It would be best to make the switch today. That has the dual benefit of a) Showing Google that they will lose users, and maybe they will change their mind (again), and b) Show every website that they do need to put actual effort into supporting and testing against Firefox.
It's been easily avoided for years now despite alarmists saying ad block would stop working as far back as 2020. I don't even have an ad blocker installed on Vivaldi and the built in blocking has worked just fine, even the other day when people started having issues with YouTube V just kept doing its job.
I'll believe it when I see it, and the day it happens I'll switch to FF. Until then I'm not going to reduce the user experience with this armchair virtue signalling that you all pretend is making a difference.
I liked it. Found it better than Chrome for my needs to finally get away from Google. I hadn’t realized I went from Chrome to Chromium. Within a year, I am now switched to Firefox. After theming it and stuff, I’m now liking it way more than everything else. It does everything I need and looks beautiful.
I also enjoy Firefox Focus on iOS which is basically incognito on steroids. Any time I click a link, it defaults to FFF.
In other words, these older extentions work just fine, no one wants the new limited features, and google is force disabling older extentions despite any outcries from its users because it can.
The popular uBlock Origin extension, for example, would be limited under Manifest V3. The developer created uBlock Origin Lite, a reduced version that is compatible with Manifest V3.
Sounds like manifest 3 would also break extensions like Stylish, Greasemonkey and Dark Reader, basically anything that injects or interacts with the html, css or JavaScript of a page in any way.
I was mainly referring to how sluggish it was. For my web apps, it was always slower and the UI would bog down. Maybe not the correct definition of you refer to unnecessary features.
I am more referring to how lean or streamline the software is. Both in front end design and backend.
A lot of browser performance has to do with how you use it, so my experience is not universal.
Still, even full fat Firefox is skinny compared to the morbidly obese Chrome and edge browsers.
There isn't much, Waterfox removes Pocket and disables most of the telemetry, tweaks some of the settings to be more privacy and performance minded, swaps google from default search engine and iirc it has more aggressive compiler optimization settings in exchange for having slightly more modern hardware requirements.
And the default theme is more compact and less chrome-esque.
It originally was just about providing 64-bit builds of Firefox back when Mozilla didn't yet, today it's mostly "Firefox, but slightly better."
Around the time Chrome first hit the scene, Firefox was getting pretty bloated and inefficient... They've come a long way since then but they still do a bunch of unnecessary stuff that should probably be off by default but isn't
I mean, they absolutely did change their extension system, removing a lot of what the extensions had access to. Not to this level, no, but they did do that and a lot of what could be done with Firefox is no longer possible, so I'm not sure how that's disinformation.
An unfounded leap from that point to "don't trust moz", yes, but the extension change did happen.