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Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

Being highly user-configurable used to be the best reason to use Firefox, but Mozilla seem to be have become openly hostile towards that flexibility in recent times, even when it made the experience far worse for lots of users. These days, being probably more trustworthy when it comes to privacy and phoning home is more-or-less the only benefit Firefox has compared to just using Chrome/Safari/Edge that comes out of the box with your device.

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Supporting all that flexibility is challenging for development, and could cause issues for the end user.

I can imagine that people over-customize Firefox, forget about their changes, then have bugs, finally abandon Firefox thinking it's unstable.

No doubt some people do. On the other hand, that flexibility was Firefox's main selling point.

Even today, there are several things I used to use on a frequent basis that are missing or limited because the Quantum changes broke so many add-ons. The equivalent functionality hasn't been or in some cases can't be implemented by add-ons using the new APIs instead.

I'm a programmer. I understand the technical arguments for why they wanted to make the internal changes. But when you are dumping your #1 competitive advantage because of technical details, it's probably time to start asking some tough questions.

Being fair, they dumped their #1 competitive advantage in order to relieve their #1 competitive disadvantage - keeping XUL made desperately needed performance improvements impossible to implement. Calling that "technical details" rather understates the case.

FWIW, I didn't find Firefox noticeably slow on any device I was using before, nor did I notice any big speed up after those changes. I understand that others had varying experiences, but unfortunately I can't relate to them at all myself.

The only time pre-e10s Firefox performed well was anecdotally, in threads relating to pre-e10s Firefox not performing well.

That might be your experience; I have no reason to doubt you. Mine is that no-one I know personally ever expressed any dissatisfaction with the speed of Firefox before anyway, and the only time people complain about the performance of pre-e10s Firefox is when they're trying to justify all the broken useful functionality that was caused by the change.

You're right that people weren't all that likely to complain loudly about Firefox's pre-e10s performance. Much more often, they just quietly switched to Chrome.

You're making a significant assumption there. Let's not pretend that people only switch to Chrome because of some perception about performance. If that were the main or only reason, shouldn't lots of people have switched to Firefox later, if Quantum made it so much faster?

Who's pretending anything of the sort? I hope it doesn't really need to be explained that saying this is a reason why some people switched to Chrome doesn't preclude other people doing it for other reasons, or that once there, they're likely to stick instead of going through the headache of switching back again.

None of this needs to be taken on faith. There were Mozillians here and elsewhere talking at length around the time of the change about why it was necessary, and maintaining market share against Webkit browsers and especially Chrome was a major reason. I don't care enough to spend any of my Friday night digging up those references from a couple of years ago, but they shouldn't take all that much finding if you do.

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