Never attribute to sneakiness what can be attributed to not wanting to maintain 2 versions of one app until 100% feature parity. There isn't really direction to give for a path that doesn't exist.

Removing the whitelist would be a trivial amount of work.

Sure but not everything works yet which is not a trivial amount of issues but for nightly it is the near term plan https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/14034

Not everything works yet, but with the whitelist, virtually nothing does. Removing it would still make a lot of extensions work without breaking anything.

>no-downgrade path approach like this speaks volumes about Mozilla.

You can downgrade, just forgo Play Store -- and you will have to setup all over again, first uninstalling the darned 79.

Unless something has changed recently deleting Firefox also deletes anything you ever downloaded with it. Be very careful about this.

Also there is no way to clear the list of downloaded files, there is only a 'delete' button, which if clicked deletes all your downloads. This is particularly annoying if you start downloading something only to find out you already downloaded it (i.e a podcast), the download history tab is the only place to cancel the download, but if you've used firefox for a while the tab is so slow to load that your download has often completed before the tab has loaded.

I keep all downloads/media on the sd card only.

You can downgrade but you have to redo all your configuration.

well I didn't know it was coming and my workflow went to hell.