A quote from Miles Davis, from a clip used in BBC Radio 4’s Great Lives episode on him. He was asked why he doesn’t revisit his old music.

Those songs, to me, don’t exist. You know, we don’t have time for “Body and Soul” and “I Got Rhythm,” you know, or “So What,” or Kind of Blue. Those things are there, they were done in that era, the right hour, the right day, and it happened. It’s over, it’s on the record. You know, people ask me, “Why’d you play this?” Go buy the record.

Compare to Marina Abramović when asked a question about an early work:

I hate these kind of questions. I can’t deal with sentimentality. To me, it’s so important: learn the lesson, move on. Learn the lesson, move on.

It was a nice day in Toronto today, and I was enjoying a walk along Bloor Street West near Ossington when I saw Toronto Darts & Games. Some juggling balls in the window caught my eye and I went in.

This is a fantastic store! They have juggling supplies, Rubik’s cubes, board games, card games, decks of cards, toys, puzzles (many types, including jigsaws), chess boards and clocks, backgammon sets, cribbage boards, polyhedral dice, and much more. And that’s not including darts: the back quarter of the space is all for darts.

I bought two sets of three beanbags made by Higgins Brothers, who are new to me, and I was delighted to find it’s in Dundas, which is near Toronto, just around the west side of Lake Ontario. A Canadian company making great juggling supplies! I think one set of beanbags I have was made by them, but they’re about twenty years old now and getting worn out. They’re still perfectly usable, though: that’s good manufacturing.

I also picked up two NexCubes, a 3×3 (basically a Rubik’s Cube but a different mechanism inside, I think) and a 2×2 (a Pocket Cube), which have very smooth workings (here is the set in the online store). The fellow said this is what speed cubers use.

Toronto Darts & Games will now be the first place I go for anything like this. It’s great to have a local store with such a big selection.

I’m reading the Accursed Kings series of historical novels (Les Rois Maudits in your actual French) by Maurice Druon, an immensely enjoyable telling of French and English royalty (and Aquitanian, Burgundian, etc.) in the early 1300s, with adultery, murder, poisoning, revolution, blackmail, executions, forgery, Templars, witches, babies swapped at birth, an escape from the Tower of London, the Avignon Papacy, Lombard bankers, the Queen of England (sister to the King of France) invading England from France with her lover and her son to take the throne from her husband, and more.

The books are rich with memorable quotes. Here’s one from the fifth, The She-Wolf of France (translated by Humphrey Hare):

You can think what you like of your friends, provided you don’t tell them.

And from the sixth, The Lily and the Lion:

Stupidity is no bar to enterprise; on the contrary, it tends to conceal difficulties which an intelligent man would consider insuperable.

I have a display up at the main branch of York University Libraries, where I work. It’s timed for Earth Day, and I call it Climate Crisis, Climate Action. Here’s the whole thing, which is just inside the entrance of the Scott Library in the unattractive alcove we use for displays.

The screen has ten slides in rotation. The PDF version of the slide deck is about 2.5 MB.

Here are the books (listed below). Electronic books have a dummy with a cover and QR code pointing to the catalogue entry.

Here is the table with my personal statement and free zines set out for people to take.

This is my signed statement:

Climate Climate, Crisis Action

This display is inspired by Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021). It is not actually about how to blow up a pipeline. It is about why people aren’t blowing them up now, and if they will start, and if they should start. It’s about pacifism, sabotage, and the role of radical and direct action to bring about major changes in society.

The climate crisis is happening and the global situation is going to get much, much worse. Some things are getting better, such as the quickly growing implementation of solar power around the world. But the years ahead are going to be bad, the decades ahead will be very bad, and the centuries ahead could be catastrophic.

Alone, we can achieve very little. Working together, we can do more. But when we work together we must be careful about who’s watching and listening.

Zines

The zines are:

• Electronic Frontier Foundation Pocket Guide: Protecting Your Data During a Protest
• Anne Pasek: Getting Into Fights with Data Centres
• Håkan Geijer (from Riot Medicine): How Not to Blow Up a Pipeline

They all get picked up every day. The little EFF guide has the fewest takers, but I hope those who do grab are the kind who will find it useful and practical. Pasek’s and Geijer’s zines are both popular. Many thanks to them for writing the zines, making them openly available, and formatting them for printing!

Suggestions for other zines are welcome.

Book list

This is my book list. Most but not all of the books are in the display. How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm is there in print and e. I like Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introductions and put them out whenever I can.

