I am one of the longest-running users of Mozilla's Firefox. I was here before Chrome was a thing, I remained when google robbed a **bleep**-ton of the market share, and I have never been tempted to switch to any other browser because of Mozilla's commitment to things like privacy and open source, independence from Chromium, the fact that it runs better, and predominately the fact that it supports extensions and ad-blockers, without which the internet would be worthless to me in this era.
In fact, Mozilla's Firefox is arguably the longest standing service that I have consistently used without significant disappointment, because they have not yet appeared to entirely abandon their original core values.
That being said, lately I have begun to see indicators that Mozilla is starting to follow in the footsteps of the companies before it who stopped catering to the userbase in favor of the shareholder. En**bleep**tification, as it's aptly been termed. Constant updates, primarily to inject an endless conveyor-belt of new features that aren't necessarily desirable, while meanwhile discontinuing support for long-standing features that have been established and relied upon by those users that found utility in it.
Countless internet for-profit companies have decimated consumer confidence by offering services or titles and then cancelling or revoking them after broad-scale adoption. Why should we take up any of your new features if we can't trust that they'll not be trashed with a future update, after we've already invested in them? This is ludicrous. This is why I and others have largely degoogled. Too much forcing things into our daily work routines only to dissolve them once we've integrated them to a point that undoing it entails a significant burden.
The problem is, only the larger entities can afford to support services and features long-term, so when they treat services like a lab experiment they can pick up and drop at a whim, how are we to find an alternative that won't do the same?
Trust is being broken. I'm worried about the direction Mozilla is going in.
