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Comment by Yoric

2 days ago

> And Mozilla usually ignored user protests while pointing at telemetry, and did whatever they wanted to, users be damned.

When I worked on Firefox, most of the changes happened exactly because user research determined that users wanted them and/or that not having them hurt the product. We changed the tabs at least once because users thought that the old shape of tabs made the browser feel slow (true story, sadly). We changed the add-on API (after having warned add-on developers for at least 6 years) because the old API was incompatible with multi-threading, multi-process, sandboxing, which in turn was really bad for both performance and security.

I'll absolutely grant you that Mozilla hasn't been very good at communicating these choices, but again, the sheer hostility of tech crowds is exhausting.

Anyone can hip fire an accusation from the philosopher's chair (potty), and it's like that thing about a falsehood circling the world five times before the truth even gets out of bed.

Against the avalanche of claims that they've "done nothing", it can be tedious to pull out examples of, say, major projects achieving huge performance improvements in WebGPU, but meanwhile it costs nothing to claim Firefox has "done nothing since Quantum" which I've heard claimed in these parts in full sincerity.