• Abadi, Climate Radicals: Why Our Environmental Politics Isn’t Working
• Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang
• Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline
• Biehl, Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin
• Blake, Children of a Modest Star
• Mike Davis, The Monster Enters: Covid-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism
• Davis, The Earth First! Reader: Ten Years of Radical Environmentalism
• Di Ronco, Policing Environmental Protest: Power and Resistance in Pandemic Times
• Doherty, Surviving Climate Anxiety
• Dunion, Troublemakers: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Scotland
• Extinction Rebellion, This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook
• Firth, Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action
• Fisher, Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action
• Fox, Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them
• Goldstone, Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction
• Gonstalla, Atlas of a Threatened Planet
• David Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography
• Greenfield, Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire
• Hanieh, Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market
• Henderson, Glacial: The Inside Story of Climate Politics
• Hermann, The End of Capitalism: Why Growth and Climate Protection Are Incompatible—And How We Will Live In the Future
• Huber, Climate Change as Class War
• Jakobsen, Anarchism and Ecological Economics: A Transformative Approach to a Sustainable Future
• Klein, A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency
• Kuyek, Unearthing Justice: How to Protect Your Community from the Mining Industry
• Liddick, Eco-Terrorism: Radical Environmental and Animal Liberation Movements
• Lynas, Our Final Warning
• Markley, The Deluge (see my 2023 review of this excellent novel)
• Martha F. Lee, Earth First! Environmental Apocalypse
• Maslin, Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction
• Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age
• McGuire, Geophysical and Climate Hazards: A Very Short Introduction
• Mendez, Climate Change from the Streets
• Menton and Le Billon, Environmental Defenders
• Nesbit, This Is the Way the World Ends: How Droughts and Die-Offs, Heat Waves and Hurricanes are Converging on America
• Oreskes and Conway, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future
• Princhard, Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction
• Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry for the Future
• Rosebraugh, Burning Rage of a Dying Planet: Speaking for the Earth Liberation Front
• Sawatsky, Anarchist Perspectives for Social Work: Disrupting Oppressive Systems
• Scheuerman, The Cambridge Companion to Civil Disobedience
• Schwartzstei, The Heat and the Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence
• David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth
• Welzer, Climate Wars: Why People Will Be Killed in the Twenty-First Century
• Mark Winfield (York) et al., Sustainable Energy Transitions in Canada
• Woodhouse, The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism
• How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022 film)
• Night Moves (2013 film)

Academic freedom

In case you’re wondering, librarians and archivists at York have academic freedom, thanks for being members of the York University Faculty Association (a union). This is Article 10 (Academic Freedom) in our collective agreement:

10.1 The parties agree to continue their practice of upholding, protecting, and promoting academic freedom as essential to the pursuit of truth and the fulfilment of the University’s objectives. Academic freedom includes the freedom of an employee to examine, question, teach, and learn; to disseminate their opinion(s) on any questions related to their teaching, professional activities, and research both inside and outside the classroom; to pursue without interference or reprisal, and consistent with the time constraints imposed by their other University duties, their research, creative or professional activities, and to freely publish and make public the results thereof; to criticize the University or society at large; and to be free from institutional censorship. Academic freedom does not require neutrality on the part of the individual, nor does it preclude commitment on the part of the individual. Rather, academic freedom makes such commitment possible.

10.02 When exercising their rights of action and expression as citizens, employees shall endeavour to ensure that their private actions or expressions are not interpreted as representing positions of York University. Any published views of the Administration concerning YUFA shall be clearly identified as representing the views of the York University Administration.

I came across Compositor, a really wonderful site that has a huge collection of printers’ ornaments from the 1700s.

Eighteenth-century books were highly decorated and decorative. Their pages were adorned with ornaments that ranged from small floral embellishments to large and intricate head- and tailpieces, depicting all manner of people, places, and things. Compositor includes ornaments cut by hand in blocks of wood or metal, as well as cast ornaments, engravings, and fleurons (ornamental typography).

Here are four:

The project was overseen by Hazel Wilkinson, who cowrote “Computer Vision and the Creation of a Database of Printers’ Ornaments” (Digital Humanities Quarterly vol. 15 no. 1, 2021), from which I quote: “All of the content is in the public domain, so the images collected in Fleuron are freely disseminated for public use.” (Fleuron is the former name of Compositor).

For more on all this, and more images, you could browse English Printers’ Ornaments by Henry R. Plomer (1924).

Compositor would be a great source for illustrations and graphic elements to use on web sites.

Yesterday I was at the Art Gallery of Ontario and spent a while looking at The Rose (1964) by Agnes Martin. It’s six feet a side (182.6 × 182.7 cm to be exact) and the media are listed as “oil, red and black pencil, sizing on canvas.” It’s a quiet, mysterious work, apparently very simple but full of small differences to see when looked at closely.

