Fennec is pretty great, yes. I've been using Firefox on ideological grounds for years, and it's getting harder and harder. I currently have a tab open that will just keep loading forever every time I load the browser, taking 100% CPU, until I go and press escape to stop loading. It's slow as hell and frequently freezes.
Ideology can only take you so far if the product is a piece of crap.
> Why do you care what the rendering engine is?
then later you say
> I currently have a tab open that will just keep loading forever every time I load the browser, taking 100% CPU, until I go and press escape to stop loading. It's slow as hell and frequently freezes.
Do you not see that those two things may be related?
The rendering engine is fairly important for apparent speed and smoothness (e.g. with scrolling). These are issues where Firefox was traditionally not rated highly.
About that particular tab (which I guess you're sending a bug report about), maybe you want to try the same URL in a fresh Firefox profile?
Then I guess you were never an IE6 user.
I wouldn't call Firefox stagnant. It's just got E10S (multiprocess). The Quantum project promises to gradually improve both speed and stability (and consequentially security). They are working on replacing the traditional Firefox extensions archetecture with WebExtensions. Fennec (Firefox on Android) is an underappreciated gem.
I'm playing with Vivaldi now. It's nice, it's fast, there's a fair amount of UI innovation. But underneath, it's just Blink, so it's hard for me to get that excited about it.