"clearly we can't have that! so, up the pain!" must be mozilla's official line. point in case: firefox 31. (inflicted upon us as a security update from debian's marginally bearable ff24.)
by and large humans are pretty lemming-like and flock to the "oh, shiny!" but when it comes to FF 31 the natural reaction is more like "booh, shitty".
the ui layout is plain stupid. the options and choices are gone. it's less usable than all the older versions of FF. it's a memory hog. it manages to both waste more screen real estate and show less useful information simultaneously, which is quite a feat.
An editor is a tool for saving programmer-bukkake to disk. -- Anthony de Boer
oi! mozilla team: less wanking. please.
(unfortunately there are no real workable alternatives: midori isn't flexible or solid enough yet, and with chromium the stoopid never goes below 11.)
fortunately there are lots of other people who also hate the default setup and have spent some time cooking up useful extensions for getting FF back into a workable state:
- the classic theme restorer does most of the necessary heavy lifting.
- status-4-evar restores a useful status bar.
