[ahtaarra]

I think a part of it could be explained by the way things have been in recent times.

As of July 2021 (according to the linked metrics), ~25% of the displays used are 1366x768px while ~40% of them are 1080p. Yet when the "Proton" refresh aimed to promote usability and while certain level of cross-platform was reached, the increase of padding simply made the experiences of people using displays with "less than optimal" resolutions worse. While the proton's hidden and "unsupported" compact mode had a decent height for a 14" FHD display, the same did not look as good on my 15.6" display with the same resolution. When I complained on reddit like many others about the increase in whitespace, I don't think it was given what I believe to be a proper consideration. Why would the main menu be bigger despite having fewer items? And where are the icons? It was a concern back when it was in nightly and many of the concerns remain now even though it has had a stable release.

Another thing that is problematic is the colour-scheme. The newer style incorporates less contrasted colours and does away with what made the preceding Photon design better in certain ways: look at how the tabs on FF used to have a markedly different colour than their backdrop and how there used to be separators between tabs. The fact that the newer design is a bad one somehow eluded those in charge of it and the fact that the contrast between the active tab and its surrounding elements being low being an important issue is an afterthought is telling.

Moreover, the dropdown for the megabar suggestions used to have full-window width but now it is limited to the megabar width for no apparent reason other than looking "cool" (which it does not btw; especially when you compare it to Chromium's counterpart). They introduced the megabar-expansion-on-focus behaviour, kept a config to disable it for a major release or two and then dumped the old one. Also, when you selected multiple tabs, upon a right-click, it used to tell you the count of selected tabs - which no longer seems to be the case. Needless to say, looking at userChrome.css to be _the_ solution for undesirable changes would not work well for anyone in the long run.

Firefox, unlike Chromium-based browsers, does not support XDG base dir spec. It does not bother me very much and neither does FF flickering every once in a while on my main system. What bothers me is that with each new release I feel like FF is losing bits of its magic. Back when FF Quantum was released and was stripped of what many considered the level of flexibility which appealed to them, I was concerned but ultimately accepted it. But this time around the changes feel like marketing speak. Mozilla already has a discourse instance but post-Proton-release they also have a crowdicity instance...

The way things have been going is genuinely upsetting and many users are just reacting to that.