I love Firefox, and believe it's vitally important for an open web, but Mozilla has been shooting themselves in the foot. People don't pay attention to all the positive new features and news, they pay attention to negative coverage like this.

And of course spam from any app is unacceptable without signing up prior, especially including a browser of all things, but that's pretty much a given.

Mozilla has a surprising pattern of not missing an opportunity to look stupid, for minimal gains.

It is troubling that there was nobody in the meeting room to raise concerns about pushing notifications to ~250 millions[1] of users.

[1] Monthly Active users at https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

I wonder if we needed a "chromium" version of firefox that's been stripped of all of the bloatware

What do you consider bloatware in that regard?

i volunteer the stupid "pocket" thing

I just wish there was a global switch for disabling new features (where possible) by default.

These would then be re-enabled by individual switches, so accepting new updates would just apply security fixes to existing features, and not create usability and security issues from unwanted new features.

Not everyone wants to be the beta tester for endless new features, especially if they prefer stability and are happy with the existing functionality.

I use Firefox for reasons, but sometime Mozilla makes it hard.

They just pushed a new mobile version that wiped out all my tabs, and crashes on one of the stories in the front page here:

https://lupyuen.github.io/pinetime-rust-mynewt/articles/wayl...

Curious if others are seeing it.

This is the last straw for me personally. At this point what Mozilla claims to do and what they actually do does not seem to match. They rally against Google etc, but then install and reinstall Pocket etc on updates, claim to support free speech, yet it's clear that they only want free speech for a particular group of political throught.. I'm switching.

I gave some thought to switching back when Eich "resigned".

In the end I decided that continuing to support Mozilla by using and advocating for Firefox was the lesser of two evils - the alternative being to surrender to a Web mono-culture.

The deciding factor for me was: what would harm free speech more?

1) a browser duopoly involving an org willing to chuck their CEO under a bus for legitimate but oppressive political donations, or

2) a browser monopoly owned by an advertising company?

In the end I decided (1) was the best bet. But I swear, Mozilla keeps me on my toes reconsidering it :)

Please, help me to understand, why this message got so badly downvoted?

Submitter here (and author of one of the bug reports that got merged into this one).

My guess is the downvotes are an expression of the idea that, just because you personally find something relevant, doesn't make it okay for Mozilla to spam ~250 million people with what is essentially political advertising.