>My bet is that they were receiving complaints of Firefox breaking due to bad migration of settings between versions, so instead of fixing the migrations, they decided that this user-hostile anti-feature was good enough.

I think this is actually a good feature, one of the few introductions which I think if worthwhile, even if the implementation is a bit lacking.

You have to balance the user being able to see the message with not annoying them, and it's not difficult to achieve.

Configuration bloat is a real problem in most applications which allow third-party extensions, and I've seen some stunning examples of extensions bloat on some people's computers, Chrome users included. On the other hand, when I question it, they tell me, "I use all those!"

This article I came across here on HN really enlightened me: https://www.asktog.com/columns/000maxscrns.html

Hum... Keep in mind that there is no option to not erase your configurations. And that "configurations" has a very bread sense, including everything from about:config settings, themes, extensions, history, cache, cookies, saved passwords, and even for a short period including bookmarks (thankfully that one they stopped erasing). And, by the way, Firefox will revert from a backup if you are logged in into an account, what is probably the reason the devs didn't nuke this by themselves, but also leaves plenty of room for conspiracy theories and user enragement.

Having a button somewhere where the user can go and reset those things is ok. But keeping pestering them until they click on the button is really not.

Thanks for clarifying that, I have seen the dialog before, but never investigated what it actually does.

It sounds like something which started out as a good idea and was then steered into user abuse territory.