You might not know it, but Firefox was once widely considered to be an innovative browser. It wasn’t just an alternative to Internet Explorer (and now Chrome). Firefox introduced honest-to-goodness new features that people loved and rely on to this day.
I was there when Chrome launched. From the start it was a memory hog, but otherwise looked like a decent alternative. Firefox was stable, and lightweight, and overall better tho.
I was also there when FF adopted Chrome’s rapid prototyping model of development with radically rising build numbers. It’s not about the numbers, but over time FF’s entire philosophy has changed mostly to just copycat Chrome.
Especially crappy is the mobile browser imo, which has really turned to meh in the past few years.
And I also blame Mozilla for abandoning the Firefox OS. Something really cool could’ve become out of that. In fact, something has, as KaiOS has the basis in FF OS, and it looks like a pretty sweet OS honestly.
Actually, the mobile browser had a major overhaul a few years ago. I had switched to mobile Firefox just a few months before the new version and performance has vastly improved. Usability is okay (sometimes I wonder if these folks use their own software). But otherwise not much has changed since then.
That overhaul a few years ago was exactly terrible. IIRC they removed important features like exporting bookmarks and viewing the page source, made searching with alternative search engines much worse, removed nice features like ability to rearrange tabs…
Also I don’t remember when it was exactly when they disabled all but a handful of add-ons unless you use a beta/fork and use their stupid Mozilla account or something to create an add-on list.
And while you may have good experience with performance, since then I only see FF as slow, buggy and crashy, and let’s not forget all the shitty telemetry Mozilla keeps stuffing into the thing.
The cherry on the cake are some Mozilla higher-ups who not only never listen to the users, but also give middle finger to the “haters”, i.e. the few people who use their browser and have constructive feedback.
I honestly don’t know why I bother using it (or rather, a less shitty fork). Lots of Chrome forks have almost everything FF has with addons and more, and work more reliably. Google is dominating everything anyway, and Mozilla only wants to dig its own grave.