It’s made of pencil lines, horizontal and vertical, in a grid. I wondered how many lines there were. This is not at all necessary to the enjoyment and appreciation of the work, but I’m mathematically inclined and I was curious. I took a bad photo and counted them when I got home.

By my count there are 282 lines horizontally and 188 lines vertically. Multiplying, we find there are 53,016 cells in the grid. Good to know.

Dividing is more interesting.

$ factor 188
188: 2 2 47
$ factor 282
282: 2 3 47

There is an exact 2:3 ratio of vertical to horizontal lines!

If you ever see an Agnes Martin painting in a gallery, stop and spend some time with it.

This is a follow-up to Exactitude is not truth. Cold exactitude is not art. In that January post I looked at sources for a quote from Matisse that turned out to be taken from Delacroix.

My excellent York University colleague Philippe Theophanidis collects quotes and those two caught his eye. (Browse around his site Aphelis and you’ll see a lot of great quotes, and much more.) He found that the interview with Henri Matisse by Jacques Guenne in L’Art Vivant (15 September 1925) was published as a small book in 2020 (see its entry in the BNF catalogue), and he bought a copy. Many thanks to him for doing this and for what he discovered!

In it, “« L’exactitude n’est pas la vérité », se plaisait à dire Delacroix” has a footnote:

« La vérité esthétique n’est pas l’exactitude », formule apparue dans un article élogiuex de Léon Peisse, Le Constitutionnel, 8 juillet 1849, à propos de Delacroix.

In English something like this:

“Aesthetic truth is not exactitude,” a phrase that appears in a laudatory article by Léon Peisse, Le Constitutionnel, July 8, 1849, about Delacroix.

That issue of Le Constitutionnel is available in Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France! Philippe tracked it down and located the quote exactly.

A piece on the Salon of 1849 (an important year in the history of this annual exhibition) begins on the first page, with the first line “Heureuse et belle carrière d’artiste, que celle de M. Eugène Delacroix!” (Laudatory indeed: “A happy and beautiful artistic career, that of M. Eugène Delacroix!”) The review carries over to the bottom of the second page, and at the beginning in a discussion of two paintings of fruits and flowers we find:

Je m’inquiète peu de savoirs quels sont ces fruits et ces fleurs; c’est l’affaire du botaniste et de l’horticulteur; il me suffit de voir que ce sonts des fleurs et des fruits, et les plus beaux fruits et fleur du monde. C’est errer toto cœlo que de s’attacher en ceci à la pure imitation de ce qu’on appelle la nature. La vérité esthétique n’est pas l’exactitude.

In English this is something like:

I care little to know what these fruits and flowers are; that is the business of botanist and the horticulturist; it is enough for me to see that these are flowers and fruits, and the most beautiful fruits and flowers in the world. It is an error toto cœlo [utterly] to attach oneself in this to the pure imitation of what is called nature. Aesthetic truth is not exactitude.

The two paintings in question are first Basket of Flowers, now at the Met in New York:

And second Basket of Flowers and Fruit, now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art:

(Sources on Wikipedia: Basket of Flowers and Basket of Flowers and Fruit.)

So here we have art critic Léon Peisse saying in 1849, in a review of a work by Delacroix:

La vérité esthétique n’est pas l’exactitude. Aesthetic truth is not exactitude.

The next year Delacroix writes in his journal:

La froide exactitude n’est pas l’art. Cold exactitude is not art.

In 1925 Matisse says to an interviewer that Delacroix liked to say:

L’exactitude n’est pas la vérité. Exactitude is not truth.

Delacroix had it best.

(Unfortunately I can’t read what Edgar Degas wrote about Delacroix here: Note ayant trait à l’œuvre “Fruits et fleurs” d’Eugène Delacroix (from the archives of the Musée d’Orsay).) The heading says it was bought from Brame fils for 1600 francs on 26 December 1898.

UPDATE (18 March 2026): But Philippe Theophanidis could, and found which work it’s about:

Je ne sais pourquoi je ne mordais pas à ce tableau, Rouart ne voulait le prendre que déjà n’en voulais pas et il faisait tout ce qu’il pouvait pour me pousser dessus. Enfin comme il y renonça définitivement pour lui, je l’achetai 1600, et, une fois chez moi, je me rendis compte qu’il est admirable, que je n’y voyais goutte, et que le bon Rouart m’avait fait un fameux cadeau. Brame fils aurait pu le vendre beaucoup plus cher, lui aussi m’a fait un cadeau.

