Countless research and engineering hours.
With actual amazing, noticeable results as soon as you try it.
With a bunch of useful UI features.
"But tabs aren't curved, so fuck these guys! I won't upgrade!"
Oh well...
Edit: It seems that I was too hasty with my "who cares about speed" question. Apparently a lot of people do. I guess I just never found FF that much slower than other browsers. If it takes a second or two longer to load some page it is just not important to me.
I do. I can't use a browser that does not feel snappy. I couldn't care less about whether tab edges are round or not.
Millions of people who've switched to Chrome. Including hundreds that have said as much in HN comments over the last 5 years.
I do care very much if you break all of my current extensions and as a result the UI behavior I was used to is gone. It's like being forced to switch to a completely new browsers. If I wanted different browser I could have switched to Chrome years ago, thank you very much. Customization is much more important than speed.
Obviously it's not, since the majority of Firefox user base (which used to be very high) jumped to Chrome 5-10 years ago, despite the first having customizations (add-ons) and the latter not yet (and when it added, incompatible ones).
In fact, by mozilla's own estimates (based on telemetry), only about 33% or so of their users even use add-ons.
still - as you wrote, folks who cared about speed jumped the ship already. Honestly, I don't believe they're coming back, just because FF's speed is now comparable to Chrome.
> In fact, by mozilla's own estimates (based on telemetry), only about 33% or so of their users even use add-ons.
alternatively: advanced users that tend to use add-ons also happen to be those who know how to disable telemetry.
Pretty much every end user, especially non-tech related end users.
It's kind of a huge deal FYI.
This, from Hacker News, who not one week ago was complaining about "everything being perceptibly slower" and who constantly complains about latency in applications. Pretty sure everyone cares about browser speed.
I lost my entire workflow one day when I did an "emergency upgrade" to FF that broke my addons and wouldn't even let me fix it.
I got some German actors to play it out: