A Federal Judge has declared Google a Monopoly, what will it mean for Firefox and it’s parent Mozilla


Since a Federal Judge has declared that Google is a monopoly and specifically that it paying other companies for the top search spot in browsers like Safari and Firefox is monopolistic, I see a serious unintended consequence. People are wondering what will happen to Google, but I wonder what will happen to Mozilla and specifically Firefox, which I have long considered the best desktop browser around (I specify desktop as I am forced to use Safari on my iPhone and iPad, or at least a WebKit browser).

Mozilla releases Firefox for free and the company has long struggled to make money in any way besides selling Google its prime search engine spot. And since it is likely that the Judge will stop Google from making such payments, I wonder how long Mozilla will survive.

And ironically this will also benefit Google’s chrome browser, as without Mozilla there will be so few alternatives to Chrome, especially that run their own separate engine as Microsoft’s Edge, Vivaldi, Opera and Brave are all already based on Chromium. And sure these other chromium browsers don’t all share your data with Google as Chrome does, but the internet should not all be controlled by one company! And right now there is basically chromium, Gecko from Mozilla and WebKit for Safari, so breaking this monopoly could actually leave only Chromium and WebKit left.

And I prefer Mozilla because of its customization. Unfortunately they now have the same plugin architecture, but I can still customize Mozilla much more and am not having more of my data used by Google to make money off it.

And the less competition, the less chance of google improving Chomium.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-judge-rules-google-broke-antitrust-law-search-case-2024-08-05

The Register has some great advice for Mozilla

See this article by Liam Proven at the Register.

Mozilla, please stop aping Chrome. Copying is rarely the way to win big. The Australis Chrome-like theme in Firefox 29 annoyed users and was a driving force behind Pale Moon. Firefox Quantum killed XUL addons, and drove The Reg FOSS desk to Waterfox Classic. Others went to Basilisk instead, while XP users have MyPal.

Even Microsoft’s Chrome-based Edge has vertical tabs. Firefox doesn’t, and to make them well, you must mess around with config files, although we still feel it’s worth it. The Vivaldi browser shows that there is still plenty of room to outdo Chrome on features, and a market of people who want for them.

Can we please have a Firefox that leans into being the browser for power users? Bundle some of the more powerful extensions that survived your self-inflicted extension extinction event. Vertical or tree-structured tabs, on any edge. Menu bars and hotkeys. Multithreaded downloads, even integrated BitTorrent support. Perhaps experiment with this stuff in the Firefox developer edition. Bring back the customizability it once had, which you’ve been steadily removing for years.

Yes yes yes!

I still use Mozilla almost exlusively on my Mac, and I use tree style vertical tabs, which are so much better, but I had to customize Mozilla so much!

Making the Title Bar dark in Firefox on a Mac in dark mode, and tree style tabs only

OK so I know this is probably going into the weeds way too much for most readers (if there even is anyone currently reading my blog), but this has been an annoyance to me for some time.

I use Mozilla Firefox as my primary browser and have for a good many years. Now I use Safari on iOS because all browsers on iOS are using the same Safari engine anyway, so might as well use Apples. And I do use Safari once in a while on my mac, especially to manage my bookmarks which manage to get pretty messed up at least once a month so I need to go back to my most recent backup of Firefox bookmarks and replace them to clean them up, but for general browsing I use Firefox.

Now I recently took a jump into trying out using Vivaldi browser, because it has built in ability to have my tabs on the left or right, but I don’t like them as well as Firefox’s plug in Tree Style Tabs, plus I find Vivaldi to be a bit of a resource hog when I have a lot of tabs open and I often have way too many tabs open. Don’t get me wrong it is a good browser, but I have always preferred Firefox even if it supposedly more of a resource hog than either Chrome or Safari. I have always liked it plug ins better, and it just the most customizable especially if you delve into the about:config settings and even more so if you delve into CSS by customizing your userChrome.css file (which is a text file you put into your profile folder within a chrome folder.

Because I use Tree Style tabs on the left of my browser, I have wanted to get rid of the tabs along the top and with some coding help I managed that.

I added the following to my userChrome.css file and this hides the top tabs, which saves a little space at the top of my browser.

/* hides the native tabs */
#TabsToolbar {
  visibility: collapse;
}

Now I wanted to make the damn white title bar at the top be dark. I know it was possible to get rid of it (and it is gone on Windows already), but I like having the site title at the top.

Now to get some help I posted my question in the Reddit Firefox CSS section and got the answers very quickly.

So again I entered about:config in the url bar of Firefox to go into the advanced settings.

And first set browser.tabs.drawInTitlebar to true, and it was set to false which allows the OS to draw the title bar, when set to true Firefox draws the title bar so the color can be changed using a #titelbar tag in the css. When I set this the title bar went away, but I was able to turn it back on in the customizetoolbar settings. To get there right click in the toolbar and select customize toolbar,

Then in the bottom right hand corner there is a checkbox for the title and I turned it back on, though it was still bright.

Next again in about:config, I set the setting for widget.macos.respect-system-appearance to true, which made the title bar follow the settings for dark mode, and now my title bar is dark. WOOHOO!

No more top tabs and the title bar is dark, I couldn’t be happier!

Mozilla Firfox is dumping it’s plug ins, moving to chrome style extensions

Ars Technica reports that Mozilla is dumping it’s plug ins in favor of Chrome Style Extensions. This will mean a more modern browser which is less likely to crash, but it means no more extensions that can deeply change the browser.

And it is it’s powerful plugin style that is why I have stuck with Mozilla even when Chrome was faster, so this might mean the end of me sticking with Mozilla. I use quite a few Moxilla extensions ever day, like Tab Mix Plus and download them all, and if they are gone, there goes my support and use of Mozilla. I personally have always been willing to have a little less stability to keep Mozillas awesome plug in support, so I think this is an awful idea!

Honestly I am going to give Vivaldi a try, it is a new browser for power users from one of the founders of the Opera browser. With Mozilla removing it’s most powerful features, a customizable alternative based on the same webkit engine as Chrome sounds like a great idea! ArsTechnica has a good look at it.