Before you come at me with stuff like Librewolf, Waterfox and IceCat; those don’t count. They are just tweaked Firefox distros with mostly basic low level changes. Not every Chromium browser is super unique either, but I feel like there are more differences between them then there are with Firefox distros. Why is that? Why there aren’t different browsers that use Firefox’s engines but provide a different UX?
No doubt dropping XUL was a terrible move. WebExtensions are just userscripts but worse in almost every way. I never heard about the other issues however, can you link sources for those?
I think dropping XUL was a great move. It was old legacy and expensive to maintain. Mozilla already has limited resources, I don’t think maintaining a redundant and complex technology is a great idea. I say burn XUL.
But I do agree that they should have kept legacy extensions. There are a few major arguments against this:
As to 1 I say that is fine. I think the better approach would have been recommending WebExtensions and providing a stability guarantee, but allow legacy extensions and break compatibility with impunity. Yes, it sucks for extensions authors (I speak as a past extension author) but for the minority of extensions that need this level of integration it seems worth it. And it is arguably a benefit to make the WebExtension route more attractive to developers in the cases where it can be used.
For 2 I call this a feature. There are already WebExtenions privileges that are basically full access so I don’t see why legacy extensions couldn’t display to the user some “fake” permissions such as “Full access to my browser and all sites” and allow it. I don’t care if they label it bright red in the store, or even hide it from search results, but please make it possible.
I know because in the slow tightening of restrictions I maintained VimFx for a while. So sure, it was a pain fixing the incompatibilities, but it was manageable. Furthermore in that case there were very few users because you had to jump though many hoops to use the extension even after it was updated. So if this extension type was supported there would be more people helping out, lightening the load.
I’ll try and see what I can find bc the most of these things were done in a long periods of time and I’m not sure what is still findable. The “View image details” in particular you can see for yourself that it’s missing. Simply open any image (except from Instagram - Firefox doesn’t detect these correctly), right click it and you’ll se there’s no such an option. There’s only “Inspect” from which you can get the URL but there’s no more the additional window where you can see image dimensions, size or just click “save as…”.
The disappearing interface bug that was never fixed: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1536396
The anti-tracking function that causes some websites not to let you in - try logging into your mediafire account. It doesn’t always happen but when it does, it will say “this form was idle for too long” and that’s it. Eventually you’ll have to change the browser in order to login.
The disabled function - you can see that one for yourself as well. Simply open the menu, click “Help” and then “Feedback”. You will see this: https://i.imgur.com/NjvwTjm.png It’s like that for about a year, probably longer.
The other removed features - such as status bar and disabling updates are clearly visible by anyone, so I’m skipping these.
As for the war against adblockers (mostly), here’s an example of my about:config (I still have Firefox but it’s not my default browser anymore): https://i.imgur.com/UEIaAcf.png This was my way to disable addons removal - setting url addresses as 127.0.0.1 bc Microzilla had blocked many addons (adblockers included) for unknown reasons and when that was implemented with a browser update, I turned out with a browser stripped off of half of its addons. Even an addon I’ve been using for years (previously known as Speed Dial, now known as GroupSpeedDial) was removed and marked as “dangerous” (a complete bullsh*t, ofc, there’s nothing dangerous about it).