Indeed, Mozilla has a particular bad habit of not listening to customers.

It shows even in the UI design. Features like tab pinning and tab groups work in ways that are sub-optimal to how users want to use them. A pinned tab should not be tied to a specific URL. If you go their forums you see a lot complaints, and weird thing is all the nonsensical arguments that their reps advance as to how these features should work the way they currently are. I as a longtime Firefox user can immediately see what is wrong with these features as implemented, but the devs won't listen. I wonder if they use FF themselves.

Firefox is also the only app on my MacBook that consistently brings the system to a crawl. Almost every single time my machines slows down, the solution is to kill Firefox. It's got to the point I don't even need to use Activity Monitor, I just kill Firefox and and system recovers.

It's gotten to the point I'm seriously looking at alternatives, trying out Orion and Helium browsers.

It took them AGES to finally implement tab groups and vertical tabs, two of the most requested features that pretty much all browsers browsers had at that point. They can barely hear Firefox users over the sound of google's millions filling up their bank.

I'm confused, because I desperately want pinned tabs to stay on their URL, but that's not what happens, and I end up with random URLs in these tabs because I click links. Is there a config flag I flipped without thinking?

It seems they have listened to users and allow pinned tabs to navigate to any url.

Initially this is how pinning worked, and along the way they changed it so that if you navigated to a different domain from the one you pinned, it opened in a new (unpinned) tab, which was jarring.

Now it seems they have reverted that change. So they seem to vacillate on the implementation.

Yeah, I don't get why I'd want to pin a tab and then change the url (which I do accidentally for a pinned tab every couple of weeks or so). When it's not the site I pinned, it's just...a tab?

Do you actually use the feature much?

From my experience I want to pin tabs because I simply want a set of tab available for use that remain visible when I scroll through a lot of tab headers to the right.

It's very annoying to be on a pinned tab, navigate to even just another server on the same root domain, and suddenly be pushed to another (un-pinned) tab. Even if navigate to a totally different url, I do no want to be pushed to another tab.

The enforcement of the url remaining the same should be done by myself, not the browser trying to second-guess me.

As far as I can tell, it's literally the only way I use pinned tabs (other than when I accidentally do navigate away on them due to the lack of enforcement). I have several pages I always want open (e.g. my email, a couple of messaging platforms, Spotify, the web portal for texting via my Android phone), and then I have some varying number of other tabs open that I use for anything else I'm currently using my browser for. I guess this is one of those things where everyone's preference is different, because to me, having a static set of pages I always want open is pretty much the ideal use case for a pinned tab. I can't really wrap my head around wanting to use them any other way; if they can navigate away, they're just like any other tab but harder to close, and I don't really have a use case for enforcing the minimum number of tabs to be larger than zero unless it's literally to force a specific page to always be open. I find it far more annoying to have to navigate a tab back to the state it was previously than to reopen a page from a tab I accidentally closed, so having an extra layer of protection on closing a tab isn't nearly as useful as if it also had that extra layer of protection on what the tab itself was showing.

edit: I don't see it as the browser second-guessing me as much as following what I'm already trying to do in the first place. I don't pin a tab if I don't actually want to keep that specific page open, and taking an action to preserve a state that I opted into isn't going around my specified intention, but following it.

Try Zen Browser - it's reskinned Firefox.

> Now that Google is yanking it

Can you elaborate? Are they winding down their their participation in search licensing deals?

Looks like I was a little out of date.

https://itsfoss.com/news/mozilla-lifeline-is-safe/

Google pays Mozilla, basically to make Google the default search engine for everything in Firefox. Previously, it looked like an antitrust case was going to force them to stop doing that, but it didn't turn out that way.

Mozilla is still getting most of their money from Google and they shouldn't need to kneecap themselves to pay the rent. Still, you can't help but wonder what might happen if Firefox starts eating too much of Chrome's market share. Mozilla should be trying to branch out, but in a user friendly way.

I definitely heard there was a risk of that happening, but you're right that it seems not to have materialized. I'm honestly not sure what remedy they landed on or if they are still deliberating but I think a fascinating option that follows precedent would be a pop-up browser picker in Android instead of rolling Chrome as default, as that has precedent in other antitrust cases and could potentially change the market share issue overnight.

Another interesting one would be truly spinning off Chrome, but paying a search licensing fee to them, too. Actually, that's fascinating to consider in this context, because I know that option (spinning off the browser into its own company) has been criticized on the grounds that it would be unrealistic to assume a browser can simply monetize itself. Ironic given the Mozilla criticism.

> Now that Google is yanking it, Mozilla needs to find alternative sources of filthy lucre

How do Mozilla's costs look?