To be fair, this issue is also reflected with the mobile upgrade that wiped most of the functionality, extension integration, and good will.

Whomever they have hired to (1) perform UX research and (2) make executive decisions aren't performing, IMHO.

The CEO is not performing either but their salary is through the roof as market share tanks and devs are laid off

I did not use the mobile version until after they redid the design.

I dont really have a lot of complaints about it. I like the dark mode and the address bar at the bottom it has ad blocker.

What all changed between those versions ?

Drastically reduced universe of extensions

Poor design of tab history (chronological order)

No more about:config

Change in the text rendering engine causes some websites to be unreadable (esp. news, arstechnica, and reddit), accessibility out the window

There are many more, but I don't mean to rehash because it's been a passionate discussion for many over the past year.

>No more about:config

So few realize the importance of this. Some say "well only in Android" or "use nightly". The plan is clearly to incrementally erode freedom to a final state of dysfunction under the guise of gaslit improvements and false switches. They actually argue that removing about:config was for our own good. Printing webpages to PDF is also something we're supposedly better without. But we shouldn't complain, for they've abandoned the crusty old obsolete concept of configurability for brave new ones. Pocket, guerilla advertising, binary over variety, cloudflare, dom.battery.enabled, privacy.resistFingerprinting.alwaysdisabled and an emoji level of privacy. Why design good software when they can design good users? They're not all bad though. At least they saved us all from the terrifying overwhelming burden of RSS, right?

They're attitude is that, yeah, the internet is becoming a roiling cloaca, which is accepted and inevitable, yes? So rather than resist and try to improve it, adapt and contribute to it's descent.

> The plan is clearly to incrementally erode freedom to a final state of dysfunction under the guise of gaslit improvements and false switches.

That's quite the accusation, and completely baseless. about:config was removed from the stable version on android to prevent users breaking their installations. It's interesting you mention privacy.resistFingerprinting, as it alone is the cause of countless bug reports and support tickets from users who don't understand the implications. If you're confident enough to go digging in about:support then you can run beta or install a fork with it enabled. There's no alterior motive.

The base is the removal of about:config. Whatever got written up into the release notes, it was received by many users as stated above.

Also note that an ulterior motive doesn't need to exist for the path towards centralized, user-hostile control to happen. It starts with "the developer knows better what the user wants than the user themselves" sort of attitudes.

Trying to reinforce my comment?

Removing a whole toolset of configurability because one tool was causing trivial issues is practical? And you have evidence of jubilant hordes prostrating themselves in gratitude for this benevolence? Where are they? Did they all get disappeared along with this post?

This mentality goes down well-known paths.

Autoplay forever, whether anyone wants it or not!

Performance dropped like a brick. Plus the things 'tomrod listed in a parallel reply.

No, they need money to pay for their CEO. She had to fire 250 engineers to pay her salary last year, she might not have another 250 left to fire this year.

The salary of 250 engineers is way more than her own salary, but yes it is a bad look to be firing engineers while raising executive pay.

It is but it also happens often enough in business that you have to wonder what it is that drives it?

Is it some business school process or management training BS? It usually only happens when "trained" business people get involved that this sort of BS happens.