Mozilla has been very destructive, and I have had to restrain Firefox in a number of different ways. It's Updater.app will disregard your wishes and repeatedly download updates over and over again. This happened to me when I had to turn in an assignment and I was on a 2G connection a few years ago. Most of their updates are unidirectional, even though they don't need to be. And major features are quietly removed, as if it is just normal for your car's speedometer to disappear one morning. This ends up feeling like gas-lighting. At least Chrome's updates are small and hard to notice, but Firefox has all the same disregard for users, except they are very clumsy about it. And the official response from them has been that if their updates destroy your profile folder, that you should have made a backup and it was your fault for assuming that their software wouldn't do a destructive update.
The tone-deafness of the comments here is astounding. The fact that these posts are rapidly downvoted further reinforces my point.
It's not just Mozilla, it's the whole "update culture": "you must take these important fixes for remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities, and also all of that other stuff" --- of which everyone would probably want the former, but no one really wants the latter.
When the "choice" of browsers that can view the majority of sites, including advanced JavaScript, is basically between Firefox or the various flavours of Chrom(e/ium), there is no real choice!
tl;dr: To say I am annoying with the state of things is an enormous understatement. The browser culture is getting more and more user-hostile and "security" is being used as an excuse to put users under the noose, this encouragement of "learned helplessness" is insane. Fuck this idiotic "it's for your security" bullshit.
I'm sorry you are getting downvoted. You are absolutely correct. I've gotten in many discussions about this exact same thing on HN. I at one point I had an exchange with someone about terrible bad Pale Moon was because it let users do things like override HSTS settings, and otherwise undo decisions that Mozilla had made.[1]
I actually have highly specialized profiles that make heavy use of XUL addons that I have developed over the years for very specific things, and I hate how careful I have to be that an update won't come and delete them. It would be one line of code to make a backup of a profile before "upgrading" it...
