> Did you actually took the time to setup firefox to your liking once?

Yes. I use Firefox pretty much exclusively.

I'm saying that the first-run experience, and the amount of setting up it takes to make Firefox less intrusive, illustrate that Firefox is not as focused on being a useful tool as I would like.

Compare that to browsers having more market share and firefox isn't any more intrusive or less focused at being useful. Chrome is totally shitty in stock form as well unless you love ads and don't care about privacy.

Oh, of course! I'm most definitely not saying Chrome, Edge or Safari are better. I'm saying Firefox is just as bad.

I mean, the fact we're even discussing whether or not Firefox is more or less user-hostile than Google and Microsoft illustrates my point perfectly :)

I have set up Firefox to my liking but UI reworks and new anti-features mean that I have to invest significant time for each update to just get things back to how I like them.

I agree. More than this, it's not just “I don't like change and I have to tweak Firefox to my liking”; it's “I don't trust that Mozilla is acting in my interests; I expect that any changes are to my detriment”.

You can use one of the forks such as librewolf or any other fork which comes with a firefox already tuned with a more privacy oriented focus.

When my browser developer is happy that others decide what I see on the net is when I bail.

It is not like every update break everything. They did one major update that broke a number of extensions and they didn't even do it without prior announcement and time for extensions developpers to adapt them. Appart from them those are tiny changes.