Yep, you are correct. Each of those decisions was made over the protests of a vocal but relatively small group of users.
You can't please all people all of the time, and I agree the pocket integration, and the looking glass add were mistakes, but the other items were directly related to sustainability of the project ($, eng cycles), or user safety.
You can disagree with them as much as you like, but Firefox continues to support the ultimate in user control by releasing their product as open source. Roll your own build that doesn't require those features, sideload your add-ons, and/or fork the product.
As a user, the average Firefox user has far more control over the browser than Chrome, Edge, or Safari users do, and have the flexibility to use one of many Firefox forks that have the same beef as you.
Since the first thing that group protested was telemetry, I don't know how we could possibly know that it's a "vocal but relatively small group of users". In general, though, "you can't please everyone, and not that many people objected" isn't really a compelling argument; the criticism is still valid, and people being unwilling to make the effort to make a fuss, fork, find workarounds, or switch browsers doesn't mean that they're okay with it. For that matter, there's not a lot of feedback in general; how many people objected, and how many said they were in favor, compared to the overwhelming majority who never said anything?
> You can disagree with them as much as you like, but Firefox continues to support the ultimate in user control by releasing their product as open source. Roll your own build that doesn't require those features, sideload your add-ons, and/or fork the product.
By that standard Chrome is a paragon of user control. Firefox, as it actually exists, in the thing that Mozilla offers users to download, claims to care about user empowerment while constantly reducing users' power.
In fairness, it's hard to tell what's Firefox throwing away the thing that made them special vs Google abusing its monopoly position to push its way into the browser market.
You can't please all people all of the time, and I agree the pocket integration, and the looking glass add were mistakes, but the other items were directly related to sustainability of the project ($, eng cycles), or user safety.
You can disagree with them as much as you like, but Firefox continues to support the ultimate in user control by releasing their product as open source. Roll your own build that doesn't require those features, sideload your add-ons, and/or fork the product.
As a user, the average Firefox user has far more control over the browser than Chrome, Edge, or Safari users do, and have the flexibility to use one of many Firefox forks that have the same beef as you.