this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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Yeah, perhaps not their greatest move ever. I miss how customizable Firefox used to be. For a long time I used Waterfox Classic to postpone the switch, but it got harder and harder. Now you have to use stuff like paxmod to get back some of the old features.
I don't know the internal technical issues too well, though, and they have made a lot of headway in the speed department since switching. I do recall discussion around when they dropped them about being held back by the addon architecture.
It definitely was their gratest move ever. So many improvements was blocked by supporting the old extensions. Firefox would be completely useless and dead by now if they was still supporting them. Their loss in market share to chrome is largely due to not killing them 5 years earlier.
OK, but even if I accept that there was a technical necessity, the new architecture needlessly blocked ui modification to offer a less flexible experience. They could have provided a solution that worked better for their most loyal users and long time advocates. Instead they caused the outflux of these highly technical users, many of whom instead championed chrome, and more or less got us into this mess in the first place.
A lot of the Firefox users you mention have probably moved to Vivaldi, given that it has implemented features that Firefox had via extensions before they went all in on WebExtensions.