Firefox: The now
While some imitators try to make it look like an art form, Firefox developers seem to imply that they have absolutely no intention of being original.
Firefox copied Chrome's no-chrome user interface (UI). Chrome has a maze-like vertigo-inducing Settings screen, which makes it difficult to discover and change settings (particularly those relating to privacy). Firefox has gone for the same style for its Preferences screen.
Firefox even chose to copy Chrome’s version number system.
Companies like Google, Apple, Facebook and Twitter have declared an unofficial war on RSS, apparently because it encourages anonymity. Chrome never supported RSS/ATOM feeds. Google had also shut down its Reader and FeedBurner services. And now, Firefox has stopped displaying the orange RSS feed icon in the address bar. It is now obscured in the multi-layered hidden menu system.
Being a Google product, Chrome was never known for privacy protection. In contrast, Firefox was a strongly trusted brand. Now, if you try to clear Firefox history, it will clear history entries only for the last one hour by default. If you try to change the way it remembers history, Firefox will immediately want to restart the browser, instead of waiting until the user does that.
Chrome uses a background service (daemon) to download updates. Firefox also started bundling an update service. If you chose not to install the service, then the browser would get extremely cranky after that. First, it will not display the browser at all. Instead, an update window will start checking your add-ons and update them. Then, it will update the browser. Subsequently, it will check to see if your add-ons are compatible with that new version, disable those that are not compatible and only then display the browser. Because Mozilla has been repeatedly introducing breaking changes with each Firefox release, Firefox add-ons are getting culled out of existence.
In August 2015, Mozilla decided to abandon its XUL-based add-on architecture and instead adopted WebExtensions, a clone of the extensions API used by Chrome. Mozilla reasoned that it would be easy for add-on writers to maintain just one code base. This is particularly galling for Firefox add-on writers, as Firefox has a far richer add-on ecosystem than Chrome. The author of the popular DownThemAll add-on wrote:
“What this also means: Almost all your existing add-ons will be broken, entirely, save for some Add-on SDK addons, namely those that don’t do anything fancy. Sure, even today, lots of add-ons break, and some add-ons will not get updated when they do and there are no suitable replacements.