I do honestly wonder if there is some sort of campaign against Mozilla and Firefox at this point. It might not be a paid thing or some sort of conspiracy, but just an echo chamber effect that keeps getting more intense over time.
In every single thread it's the same stuff rehashed over and over, and dramatic takes about absolutely trivial changes or people being mad over Mozilla political stuff like them canning a former CEO (which was totally deserved). Very rarely do I ever see a positive comment or thread title, and most of the problems people bring up are basically non-issues for 99% of users or completely made up. There are of course some legitimate issues here and there, but they are the exception.
Every time I open these threads it's pretty confusing, I don't know if I am living in a different reality or what's up. I have had zero issues with Firefox in any way and have no complaints about the direction it's moving in. It has the best Wayland support, has great performance, now isolates each site in an OS level process (which further improves performance on modern machines), gets rapid security updates and builds in 1/4th the time and space that chromium takes. I don't notice anything missing compared to using chromium either.
Them removing Yandex from the default search engine options is barely news worthy. Users who want to use it still can, users who don't will continue not to, there is no real issue here.
It's not like this is unique to Mozilla though. Once you get big enough, you end up attracting a critical mass of people who like to rehash the same old grievances. Take any HN thread about Google, for example.
Except with Google, Google keeps committing the sins, and when even informed that they are doing it, executives at Google just respond "working as intended, WONTFIX".
I don't have much else to add because your post perfectly sums it up. To me it seems it started when Brandon Eich was outed, a segment of the tech community never let it go and views everything they do with extreme scrutiny. I don't feel like it's deserved at all. Mozilla has new leadership and Brandon has moved on to other great things like the browser Brave. Mozilla and the work they've done for open source is irreplaceable. I still use Firefox and filezilla all the time and Rust has been such a massive success that even Microsoft is using it in Windows.
I believe some of the Chromium folks are partly responsible for this. Though it's probably not a planned "campaign" of any sort, I've seen some prominent figures constantly direct hatred toward other browser vendors online, and countless webdevs piling on. I'm not posting links because many of them are highly toxic, but browser developers on the receiving end has expressed their frustrations more than once.
In every single thread it's the same stuff rehashed over and over, and dramatic takes about absolutely trivial changes or people being mad over Mozilla political stuff like them canning a former CEO (which was totally deserved). Very rarely do I ever see a positive comment or thread title, and most of the problems people bring up are basically non-issues for 99% of users or completely made up. There are of course some legitimate issues here and there, but they are the exception.
Every time I open these threads it's pretty confusing, I don't know if I am living in a different reality or what's up. I have had zero issues with Firefox in any way and have no complaints about the direction it's moving in. It has the best Wayland support, has great performance, now isolates each site in an OS level process (which further improves performance on modern machines), gets rapid security updates and builds in 1/4th the time and space that chromium takes. I don't notice anything missing compared to using chromium either.
Them removing Yandex from the default search engine options is barely news worthy. Users who want to use it still can, users who don't will continue not to, there is no real issue here.