Nils's blog post[0] that I found linked here[1] from here[2]. I found that last link from the google search (Nils Maier blog post Firefox extension).

[0]https://www.downthemall.org/the-likely-end-of-downthemall/

[1]https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...

[2]https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-changes-firefox-apis-d...

I just want to point out that you casually dismissed "a few hundred thousand" users whose lives were impacted as a non-issue.

This is exactly the type of attitude which gives software dev such a bad rap.

I personally support every single user of my products and never force a new version on them.

> casually dismissed "a few hundred thousand" users whose lives were impacted as a non-issue.

I did not intend that. My intention is this: "the cost of maintaining a browser with up-to-date standards and security is enormous". A few hundred thousand users who are unlikely to pay anything for such a browser is just financially not viable.

Just to put into perspective, maintaining a full browser (with its own engine etc) costs at minimum $300M/year (judging by the size of Chrome/Firefox/Safari's teams). That means that 300k users would need to pay more than $80 a MONTH to make that sustainable. That's insane.

Two things:

- that would go from my tool budget paid by work as soon as it is better since my browser is my second most important tool.

- as mentioned above I propose starting with a soft fork, as set of patches to be applied to the latest Firefox

You may find LibreWolf interesting:

https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/

> No. Who would use it? The few hundred thousand who want Tree Style Tabs?

No, I want the few tens of million ex-Firefox users that have left during the last decade because of being annoyed or because of the pragmatic reason that Firefox doesn't offer any experienced direct advantage anymore while Chrome is pushed heavily and has a experienced direct advantage: that Google web properties are optimized, not sabotaged on it.

> Separately, keeping a browser up-to-date with new standards and security fixes is a huge undertaking. You would need a lot of engineers invested in such a project.

Here I should have been more precise: I mean to start with a soft fork. Start by building from ordinary Firefox with just small patches to fix the worst offenders like the tab strip API and restoring the UI.

> No, I want the few tens of million ex-Firefox users that have left during the last decade because of being annoyed or because of the pragmatic reason that Firefox doesn't offer any experienced direct advantage anymore while Chrome is pushed heavily and has a experienced direct advantage: that Google web properties are optimized, not sabotaged on it.

Me too.

Leadership at Mozilla is interested more in social justice, diversity, and equity issues than engineering issues. Don't look for this to come from today's Mozilla.

There is lately a push for privacy issues at Mozilla, which is nice to see.