My biggest problem is how they've become seemingly hostile toward people who remember how customizable Firefox was, and just want to revert the most annoying UI changes. Not only removing options from the menus, but then after workarounds surface actually going in later and stripping useful stuff out of about:config. Don't understand.

Note: This draft is a rought and long and I have a lot of things to say about this matter, also I haven't sleep yet, so pardon if it is a bit confusing

How Chrome won over the web is a combination of marketing tactics, change of user interests and timing.

Marketing tactics since there was a time where Google use to bundle Chrome as optional checkbox on several freeware application installers. This may be shady but it helped immensly in the Google Chrome adoption, as most users did not hear about Google Chrome (or did not notice). Helps alot also that their website also helped advertised their new Chrome browser which is touted to be better and faster.

Change of user interests because Firefox started to get slower and slower pre quantum update. It was really so bad that the user experience became clunky and laggy as Firefox runs longer overtime. I mean sure e10s helped speed up things but it wasn't enough to be atleast close to on par with Chrome and users actually notice this.

It does not helped too that Chrome bundles flash player by default which also helped change the interests of the masses. For a casual, why would they bother installing Firefox and Adobe flash player seperately when they can install Chrome which is faster and has flash player integrated by default?

Finally the timing, because as the web has continuously evolved, Google being always on top of the adoption of standards (well to be honest, Google has been pushing the standards for years now that it is safe to assume Google is now the standard, lmao) helped the widespread adoption during the times that:

• The web was moving away from flash player
• There was a boom in web app chat apps as standalone chat apps began to die out
• The rise of PWA
• Support for DRM of multimedia webapps (well now they're pushing for DRM on the web pages), and you know how normie users use to think if their site works on Chrome and not on Firefox

Competitions where focused on adopting to the standards and Google took note of this as they sway everyone to their side until it was too late for the rest.

Mind you during the 2011-2013, there was a massive flock of Chrome users and this is because Firefox may have been super customizable from the getgo, Chrome originally lacked extensions support but as soon as the Chrome extension store came out, it was already an uphill battle for Mozilla as they where focused on adopting to the evolving standard, it took them time to catch up with the user experience causing the bleeding of userbase.

It does not even helped that they had a hard time adopting to the ever evolving standards because their manpowered was shifted all over the place due to Mozilla's other focus of trying to be not dependent on Google's income. I am referring to projects such as Firefox OS.

Honestly during the massive growth of Chrome era between 2011-2018, the only one that had a chance to stop it was Microsoft but well Internet Explorer and Edge was always behind on updates mainly because they tied their updates to Windows updates which was known to be slow and clunky. So even if we consider Mozilla having a bleeding userbase problem, Microsoft actually had it worse, lol.

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.

If I can't run Ublock Origin on a browser, it's dead to me.

Interesting article, that's exactly what I've been thinking about Firefox for many many years now. I hate anything that makes Firefox look and behave like Chrome. And I do everything just to revert these looks and changes.

Will there be an extension that restores the old Firefox reopen tab feature?

This is a very messed up article.

The problem isn't that Firefox loses when it tries to copy Chrome. The problem is that, due to popularity and massively larger userbase, it is Chrome which sets habits used in browsers - and so with something like 'reopen last tab' function being different in Firefox is a problem for 1000 Chrome users but only 1 Firefox user.

The actual bug here is #1 Nearly Everyone Learned to use Chrome. They learn new, they learn bad, and in their ignorance, they blame the (sometimes original and better) Firefox for being wrong.

The only reason I ever switch from Firefox to Chrome back in the day, was because Firefox was noticably slower and, at the time, had some other ongoing issues that forced me to switch.

It's actually faster now and almost all the issues I once had are gone. The only one that remains is being able to use certain types of option selections on mobile (like drop down boxes, multi-selection, radial, etc).