know and I’ll link here. More: The two-class platform