I love firefox and use it avidly, but why does every firefox update keep trending on HN? I'm genuinely curious, most of these updates seem fairly minor
It does seem like it's mostly driven by people's desire to complain about Mozilla, defend Firefox, and/or opine about the direction of the web. Which is fine, though it's kind of funny that those discussions get attached to minimal release announcements.
(Don't get me wrong; it's sort of gratifying to have one's day job product showing up regularly on HN.)
- The HN crowd were likely burned the hardest by Mozilla's continued dumbing down of the browser (you'll reliably see complaints about how it seems like new releases always remove or move things needlessly)
- Firefox is de facto a Google project. If Google says jump, Mozilla says 'how high' because Google holds them at budgetpoint.
- Mozilla's stewardship of Firefox has been abysmal. A history of unforced errors, with a result of a completely irrelevant market share. (While paying a CEO millions to do... what, exactly?)
- Talking out of both sides of their mouth wrt. privacy (telemetry, cliqz and hiding it, etc)
Nope. Look at deviations in implementing Manifest v3 as an example.
For once, I like most of their decisions (except maybe for the layoffs, but they were arguably needed). Some were unfortunate, but they realized that and fixed them publicly. Everyone makes mistakes.