I'm a user, we should I care that they are making architectural improvements while they rewrite things in a different language when there are so many obvious issues preventing me from using it?
At this rate they will be rewriting it for no one.
And yet market share is plummeting, doesn't that indicated that your metrics for what users care about are completely wrong?
It's hardly me alone having this experience, most firefox users had there extensions break for no visible benefit. Anyone with the non-default ubuntu theme has the same issue with text boxes, which indicates a complete lack of QA.
I also have a 15 year long emotional attachment to firefox and a desire to see it succeed, if you can't convince me these changes are for the better then good luck with the rest of the world.
Mozilla is suffering from not having its own platform - they could have done so by keeping FirefoxOS alive and use the growing success of KaiOS today. Looks like they are not ready to come back because... reasons.
But yes, I agree that FF market share problems are not due to problems with the product itself.
Firefox has broken out of this before by being a better product. Not being default on any platform is nothing compared to back in the day when IE had >95% market share and sites were made to work with it only.
These days even many linux distros are defaulting to chromium, that's the one place where it could be the "native" browser.
The breakage in question is more than one year old now, and most things has been restored since then (including vertical tabs).
Mozilla have put a tremendous amount of effort into the "ugly on every platform" cross platform tools over the years, from XUL to whatever the current one is. Developing a native UI for each platform would have been less effort and given much better results than continuing with this tried and failed approach.
Their latest attempt at theme support is just laughable and was very obviously not QA'd. In text areas I get the dark background theme from my desktop and the dark text foreground from the website css and it's made firefox unusable for me.
This is on top of things like their recent breakages to extensions so things that used to work (vertical tabs) still don't. And this only broke so they could go multi-threaded and then quickly had to add throttles so random sites couldn't hog every core.
But it seems mozilla are more concerned with re-writing things in rust, tying users into various web services and god knows what other side projects while they continue to avoid improving their core product.
I'd love to see firefox regain market share, we need an open source browser that's not controlled by a spyware company, but on their current trajectory firefox will dissapear into history and mozilla themselves will be the primary cause.