Quiche Industries has made AI-free web search the default behavior in Quiche Browser, a small but pointed change for users who would rather see ordinary search links before a generated answer box eats the page.
The company announced the change on Mastodon on July 14, saying Quiche Browser now disables AI overviews in search results “out of the box.” Quiche Industries framed the move as a way to keep links to human-made websites from being pushed down by generated summaries.
The mechanism is less dramatic than the rhetoric. In follow-up posts, Quiche Industries said the browser is not stripping elements out of pages or running a content blocker against search results. Instead, when a supported search engine is set as the browser’s default, Quiche Browser opens that engine’s AI-free results URL.
How the setting works
According to Quiche Industries, the default applies to Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing and Brave Search. If one of those is selected as the default search engine, a typed search query is sent to the version of that engine that does not show AI features.
The company said the search results are then served as the search engine provides them. In other words, Quiche Browser is changing the destination it generates for a search query, rather than modifying the returned results page after it loads.
Quiche Industries also drew a line between searches and direct navigation. In response to a Mastodon user who described the feature as address hijacking, the company said that entering a Google search results URL in the address bar sends the browser to that URL without changes. Entering a search query while Google is the default search engine makes the app generate a URL for Google’s no-AI results version.
Users who want AI search features can turn them back on. Quiche Industries said the toggle is available in Settings, then Search.
Default choice draws pushback
The announcement produced the kind of argument browser defaults tend to produce: half product design, half theology. Some Mastodon users praised the decision specifically because it is enabled by default. Others objected that a browser should render pages without imposing the developer’s view of what the web should look like.
A Mastodon user posting as boobooking argued that changes like this should be handled by configurable browser extensions, not by the browser itself. Quiche Industries replied that the feature does not change the search results page and only redirects to an AI-free version when one is available.
Another user, RandomHayBale, said the feature should be opt-in and compared default URL changes to unwanted browser add-on behavior. Quiche Industries disputed that characterization, saying the browser does not alter a URL the user explicitly enters.
The dispute is narrow but useful. Quiche Browser is not claiming to defeat AI search with filtering magic. It is choosing a different search endpoint by default, then giving users a switch to undo that choice. That is still an opinionated browser decision, just not the page-mangling one critics initially suspected.
This story draws on original reporting from Mastodon.
