The changes that Google is getting ready to roll out for Chrome, that will effect add blocking via third party extensions, is growing close. I’ve placed links at the bottom to help explain many of these issues in greater detail. Meanwhile, I’ll discuss why I see it effecting my browser choice.

Google Chrome uses the Blink browser engine. So do other browsers, including but not limited to, Microsoft’s Edge, Vivaldi, Brave, and Opera. I’ve been an almost exclusive user of Vivaldi on macOS, Linux and Windows (while I ran Windows), falling back to Safari (macOS) and Chrome when I needed to check an odd behavior. One browser that does not use Blink, but that I’ve avoided for some time now, has been Firefox. I’ve avoided Firefox because of UI changes it’s made that, to be honest, annoyed the crap out of me. The worst UI change, in my opinion, was from tabs to buttons across the top of the browser. Apple tried this design idea with a beta version of Safari, but got so much grief over that change that they put regular tabs back, and put a toggle in the browser settings page to select that “advanced” feature if that’s what you wanted.

I’m back to considering Firefox because I can no longer trust what will happen to Blink, and by its association, to Vivaldi in particular. I feel Vivaldi is excellent, but if they continue to use Blink (and honestly they couldn’t switch if they wanted to) then I really don’t want to use Vivaldi. That’s why I’m beginning to move back to Firefox on Linux Mint, starting with fixing the one UI feature I can’t stand — new-style button tabs.

There’s a link at the bottom to a question asked about how to fix the button tab issue, followed by a number of answers. I’m going to paraphrase that answer and show what solution I settled on. Here are the steps I took, and what it looked like along the way on my end.

• Open about:config
• Search for toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets
• Double-click the value to set it to true

• Open about:support
• Search for Profile Directory
• Click Open Directory

Opening the path shown will put you immediately into the profile directory. In that directory create a folder called chrome, and then navigate into chrome. Inside the chrome folder create a new file called userChrome.css

Open the empty file, and then copy and paste the following:

.tab-background {  border-radius: var(--tab-border-radius) var(--tab-border-radius) 0 0 !important;  margin-top: 1px !important;  margin-bottom: 0 !important;  padding-bottom: 31px !important;}.tabbrowser-tab[multiselected=true]:not([selected=true]) .tab-background {  border-radius: var(--tab-border-radius) !important;  margin-top: 2px !important;  margin-bottom: 1px !important;  padding-bottom: 29px !important;}.tabbrowser-tab[selected=true] .tab-background ,.tabbrowser-tab[multiselected=true] .tab-background {  background-color: var(--toolbar-bgcolor) !important;  background-image: var(--toolbar-bgimage) !important;}

Save what you just pasted into userChrome.css, then exit and restart Firefox. You’ll then have normal tabs back.

You might well ask yourself why must I go to this much trouble? I don’t have a definitive answer for you, but I can imagine that a singular developer decided to do it this way, and they were in their own little echo chamber/bubble that reinforced that decision. As I wrote earlier Apple tried this and got soundly beaten back, to the point that Safari was released with Plain Old Tabs. But at least you have an ability to actually fix the Firefox tabs issue.

It’s surprising how much better I like Firefox with this one change. Believe it or not I now feel comfortable leaving all other browsers and moving back into using Firefox.

Links

• Inc — Google Is Putting an End to Ad-Blocking in Chrome: Here Are the 5 Best Browser Alternatives — https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/google-is-putting-an-end-to-ad-blocking-in-chrome-here-are-5-best-browser-alternatives.html
• Daring Fireball — The Tragedy of Safari 15 for Mac’s ‘Tabs’ — https://daringfireball.net/2021/10/the_tragedy_of_safari_15_quote_unquote_tabs
• Chromium repo — Blink browser engine — https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/third_party/blink/
• superuser — How to switch back to Firefox’ old style of tabs? — https://superuser.com/questions/1653533/how-to-switch-back-to-firefox-old-style-of-tabs