This I can relate with, but I would like to note that Firefox seems to be continually expanding its APIs and regaining functionality that was lost. In particular, [Tridactyl](https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl) (which tries to reimplement Pentadactyl, a kitchen-sink extension API consumer) works rather well. There are still some pain points, like the keyboard shortcut API which still hasn't been merged, but I am hopeful they eventually will be.

I too experience privacy extensions breaking websites frequently, since I'm a heavy user of those, but so far I have never encountered a case of a website that was truly broken under Firefox. It was always one of my settings and worked under a clean profile.

They rushed it and I find it hard to not see it as a giant "screw you".

They didnt release the specifications early enough for people to rewrite their addons and at the end of ESR52 there where still multiple bugs open which prevented people from porting their addons. We didnt even get a normal 1 year ESR support frame for gods sake. All that ignoring the fact that there was no warning for the end users that all their security addons were disabled after the automatic update.

I am still furious about the absolute arrogance and carelessness Mozilla showed here.

I was very pissed at them for exactly this reason and I still am to some degree. I would love to find an acceptable alternative that goes back to the roots, so to speak. For instance, I've been looking at qutebrowser, but it's still too limited (and might remain so for some time).

But Chrome as an alternative? That's not even on the table. Firefox is definitely the lesser of two evils.

This. Ever since the plugin fiasco, it’s really hard for me to see Firefox as anything other than a worse Chrome. Extensibility was Firefox’s main selling point; and they pissed that away.

I'm just amazed that you can't even manually remap keyboard commands. Seriously Mozilla? $500 million/year in funding and you can't support that customization?

An even better example is "Other Bookmarks". https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/default-bookm...

They simply changed the default bookmark location with no option to change it back.

I need an addon to change the default bookmark location to keep my earlier filing approach.

I mean really?

Thanks for the heads-up! I locally maintained Pentadactyl for my own browser until Mozilla banned unsigned addons (which ticked me off enough to write a Hiter parody[1]). That extension was also what got me into vim.

I'm still upset that they broke custom keyboard shortcuts for ... two years now? All the replacements will only remap keys after a tab's JS has loaded. I used to be able to just zoom through the tabs with shift-j and shift-k, but now it will randomly stop on pages that need to reload, which breaks the whole experience.

I've had Super NES games that offered key customizations, and had much less memory and money to work with. That's really disappointing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taGARf8K5J8