Well said. My reason to feel greatly disappointed are mostly the same or similar, and there are some more points that are extremely irritating.
The motto of Firefox development team seems to be “Developers know best”. Users are expected to embrace changes and feel happy. All criticism is just ignored, often with arrogant/indulgent intonation.
Why there’s no way to manually override several security-related features? Why cannot I force using invalid SSL certificate any more? Developers know best: it’s insecure and they won’t allow that under any circumstances. I suppose that developers live in ideal world where there are no network devices utilizing invalid SSLs, which just can’t be fixed other by buying a new hardware (which is not always possible or under my control).
Why new WebExtensions API was not fully finished by the time XUL has been phased out? Developers know best: only the features “most popular” (?) get high priority and are more or less properly implemented. The rest will be implemented, if ever, some time later. Your add-on heavily depends on new API feature, not implemented or even absent? Perhaps you shouldn’t work on such an add-on.
And the mentioned endless UI changes. They are sudden, abrupt, often irreversible. Once again “Developers know best”: well, folks, don’t live in the past! See how cool and wonderful are the new features! You miss “Forward” button? You are joking, no one needs it. You don’t like new theme? You just aren’t wise enough to understand it’s the coolest thing. And so on and so forth.
I do not know whether the developers/product managers (if the latter do exist) actually belong to human race (their logic at times looks too alien), but there are things they seem ignoring for no sane reason:
People are conservative. They like this theme, this UI, this set of add-ons. You bring changes? Fine, but let people have whatever they already have by default. Offer them new features without forcefully making them use new features. That’s just sheer disrespect.
There are experts in programming/UI/security outside Mozilla developers teams. That can come as a shock, but it’s true. When developers do a change and speak (often giving no alternative) “this is correct and you shall do that”, they forget they are not the only experts in the world. Just don’t take your users for security-ignorant, dumb, retrograde fools. Believe me, they are not.
I used to support Mozilla products and promote them (including donating, evangelizing etc). But after the developers’ recent actions screwed bookmarks handling add-ons such as Xmarks, without a single line of remorse, I feel I was promoting wrong products and wrong team.
I do not like promoting the product where my opinion means nothing, and my plans can be just ruined because of “this is open source software and no one guarantees anything”.
I hope Mozilla’s new users base will be happy with that. Personally, I stop supporting Mozilla’s products.