> Despite losing a small part of their functionality, ad blockers will still be able to offer nearly the same quality of filtering that they demonstrated with Manifest V2.

If some mechanism or capability is no longer possible or is made infeasible for adblockers to control, then ads will simply switch to using that mechanism. It's a pretty obvious outcome. You cannot simply give just an inch with adtech.

No one was willing to keep supporting XUL.

If the biggest knock against Firefox is that it imitates Chrome too often, that's hardly a reason to stick with Chrome.

And they aren't afraid to diverge from Chrome in important ways. For example, letting you disable 3p cookies already.

> That approach doesn't work well given Firefox's established track record of just imitating Chrome

Established track record? What?

> and then getting rid of the prior (and better) way of doing things.

Do you mean how they did the complete opposite by keeping Manifest v2 around for much longer than Google wanted to? Then by making their own Manifest v3 that didn't gimp ad blockers like google has been trying to for years?

> XUL extension developers are well aware of this problem, for example.

XUL was super useful... for it's time.

But it became a drag on performance as Firefox became more optimised for multi-core CPUs. And it became a drag for developers trying to support an older standard. Sure the new extension standard became more difficult to get started, but it did push the workers standards forwards which is ultimately what the web needed.

> We've seen it happen repeatedly with Firefox's UI, too.

Firefox's UI goes up and down in quality all the time. Thinking nothing is improving at all is an observational bias.

They have to, since big silicon valley companies just copy things and sell it as their own, like everyone exists to wipe their arses. Essentially they are stealing whatever they can find. If you copy and coexist with them they can't steal shit, and since they can't innovate, because they lack the brainspace for it, they'll slowly die. Maybe this is one of the reasons Firefox acts like a braindead monkey.

Many of the changes to FF over the last several years have been, in my opinion, just plain bad.

That said, it's not like there's a large amount of choice in the browser space. Today's Firefox can be worse (in ways that are important to you & I) than yesterday's but still be the best of the options available to us today.

My opinion, and the reason I switched back to FF, is that FF is the "least bad" option we have.

Firefox has removed a lot of features, but they view ad blocking as a core selling point for the Firefox product. They've published a handful of blog posts endorsing specific ad blockers, including AdNauseum, an extension that Google considers to be malware because its purpose is to facilitate the user DoSing Google ad servers. So Mozilla will very likely never leave their implementation of the extensions API deficient for ad blockers. They've laid out exactly what they promise to continue providing in the API, in no uncertain terms.