Tannin, of all the tech people I know, you must be the one who likes change the least. Last I checked you hated Firefox altogether, claiming that the older browser (Opera was it?) was superior. Only after another change are you saying that the last Firefox was good?I barely noticed the change, something that simple and cosmetic has no influence on my use of a product.
No. That's not so bright, Dave, certainly not in the context of web browsers. For years I used Opera, by far the the most innovative browser of all, and eagerly awaited each new improvement. Most of the now-standard features people like and take advantage of in a browser were invented by Opera, and people like me adopted them years before most users even saw them. Now and again, the Opera developers would have a brain explosion and a new version would be a big farnakle-up and users like me would be grumpy. But they always fixed it eventually.
Where I
am conservative - and rightly so - is that I have a very low tolerance for
destructive change. It infuriates me when some dorkhead marketing department tool damages or reverses progress that has already been achieved. So do most people. This is why Microsoft has copped so much flack in recent years: they got a lot of Windows UI features right (after years and years of gradually improving on their pretty awful first tries), and ever since then, about half the changes they have made have been clearly changes for the worse. Destroying useful features is not "progress", it's just pointless vandalism. Worse yet is the urge to do clever-clever stuff that actively gets in your way. Controls that move around and pop up in unexpected places cause constant annoyance, loss of productivity, and frustration. The new there-again-gone-again navigation controls in Firefox 29 ar an example. It is Ergonomics 101 to put the same control in the same place every single time. The user shouldn't
ever have to look for a control, it should be in the same place it was 30 seconds ago. Every time. And - unless there is a very, very good reason - it should be in the same place it was 5 years ago too. People master interfaces far more comprehensively than the brain-dead Firefox designers realise. By making stupid, just-because-I-can UI changes with no tangible benefit, software designers destroy the very real benefit users get from accumulated years of use of a well-crafted interface. Can a user learn and adapt to the stupid new interface? Of course. And if the new interface is actually better, easier, and more productive than the old one, users will happily adapt - just as I adapted to the many, many changes made to improve the Opera UI over the years until they stopped developing the product and started making a third-rate Chrome clone with a degraded UI and reduced functionality.
Another example of the truly astonishing ergonomic stupidity of the Firefox visual designers: they have made the reload button microscopic (harder to click, easier to miss), faint (harder to see, more time wasted), and - here is the really stupid bit - moved it away from the sensible, practical position immediately to the right of the other main navigation controls and hidden it away on the other side of the address field. Absurd! (Yes, they were not the first company to do that. They were following in the footsteps of those well-known champions of the borked UI, Microsoft.) Anyone who develops websites or software is
constantly going back - forward - stop - reload - back, over and over, but the fundamental stupidity of sprinkling related functional controls all over the place like confetti affects all manner of users.
Most users probably spend less time with a browser than I do, granted. On the other hand, most users mainly or entirely use one single browser. So, overall, my level of familiarity with a given browser is probably about typical (because I have to use multiple different ones to do my job properly).
The Classic Theme Restorer fixes some of the problems but can't touch some of the others. In any case, you shouldn't have to install third-party patches just to get decent functionality out of a basic product. (When you do, it is a clear sign that you have right royally screwed the pooch - the Windows 8 Metro disaster is another example.) Pale Moon, on the other hand, fixes nearly all of them, and it's not a patch or an add-on, it's a full, stand-alone product.
Bottom line: I have dumped Firefox. Thousands, maybe millions of other users will do the same. I mean what's the point of Firefox now? It is inflicting the Chrome interface on everyone already, so they might as well all run Chrome and be done with it.
