[bigbugbag]

Removing the option the ability to disable javascript was a deal breaker for me. Luckily I could sort of restore this much needed feature through extensions.

The other browser that got it and offered a quick menu to disable/enable javascript was opera with the f12 or quick preferences menu, not sure if this option survived opera selling out and becoming a chrome skin.

Pocket was another thing not needed to disable in firefox, it was proprietary and had vulnerabilites when a better opensource alternative existed, mozilla got a lot of flak for this. Then they bought it for millions of $ to leverage the users to get into mobile.

Hello was again another unneeded thing to disable right away (yay more extensions!), it leaked the local IP and added vulnerability.It was such a popular feature that it got removed a few versions later.

Those 3 really infuriated me and a portion of the firefox users community.

I can't tell about the memory usage, I've bought a 16GB RAM laptop a few years ago to free myself from firefox memory issues, I do know that once in a while I have to quit firefox because it's consuming too much memory and cpu while idle.

by the time e10s arrived, there was no "vast majority of users" anymore for firefox. Having not heard of it means mozilla communication sucks. Anyways e10s is disabled in my firefox, I do not remember why.

I'm not sure what you mean by firefox being the last browser to support xp, 6 months ago I tried to install firefox on windows xp and installer denied to install telling me it does not support xp anymore. I think I installed pale moon instead and opera so maybe firefox is not the last one to support xp.

Signed extensions caused an uproar and some people left firefox over this because it's removing freedom from user and giving more power/control to firefox. I had to drop a couple extensions that refused to comply with mozilla demands or were not updated.

And there are other things like this, and when all this happens while bug report dating of years or decades are still waiting to be dealt with or closed as WONTFIX because you do not matter enough, well...

[emn13]

But isn't that exactly what extensions are for - to enable power users or simply niche use cases to flourish without bogging down the UI and codebase for everyone else?

I would have liked Hello (or really, any decent chat application that's not just some vehicle for the dreams of vendor lock-in by a large company) to succeed, but you're right, it flopped.

Firefox 52 was supported on XP service pack 2 (or later). Version 53 was released April 19, 2017. If you couldn't install FF on XP six months ago, you either were using a really really out of date XP (SP2 was released 2004!), or you misremembered, or you were using some beta or otherwise nonstandard FF.

I mean - I don't really disagree with you; heck I share some of the same frustrations. But what the heck is the alternative? Most of what you're mentioning is worse on every other browser.

What remains is perf and extensions; but I feel that those two issues are intertwined. FF extension APIs were, unfortunately, misdesigned. Not through malice or even incompetence, but because this turns out to be tricky. And so it was really easy to bog FF down with benign-looking extensions, and furthermore, it was difficult for FF to modernize with such low encapsulation. They should have bitten the bullet much earlier - instead, the problem kept festering.

When you say FF was a hog on a 16GB laptop, then it's almost certainly down to extensions - those very extensions you're frustrated they're forcibly modernizing. I don't think there's any good solution here.

[bigbugbag]

IIRC extensions were the excuse for not adding features in firefox because it was supposed to be the most basic possible to avoid performance issues.

Thing is there is no need to bog down the UI for people who don't need certain advanced features (of which an adblocker is not), you can be smart about it. Once again look at opera did it. For example mouse gestures were disabled until you first tried to use them and at this point it would spawn a window asking you if you wanted to enable them.

I have no idea what the reasoning for adding hello into a web browser. Opera did it with an IRC client a couple decades ago and it stopped being relevant at some distant point in the past. There are enough chat applications around, no need to push an additional in the browser, especially when on the other hand you remove or do not add features on the pretense that you lack resources.

I do not misremember at all (well it was probably more than 6 months ago as this took place at the end of last year). I remember perfectly being sorry for cleaning up my archives of older version install files for firefox because the oldest I had was version 49 and this version had already dropped windows xp support for this hardware (and IIANM firefox dropped linux support with version 52 or 53). Faced with replacing fully functional CPU/ motherboard/RAM or dropping firefox, guess what was the chosen solution.

Even pale moon that's based on older firefox versions has dropped window xp support[1].

I wish there was alternatives, but AFAIK the only alternative is to rely on older releases. Next time I have such an xp machine between my hands I'll do more research and tests to hopefully find something that will fill the gap.

Windows xp sp2 has been released in 2004 but we still fill containers of such computers to ship to Africa through humanitarian programs. We have a container leaving in september of this year. Most technology oriented people from rich western world tend to overlook that the rest of the world has not the same privileges they have.

I agree that it is not difficult to have poorly coded extensions or misdeisgned API causing a drain on resources, but this a strong design choice by mozilla who consistently refused to add those features to their browser even if incredibly popular (heck they even remove them at times). So even if the extension is the reason for the performance issue, the responsibility still lies with mozilla.

I don't mind modernizing, what I mind is that said modernizing means removing a good 70% of what I had to add to firefox to turn it into a modern browser and make it useful to me. When they tout freedom and user power but remove control and power from my hands while ignoring user feedback or even knowingly messing users because well they're not a high percentage in their skewed metric.

I may badly expressed myself here, I didn't mean that firefox is a hog all the time, but that with my use case of couple hundred tabs open over weeks or months it happens once in a while that I have to close it to clear an unexplained CPU or RAM hogging. On the other hand it is common to have 35-75% CPU usage of one core for just being opened and idle which is something I don't understand. When this happened in opera a simple F12 / disable javascript was enough to stop this nonsense. My take is that it's not as much an issue with the browser than with those stupid js heavy websites, the shortcoming from mozilla is to have removed the ability to disable scripts.

It's probably extensions in most cases, but I have replicated the behaviour with a brand new user profile and a vanilla firefox without any extensions, it actually happens faster and more often without extensions (lack of ublock origin and noscript plays a significant role here I guess).

Anyways I'm disgruntled, frustrated and fed up with this mozilla bs over the years. I sincerely hope they disappear sooner than later or that people in charge are replaced by competent people and that a user centric browser emerges from this mess.

[1]: https://www.palemoon.org/PM_end_of_WinXP_support.shtml