This is something like:

I don’t know why I wasn’t biting on this painting. Rouart didn’t want to take it since he already didn’t want it, and he was doing everything he could to push me toward it. Finally, as he definitively gave up on it for himself, I bought it for 1600, and once at home, I realized it’s admirable, that I hadn’t seen anything in it at all, and that good Rouart had made me quite a gift. Brame fils could have sold it much more dearly; he too made me a gift.

Degas’s Wikipedia article mentions his large art collection and references this quote on p. 37 from Degas by Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988):

His most important holdings were of his three idols, Ingres, Delacroix, and Daumier. In the final inventory of his collection, there were twenty paintings and eighty-eight drawings by Ingres, thirteen paintings and almost two hundred drawings by Delacroix. There were hundreds of lithographs by Daumier.

This work he bought is not one of the two above, and it seems it’s not even really by Delacroix. The Private Collection of Edgar Degas: A Summary Catalogue (Metropolitan Museum of New York, 1997) (PDF) has it as “attributed to Pierre Andrieu” (who had worked for Delacroix, and, it appears, was known for his copies and possibly forgeries of Delacroix’s work).

4. Still Life with Fruit and Flowers

ca. 1850–64

Oil on canvas, 65.8 × 81 cm

Acquired from Hector Brame, Dec. 26, 1898, for 1,600 fr., as “French school”; had been described by Degas as a work by Delacroix.

The painting is at the National Gallery in London, but not currently on display. The catalogue record for Still Life with Fruit and Flowers says:

The painting was thought to be the work of Eugène Delacroix, but it is has now been attributed to Pierre Andrieu, his most trusted assistant, and holds its own with a place in the National Gallery’s collection. At the studio sale following Delacroix’s death, Andrieu was in possession of the wax seal that was fixed to the back of this picture – perhaps accidentally, perhaps intentionally – and that authenticated it as by Delacroix.

For over two decades I hosted my web sites at Pair Networks. This site used to be static (built with Perl’s Template::Toolkit), then it was on Drupal, then I went back to static (with Jekyll). For a while I managed two WordPress sites. In the end I was hosting six web sites there, and managing email for a seventh. Shell access (to a FreeBSD server) gave me procmail, database access, and more. It always worked and the cost was reasonable.

But Pair is in the USA.

I’ve moved my sites (and a virtual private server) to FullHost. As its Web Hosting in Canada page says, “FullHost is dedicated to providing unparalleled Canadian-based web hosting internet services to Canadians. As a Canadian owned and operated business out of Victoria BC, we’ve been in the business of helping Canadians with home grown web hosting solutions since 2004.”

FullHost’s tech support has been really helpful, especially in taking several extra steps so that I can’t see any access logs for my web sites. I have to manage things with CPanel, which is extremely ugly, but it seems that’s what all hosting companies use, and once I’ve got a site configured I don’t need to look at it again. I have shell access and can do everything I need to (which is mostly just some cron jobs right now).

I recommend FullHost. If you’re interested in other Canadian service providers, look at:

• Canadian Alternatives - Internet Services
• Made in Canada
• CoSocial’s list of Canadian Tech Co-Ops
• Buy Canadian Cyber

I only realized tonight that Pair is now owned by Your.Online, which is owned by Strikwerda Investments in the Netherlands. I have nothing against the Dutch, but I’m glad to be using a Canadian company.

I’m rereading the Cornish Trilogy by Robertson Davies, and in What’s Bred in the Bone (1985) I was struck by something art restorer Tancred Saraceni says to Francis Cornish in early 1939:

Of course, you may become something rather like a photographer. But remember what Matisse said: “L’exactitude, ce n’est pas la verite.”

That’s good, but did Matisse say it? I’m never satisfied with a quotation unless I have a source.

Happily, it’s easy to get started on this one. Wikiquote’s entry on Matisse has a quotation, crediting it to Jack D. Flam’s translation of “Interview with Henri Matisse” by Jacques Guenne in L’Art Vivant (15 September 1925).

Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say.

Exactitude is not truth. And Delacroix! That’s the great French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix.

I got Flam’s excellent collection Matisse on Art (revised edition, University of California Press, 1995) from the library so I could see the whole piece. I like the quotation this way, including a little more of what comes next:

Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say. Notice that the classics went on re-doing the same painting and always differently. After a certain time, Cézanne always painted the same canvas of the Bathers. Although the master of Aix ceaselessly redid the same painting, don’t we come upon a new Cézanne with the greatest curiosity?

Matisse is quoting Eugène Delacroix and in the same breath speaking of Cézanne. (It reminded me of something Gertrude Stein said: “I am inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition.”)

I was curious to know how it read in the original French. L’Art Vivant hasn’t been digitized, but York University Libraries has it on microfilm, and I got it into the reader and took scans of the pages: “Entretien avec Henri Matisse” (2.3 MB PDF).

