Too many bad UX updates. I won’t go back to a browser without vertical tabs.

On losing market share.

I truly appreciate all of the efforts Mozilla has brought, but there are things I cannot tolerate, and @mindbleach@sh.itjust.works is accurate and concise, which I'd like to expound upon.

[Mozilla] spent twenty years burning out every committed advocate with broken extensions, UI whack-a-mole, random half-baked corporate decisions, [before finally mimicking Chrome.]

Firefox's user-base was mostly nerds, and nerds' grass-roots referrals; well and truly, Firefox was a developers first browser. What happens when you have many enthusiastic nerds contributing to a project? Free-ish improvements. You still need someone to review pushes, correct merge conflicts, implement requests, prioritize feedback, and maintain the playground after all.

However, Mozilla made some questionable and unilateral decisions that alienated their user-base. For the sake of brevity, I'll list some of the issues that caused me to switch to LibreWolf. Descending importance:

• Deciding developers would no longer be the target audience. (History follows. 2020 a new CEO is appointed: Mitchell Baker. Mozilla announces funding cuts to various departments, such as MDN, developer tools, and security researchers. MDN slowly loses its status as the, 1, go-to web reference and, 2, place to find the latest advancements of the web. Dev tools in Chrome gain features FF can't keep up with. Earlier in May, of this year, 2023: Mozilla begins new developer blogs in an effort to regain the gold mine they discarded, along with various other measures.)

• Installing the Mr. Robot extension without warning, let alone consent. (This was 6 years ago. I should let it go.)

• Whitelisting only 6 mobile add-ons. (Add-on manager now announced to be "(re-)opened" later this year.)

• Making it very difficult to opt-out of said mobile add-on decision, and impossible without opting-in to telemetry.

• about:config unavailability in mobile Firefox.

• Massive issues in major versions, which should've been caught by beta testing if not alpha.

My biggest gripes boil down to throwing us away, and the decisions made in pursuing generic and more profitable consumers. Mostly in removing the freedom, tinkering ability, control, etc that Firefox previously provided.

Ultimately, they have contributed greatly. I don't expect they quite understand how controlling and authoritarian decisions are driving away their hardest dying supporters, but I can hope they remember their roots. I hope they can learn and change. I'd like to get some faith back in the company I was such a large fan of. I wish them all the wisdom and success they can manage. If they go the way of Netscape, I hope some other idealist nerds pick up the torch.

I wish them well, but Firefox is no longer my browser.

almost no one cares about what Firefox adds, the convenience and trust Google got pretty much got everyone i think

I use Firefox, but it has been becoming a chore.

Specifically on Android, randomly it'll just not load a page or change tabs. It'll also randomly just lose the entire DOM and only render a black screen.

I still put up with it but I'm hoping they can focus on UX quirks a little more.

Hashtag late but Firefox’s main downsides is that it’s tab flushing sucks compared to Edge, and there’s no native vertical tabs.

In Edge, if a tab is put to sleep, clicking it again does not require a full refresh. Why does it need to completely reload in Firefox?

I’m aware there’s extensions for tab groups and vertical tabs (I’m using Simple Tab Groups), but it should be a natively supported feature.

Add that to the fact that Firefox is now the web developer equivalent of IE6 circa 2010 - minuscule user base and requires weird hacks to get websites to look good on it - and you got a recipe for people not wanting to use it.

Also lying about being the privacy focused browser when it has a bunch of telemetry and a bundled sponsored extension I had to look up how to get rid of, that part sucks too.