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As somebody who worked on the Gecko side on this, there absolutely was a need for a rewrite.

Not to sound like some sort of Pale Moon absolutist, but, I feel like the frontend changes were too much. And 3 years without Firefox biggest selling point is painful. It hurts. It really hurts. The only reason I haven't sold my soul and dignity to Chromium is that Iceraven lets me use μMatrix.

It had to be rewritten. Essentially there was no formal interface between the frontend and Gecko, and it had turned into a sluggish hairball of a monolith. We redesigned Gecko on Android to be embeddable (GeckoView[1]) and so a new frontend had to be written. That part was absolutely necessary.

The rest of the debate is just about the UX, really.

[1] https://geckoview.dev

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