That said, I do feel that Firefox fell in the "X is more popular, X does Y, therefore, we need to do Y" trap, forgetting that you have your current userbase exactly because you're NOT doing Y but Z. But that's an entirely different matter.
Removing XPCOM, switching to multiprocess, and switching to asynchronous Web Extensions was absolutely vital technologically. Perf is good now.
I wrote the article. I did not state that. I did not even hint it or imply it, and my eyebrows went so far up when I read this comment that my hat lifted.
I've never even heard this idea before.
Please can you point out where I said that the removal of XUL was in order to ape Chrome?
> Mozilla, please stop aping Chrome. Copying is rarely the way to win big. The Australis Chrome-like theme in Firefox 29 annoyed users and was a driving force behind Pale Moon. Firefox Quantum killed XUL addons, and drove The Reg FOSS desk to Waterfox Classic.
"A drove people to B. It didn't drive me to it, but C drove me to D."
Expanding that:
1. Stop copying Chrome.
2. Australis copied Chrome and that drove a whole fork because so many people hated it.
[Full stop.]
3. Also, comparably, for the author, Quantum killed XUL and that is why the author switched away from Firefox.
However, I note that the marketing claim from Mozilla was that Quantum used the same type of extensions that Chrome used ("webextensions") and that this would be good for the Firefox add-on ecosystem. This is demonstrably false, as I laid out in the Waterfox article which this story links to, but it was what Mozilla claimed at the time.