It definitely was their gratest move ever. So many improvements was blocked by supporting the old extensions. Firefox would be completely useless and dead by now if they was still supporting them. Their loss in market share to chrome is largely due to not killing them 5 years earlier.
OK, but even if I accept that there was a technical necessity, the new architecture needlessly blocked ui modification to offer a less flexible experience. They could have provided a solution that worked better for their most loyal users and long time advocates. Instead they caused the outflux of these highly technical users, many of whom instead championed chrome, and more or less got us into this mess in the first place.
A lot of the Firefox users you mention have probably moved to Vivaldi, given that it has implemented features that Firefox had via extensions before they went all in on WebExtensions.
It definitely was their gratest move ever. So many improvements was blocked by supporting the old extensions. Firefox would be completely useless and dead by now if they was still supporting them. Their loss in market share to chrome is largely due to not killing them 5 years earlier.
OK, but even if I accept that there was a technical necessity, the new architecture needlessly blocked ui modification to offer a less flexible experience. They could have provided a solution that worked better for their most loyal users and long time advocates. Instead they caused the outflux of these highly technical users, many of whom instead championed chrome, and more or less got us into this mess in the first place.
A lot of the Firefox users you mention have probably moved to Vivaldi, given that it has implemented features that Firefox had via extensions before they went all in on WebExtensions.