In French:

Peu à peu s’imposait cette notion que la peinture est un mode d’expression et que l’on peut exprimer la même chose de plusiers façons. « L’exactitude n’est pas la vérité », se plaisait à dire Delacroix. Remarquez que les classiques ont toujours refait le même tableau, et toujours de façon différente. A partir d’une certaine époque, Cézanne a toujours peint la même toile des Baigneuses. Bien que le maitre d’Aix eût sans cesse refait le même tableau, ne prend-on pas connaissance d’un nouveau Cézanne avec la plus grande curiosité.

L’exactitude n’est pas la vérité. To my high school French, Flam’s translation handles the original very clearly. We see that Tancred Saraceni (or Davies) slightly misquoted Matisse: there is no “ce” in this quotation. That’s assuming this is where Saraceni got the line; he was speaking in 1939 and is certainly a person likely to have read L’Art Vivant.

(For more on L’Art Vivant, which in my quick scroll looked very interesting, see “From ‘Portraits d’artistes’ to the interviewer’s portrait: interviews of modern artists by Jacques Guenne in L’art Vivant (1925–1930)” by Poppy Sfakianaki, in Journal of Art Historiography (December 2020).)

In 1947 Matisse wrote an essay titled “Exactitude is not Truth” (in Flam’s translation) for a a catalogue of a show of his drawings. Flam’s notes say, “The title phrase comes from a saying of Delacroix.” The title is the last sentence of the essay, but there is no mention of Delacroix.

I wondered if Matisse used the phrase frequently, so I looked at the indexes for the majestic two-volume biography by Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse (1995) and Matisse the Master (2005). Most of the Delacroix mentions are just in passing; there’s no mention of either this phrase or the essay.

On to Delacroix. The phrase appears once in his wonderful Journal, on 18 July 1850. Here is the original French in Wikisource:

« Dans la peinture et surtout dans le portrait, dit Mme Cavé dans son traité, c’est l’esprit qui parle à l’esprit, et non la science qui parle à la science. » Cette observation, plus profonde qu’elle ne l’a peut-être cru elle-même, est le procès fait à la pédanterie de l’exécution. Je me suis dit cent fois que la peinture, c’est-à-dire la peinture matérielle, n’était que le prétexte, que le pont entre l’esprit du peintre et celui du spectateur. La froide exactitude n’est pas l’art; l’ingénieux artifice, quand il plaît ou qu’il exprime, est l’art tout entier. La prétendue conscience de la plupart des peintres n’est que la perfection apportée à l’art d’ennuyer. Ces gens-là, s’ils le pouvaient, travailleraient avec le même scrupule l’envers de leurs tableaux… Il serait curieux de faire un traité de toutes les faussetés qui peuvent composer le vrai.

La froide exactitude n’est pas l’art.

This is the entry from the Lucy Norton translation in The Journal of Eugene Delacroix, edited by Hubert Wellington (London: Phaidon, 1995). (See Wikipedia for more on Madame Cavé.)

“In painting, and especially portraiture,” says Mme Cavé in her treatise, “mind speaks to mind, and not knowledge to knowledge.” This observation, which may be more profound than she knows herself, is an indictment of pedantry in execution. I have said to myself over and over again that painting, i.e. the material process we call painting, is no more than the pretext, the bridge, between the mind of the artist and that of the beholder. Cold accuracy is not art. Skilful invention, when it is pleasing or expressive, is art itself. The so-called conscientiousness of the great majority of painters is nothing but perfection in the art of boring. If it were possible, these fellows would labour with equal care over the backs of their pictures. It might be interesting to write a treatise on all the falsities that can be added together to make a truth.

Norton translates it as Cold accuracy is not art. To match Flam we could say Cold exactitude is not art. This is how I’ve seen it translated in some other books.

Matisse said that Delacroix “liked to say” it, but I looked at five books about Delacroix and didn’t see any mention of it, which surprised me, sharp aphorism that it is. Searching texts of scanned books at the Internet Archive doesn’t turn up any supporting evidence either.

(Note: Delacroix’s Journal is wonderful! I posted about it back in 2017. In 2019 I made a field recording in the Garden of the Delacroix Museum in Paris.)

So Matisse misremembered, or misquoted, or reshaped, Delacroix. Saraceni misquoted Matisse in a trivial way, but Matisse broadens Delacroix’s “art” to “truth.” Both Delacroix and Matisse are, of course, correct.

La froide exactitude n’est pas l’art: Cold exactitude is not art.

L’exactitude n’est pas la vérité: Exactitude is not truth.

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.