Firefox has fixed a lot of issues in their Quantum release. It removed a lot of what you called bloat as well. In tests it uses a lot less memory on average compared to Chrome. The privacy settings have been extended even further in recent years. Chrome’s settings come not even close to it. The extension system is still more flexible than Chrome’s. It has some built-in features such as autoplay stop and audio control that Chrome lacks. I also think you’re vastly overstating the incompatibilities on Firefox.

Finally, isn’t it better if there are multiple browser engines instead of just one? This allows for more innovation and has done so in the past too. The past pretty much proves that Firefox has and still can innovate despite your assertion.

I also wonder why you are stating all this in such a polemic and vulgar fashion. “ suckling on Google teats”, “bloated spamware”. None of this is even remotely accurate. But anyhow, what’s the point?

Sure, you go ahead and believe that. Every release of Firefox I've tried, including the recent ones, have sucked and been full of spam.

I'm angry at them because how the hell did we get here from the beauty of early Firefox and Phoenix? They've become the monster they were trying to fight.

You don't agree with my assertions, that's fine. Its marketshare speaks for itself. People don't trust Mozilla anymore, with good reason.

I'm old enough to remember the news of a "young kid" taking on Mozilla, IE and Netscape with their super lean Firefox browser, that was 20 years ago. It was meant to be lean, with the ability to install additional optional functionality through Plugins.

Now Firefox is old and bloated (Pocket?). It never got to be "lean" (always struggling with memory leaks, bad performance, etc) and poor compatibility (not Firefox fault, but still Firefox problem).

Yeah, exactly. Somewhere along the way leadership lost their way and made Firefox into bloated adware and kept uglifying it and mutating its interface to be worse and worse every iteration, all while posting flamboyant front-page news that they've made some major innovation. They haven't, they just... sucked even more.

It's not about trust. It's about convenience. Chrome comes with Android, so it's more convenient to use. Most people already use Google as search engine, and Google spams you to get Chrome, so it's more convenient to just use Chrome since you're also using Google, somehow using both products from the same house should be better, right?

If that's the case, Edge would be clear winner and it's still not. No, Firefox just... isn't good anymore.

Modern firefox is called librewolf or waterfox.

It respects privacy and works quite well (Actually much better than chrome based browser on my machine).

Mozilla management seems to be the issue, not firefox itself.

Yeah, but those projects are forever downstream of Firefox, no? Like they still depend on Mozilla to build new features and such, but then remove the Mozilla-y stuff before publishing?

I think the Chromium model has them forking from a shared base, and Google adds their own Chrome bits after that...? Or am I wrong?

So Google is keeping Firefox alive as a way to stave off anti-trust scrutiny, but crippling it to keep Chrome dominance...?

I honestly don't know why Google keeps funding Mozilla. Maybe it's a "useful fool" type of situation where having an inferior browser they can financially puppeteer helps them set their own standards (via WHATWG), since Firefox tries to keep parity with Chrome. Having another browser toe that line maybe helps legitimize those standards such that Google can remain in control and not worry as much about W3C/Microsoft/Apple domination? I dunno. Just speculating here.

It matters less these days since Microsoft gave up and went Chromium and Apple just doesn't care about its browser. Maybe Google already won and Firefox is on its last breaths?