Regarding and extending my earlier comment here about Patrick's wise and brilliant guiding principle to only change what really needs to be changed (a great example being the ncurses installer and LILO) my recent and ongoing struggles with Firefox only highlight the difference. I sincerely wish more developers took a page from Patrick's book especially for something as heavily used and fundamental as a web browser. Change just for change sake is like imagining that one can traverse thin ice by running really fast if you just keep running. Oh well...

Maybe their intent is without change there would be no innovation?


Last fortune:

Obviously as it stands that statement is true, but there are basics that should never change or we flirt with the folly of reinventing the wheel, not once but repeatedly...or throwing out the baby with the wash water... or far worse, making basic changes to create a feeling of "Hey! This is New!" when really it's basically the same old thing dressed up in different clothes. Reliable bases of operation are essential to serious exploration.

Specific to this thread endangering hard work customization for no clear advantage is rarely a good thing. One of the things I love most about Slackware, especially as I have set it up, is that if anything goes badly I know exactly where to look... at myself and likely the last change I made before the problem arose. I have exactly zero evidence to go on as to why, suddenly and with no alterations from me, Firefox itself worked but Tabs sometimes crashed. I spent many hours trying to figure that out rather than immediately assume, OH I must need an upgrade".

To be clear I still know it is my fault because I choose to use the binary blobs shortly after system install, instead of relying on official packages, but my fault is not the only fault and dumping ALSA for telemetry isn't the only fault at the feet of mozilla devs. I can adapt to changes in addons support, but deep changes in Profiles is just risky as Hell and I don't like it.

Couple weeks ago I ran ruario's script and got the profile thing, thought it was a major change to FF, then another update, more profile nonsense, which seemed fishy to me.

So FF devs do some odd things, we have workarounds.

Have you post your concerns to some FF devs forum? Bet they won't listen.

Yes I have and I fully agree they most likely won't even bother to respond at all. That's why I am currently testing Palemoon, Opera, and Vivaldi. I have deeply ingrained Firefox habits from over 20 years of Mozilla that are a bit of a struggle to let go, but I'm getting there.

Thanks for highlighting the workaround but I'm afraid it couldn't help me much after the fact.