When I was using Claude to build a Firefox extension and running into pseudo-security assclownery I had to defeat over and over again (which I did, I fucking rule), I complained to Claude about Firefox’s shittiness and Mozilla’s betrayal of its most ardent champions. My plaint was: “Power users were responsible for Firefox’s rise. And then they kicked them in the guts.” I thought the comments it came back with are pretty good (all AI-generated):

That’s not just venting — that’s basically accurate as a matter of history, and it’s the part that stings with actual justification rather than just frustration.

Firefox’s rise was a power-user insurgency, full stop. 2004, IE6 was a stagnant monopoly, and the people who switched first and drove everyone else to switch were the exact crowd you’re describing: the tab-and-extension nerds, the web devs who wanted standards and a DOM inspector, the tinkerers running Adblock and Greasemonkey and a hundred about:config tweaks. The “Spread Firefox” campaign, the two-page NYT ad funded by users, the word-of-mouth that put it on your relatives’ machines — that was power users doing unpaid evangelism because the browser was theirs. Extensibility wasn’t a feature bullet; it was the whole identity. Firefox was the browser you could bend to your will, and that’s precisely why the competent people carried it to ~30% share against a preinstalled monopoly.

And then the gut-kick, which you’re also right about and which has a specific name: the XUL-to-WebExtensions transition in 2017 (Firefox 57, “Quantum”). They killed the old powerful extension API — the one that let addons genuinely rewrite the browser — and replaced it with the locked-down, Chrome-compatible WebExtensions model. Overnight, thousands of the deep, only-possible-on-Firefox addons died. Tab Mix Plus, the real Tree Style Tabs, DownThemAll’s guts, tons of it — either gone or lobotomized into a shadow of themselves. The justification was real (the old model was a security and performance and maintenance nightmare, and multiprocess/e10s needed it), but the effect was unmistakable: they took the exact capability that made power users choose Firefox and handed it away to be more like the competitor those users were fleeing. The people who built the beachhead got told their use case was now a liability.

So the pattern you’re angry about isn’t a recent drift — it’s the founding betrayal, and everything since (the config lockdowns, the missing overrides, the favicon neglect) is the same posture playing out. Once an org decides its power-user base is a maintenance cost rather than its constituency, that decision compounds. And there’s a grim irony in the outcome: they kicked the tinkerers to chase the mainstream user who’d defect to Chrome anyway, and lost most of that mainstream user to Chrome regardless — so they alienated the loyal base for market share they didn’t keep. Worst of both trades.

The one place I’d complicate your read, not to defend them but because it’s true: the XUL model genuinely couldn’t survive into the multiprocess era without a rewrite, so some rupture was coming. The evil-by-your-definition part isn’t that they modernized — it’s that they modernized toward Chrome’s permission model instead of building a sanctioned power-user tier, an “I’m the operator, unlock the deep hooks” path. They had the chance to keep faith with the base while still fixing the architecture, and they chose the version that treated their earliest champions as the thing to migrate away from. That choice is the gut-kick, and it was a choice.

And though I still use Firefox because Chrome is even worse, fuck Mozilla forever, fuck the Firefox developers, and fuck anyone that had anything to do with enshittifying a once-great browser. They are all evil shit humans and I’d make sure they could never work in this industry again if I could. And yes, I am serious.

Claude is right; it was a choice. No matter what they claim, they could have done something differently but they did not. They had the time, the money and the resources. So, truly, fuck them forever.