[happypants23]

If you think Firefox has stagnated you clearly aren't aware of the substantial and complex improvements that have been made to the firefox core over the last couple of years:

* Faster Quantum Engine (multi-process architecture, etc)

* Faster CSS rendering with Stylo

* GPU-based rendering with WebRender

Any Moz engineer who worked on the above will have boosted their CV's substantially. They don't need to work on tangential greenfields to do that.

Sure so extensions had to be rewritten for Quantum, but sometimes that's the price to pay for deep architectural/security improvements.

[fireattack]

I honestly don't see these as a good sign for a browser as a tool, instead of some software development adventure.

Firefox has a much smaller team than Chrome to begin with, and they can only work on so many things. If they keep spending time in "re-inventing the wheel" (in addition to what you listed, they also revamp their mobile client quite a few times in my recent memory), what left behind is attention to details in UX and UI that users can feel, which is what Firefox was famous for.

I'm not a developer, but I've submitted or engaged in many bug tickets on Bugzilla. What I can tell from my experience is that the response to bugs (critical or not) are getting slower and slower. Not just patches, sometimes you will have tickets that took years to have someone even looking at it. My feeling is most of developers are more likely to spend their time on Mozilla's "big goals" than maintenance.

Just to give one example, there is still no full range video support in Firefox in the era of video game streaming. This alone lets me to have to use Chrome to watch Twitch.

[pseudalopex]

I think performance matters to more people than full range video.

[fireattack]

Performance isn't the only thing people care when choosing a browser. If it is, they probably abandoned Fx for a Blink based browser long time ago. Also does Firefox really have significant performance issue after 57?

[pseudalopex]

Who said it was the only thing?

Blink based browsers aren't faster across the board. They would be without Firefox developers working on performance.

[PetahNZ]

How many people worked on these features vs how many are employed though?

[pier25]

As an engineer I see the value in these projects, but as a user my biggest gripe with FF is the lack of proper multilingual spellchecking.

This has been on their Bugzilla for 20 years:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69687

[eterm]

There's a big difference between Firefox the product and the renderer.

I'd argue the parts outside the renderer have got worse even if the renderer part has got better.

[pseudalopex]

Quantum was a marketing name for various improvements that landed before support for old extensions was removed.

[ufmace]

Did they not just lay off most of the engineers who had built all of that stuff?