I'm a Firefox die-hard, but these last couple of updates have really irritated me. I couldn't give a damn about nonsense UI changes and tweaks that serve only to add unwanted confusion and consternation cycles to my schedule.

It probably says more about me, but I spent a good 20 minutes last night trying (and failing) to work out how to remove the recently-added 'Firefox Suggest' line in the Address bar drop down when you enter a character and it starts to filter options from history, etc.

It's a stupid wee thing, but I don't need it, don't want it. It's just clutter, and besides it's not 'Firefox Suggests' it's my bloody history! Get out.

There's a lot of reasons to use Firefox and its derivatives, it being open source is a perfectly valid one, and has a great many implications.

Can we trust Vivaldi? Without 100% of its source being available, the answer is dependent upon your threat model and what you intend to use a browser for along with where you live.

Vivaldi has poor feature parity with its mobile apps too.

Careful you just spoke ill of one of the community golden calfs, despite giving a totally legitimate critisicm.

Firefox has the same marketshare as samsung browser. Nosalgia wont save it. Chromium and its derivatives is just the standard client for the web, like linux is on the backend, the sooner everyone comes to terms with that the better.

Why is that for "the better" when it produces a flawed monoculture?

Standardization is the bedrock of so much innovation, especially in computing. We standardize so much, why not standardize web clients?

If you can argue why a certain firefox approach is inheirently better and not even possible in the chromium ecosystem that is compelling but I have yet to hear of such an argument. For my part it seems like firefox just keeps getting more and more behind.

Open standards breed innovation in particular. However, competition also begets innovation, and likewise, innovation begets innovation.

RAM and battery consumption for one. I would rather use a browser "that keeps getting more and more behind" if it means my battery usage is significantly better on a laptop or 2-in-1.

Web browsers are a surprisingly complex topic. For example, WebKit on iOS is intentionally crippled so that PWAs can't use push notifications, and thus businesses are forced to write apps for the App Store. However, Apple has been telling businesses for years now that their app could otherwise be achieved in a PWA, and regardless of kicking and screaming with an appeal due to needing to use push notifications, they will still reject it.

Is that wrong? Of course. Would everything using Blink or building on top of Chromium solve this? Potentially, but as we all know, Apple doesn't follow standards to the letter.

I do agree with where you're coming from though, and I do agree that standardization would be nice, but the reality is more complex, and there's objective advantages and disadvantages to each, the importance of each being a variable dependent on the user.

To me it seems right the opposite: finally a change in the UI that actually makes sense (more native-looking tabs) and the privacy features seem bar beyond that of any other browser.

I hate Firefox as much as the next guy and I wouldn't touch it with a... 10 metre pole? But they have a good content blocker built-in by default (not sure if enabled)