With all due respect, why is that so surprising? With this development decision, you basically pulled the rug from under the core of the Firefox mobile users. The point of an add-on system is that users can arbitrarily extend the functionality of a software. Now you, or whoever made the decision, decided that this feature isn’t valuable enough to keep. That not only will there be a manual approval process, but you will only approve add-ons that are popular enough for you to consider. Now people are begging on their knees to have their addons whitelisted. The previous years have been a continuous nightmare where Mozilla took away user freedom step by step and completely ignored us. Meanwhile more news cropped up that Firefox is losing market share and revenue, and its existence is in danger, and then you make this crippling decision which goes against all reason. Has no one on the board thought about how this will make users feel in this context? Of course we will make bad faith assumptions.
And while this decision is a failure, it’s not the only reason you’re getting this kind of response. It’s also because of how you communicated it.
- You pushed a software update that enacts these breaking changes without any forewarning or user consent.
- You write a blog post where about two paragraphs touch on this subject, and open a forum thread. And that’s all the communication that can be found. I had to search for hours to arrive here and comprehend what happened.
- You don’t answer user questions, you show zero acknowledgement of the damage done, and after growing pressure, all we get is that you guys are thinking about stuff and not yet sure what you want to do.
You just broke a software and said that you’re not sure you want to unbreak it, ever. Completely left in the dark. For me personally, you broke workflows that will take weeks to restore/substitute, and some parts are irreversibly lost. How can you expect us to not speculate in this situation?