Prior to 2017, all W3C standards were free for anyone to implement, allowing free/open browser developers to create their own rivals to the big companies' offerings. But now, a key W3C standard requires a proprietary component to be functional, and that component is under Google's control, and the company will not authorize free/open source developers to use that component.

TrackMeNot runs in Firefox as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and Bing. It hides users' actual search trails in a cloud of 'ghost' queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles. To better simulate user behavior TrackMeNot uses a dynamic query mechanism to 'evolve' each client (uniquely) over time, parsing the results of its searches for 'logical' future query terms with which to replace those already used.

CustomizeGoogle is a Firefox extension that enhances Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam).

I'm here to report a small side effect from installing this service pack that I was not aware of until just a few days ago: Apparently, the .NET update automatically installs its own Firefox add-on that is difficult -- if not dangerous -- to remove, once installed. [...] Microsoft has disabled the "uninstall" button on the extension. What's more, Microsoft tells us that the only way to get rid of this thing is to modify the Windows registry, an exercise that -- if done imprecisely -- can cause Windows systems to fail to boot up.

Fradar är en ”plug-in”, ett slags tilläggsprogram till webbläsaren. Den analyserar hela tiden trafikmönstret, och rapporterar om anslutningen är nationell hela vägen, och därmed säker, eller om den passerar utländska servrar eller routrar längs vägen, och därmed är avlyssningsbar av FRA.

Crowbar is a web scraping environment based on the use of a server-side headless mozilla-based browser. Its purpose is to allow running javascript scrapers against a DOM to automate web sites scraping but avoiding all the syntax normalization issues.

After finding that there are now python wrappers for GtkMozEmbed, I made my own screenshotter-and-thumbnailer by embedding the Mozilla browser component using a little python script.