skeletonbow: There's a greater wake of missing addons that I suffer through for now, but hopefully throughout the next year the situation will improve again and we end up having our cake and being able to eat it too.
Lexor: I was thinking in similar way "a year ago" when I migrated to Quantum. But "after a year" of giving the chance (and seeing not the great improvement) I think this loss is kind of "too big" to not try some other alternative.
Especially when Quantum, to my experience, is "not so stable on my system" as previous editions of Firefox and I do not know what is it (maybe it's 64bit or my Windows 7).
Have you thought about any other Firefox's fork like I do now?
I haven't experienced any major instabilities with Firefox Quantum myself yet, just loss of functionality of a handful of extensions. Some of which I can live without for now and others which are more painful to live without.
Over the years I have tried out a fair variety of Firefox forks, not as an alternative to Firefox but just to try them out to see what they had to offer, both in Linux and in Windows platforms. Ultimately I never found any of them offered anything major compared to using Firefox itself plus addons. Also, being forks of Firefox they are all inherently reliant on Mozilla's own codebase in order for them to move forward, so they are all Firefox from yesterday so to speak in that they're always going to be merging in new code from Mozilla but delayed by some amount of time, and making it work with whatever their own code changes are. Mozilla is a huge organization however, and most if not all of the forks out there are of small groups of people that don't have a fraction of the developer or financial resources that Mozilla has, and since their codebase is dependent on Mozilla's for forward movement, I'd rather stick with the horse's mouth that gets more usage in the real world and rapid security/bugfix updates than with any spinoffs that have development resource contraints on such a large code base.
In the majority of cases where I've had problems with Firefox for the last decade plus, most of them can be tracked down to problems caused by poorly written browser addons and not really the cause or fault of the actual browser itself. That includes but is not limited to memory leaks and other resource usage/bloat, instability, and other factors.
I might try out other browsers for the heck of it just to see what they offer as people often ask me about such things, but realistically I can't see myself shifting away from Firefox as my primary browser. Any shift to another browser to get away from any disappointments in Firefox, would result in taking on a much larger set of disappointments and limitations in any other browser alternative that exist which I might consider. In other words, even with any weaknesses Firefox might have at a given point in time, it's still the best browser option available for my needs and it has a huge team of people working on it so it has the largest likelihood of eventually fixing any problems I encounter with it over time, or having addons developed for it that work around them.
Aside from that, I use Chrome occasionally as a backup if I have a problem with a given page or whatnot and that usually suffices.
If push came to shove though, I'd rather fire up gdb and debug a problem in Firefox, fix it and patch the code myself than switch to some other random browser, it'd be less painful for me personally.