If that many users are happy why does it keep losing market share?
Personally every other release they remove features I like and make arbitrary UI changes. The only reason I'm still complaining and not using something else is because I don't like the alternatives either.
It's a good way to further push away a chunk of your userbase. They're moving towards a touch-friendly UI, but a lot of us just want a compact desktop app that doesn't waste screen space with excessive padding.
The proper solution to this would be to have different modes if this is so critical. To their credit they did put in a "compact" mode after beta, but this is explicitly "unsupported" and even then still has more padding than "large" mode in the old UI.
Push where? At least you still can configure chrome padding and element sizes with CSS tweaks, unlike the main competitor and its wooden interface with absolutely zero customization possibilities.
There's Vivaldi, and it too uses HTML for its interface, but the team doesn't seem to care about UI performance at all.
The average browser user doesn't know anything about CSS tweaking. Advanced users may know about it if they're curious enough or work with web technologies. People get pushed around by other reasons, mostly things like OS integration (Edge, Chrome).
> There's Vivaldi, and it too uses HTML for its interface, but the team doesn't seem to care about UI performance at all.
Thanks to that, Vivaldi also actively supports CSS tweaks like Firefox. They do indeed care about UI performance and work towards fixing it... The 3.7 update really improved its UI responsiveness. Still, it feels slower than Chrome/Brave/Firefox.
Personally every other release they remove features I like and make arbitrary UI changes. The only reason I'm still complaining and not using something else is because I don't like the alternatives either.