As Firefox's share of the browser market continues to slide, the Waterfox Project shows some of the ways that Mozilla is failing to listen to its users – and it's far from the only example.
Waterfox, which has just released its fourth version, came to your correspondent's attention after the arrival of Firefox 57, codenamed Quantum, which represented a major change in the program, complete with parts of the browser engine written in Rust.
(The Rust language itself started out as a Mozilla project. Despite Rust's popularity, within three years, Mozilla would also lay off members of the Rust language team.)
The problem with Firefox Quantum is that it also dropped a very significant feature: Netscape's XUL-based extension engine, added way back in 1997. To quote the Classic Addons Archive, dropping XUL meant losing "19,450 Firefox add-ons created by 14,274 developers over the past 15 years." At a stroke this crippled one of Firefox's killer features: how users could extensively customise it – unlike, say, Google Chrome.
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Waterfox: A Firefox fork that could teach Mozilla a lesson#
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Why are some of Moz's axed projects bigger than its flagship?
