Yes FF's background update is annoying, and caught me with "We need one more thing to do" (ie restart) in the middle of a browsing session on several occasions

Yes FF's background update is annoying, and caught me with "We need one more thing to do" (ie restart) in the middle of a browsing session on several occasions in involved customer workflows with several confluence, jira, bitbucket, mail, code review, build pipeline etc etc tabs open when I just wanted to do a side lookup/cross check on stackoverflow or something, forcing me to start Chromium in addition to FF. The problem appears to be that "browser vendors" have put themselves on a path of endless scope creep, complexity, and updates. What has become of the idea of a relatively simple media format (HTML) and media player, with variation on the server rather than client side? IMO if we don't want to restart from scratch or want to become closed loop media consumers where the server and the client is controlled by the same party, it's inevitable we drastically cut down on web app bloat, provision the extant web apps we can't do without as Electron-only desktop apps, and return to use the web as the simple static publishing medium it was envisioned to be. Also, what has become of FF ESR?