I've been a loyal Firefox user ever since I first graduated from the Internet diapers phase and realized what a piece of **** IE6 was. Over the years, though, I've become more and more disillusioned with the direction the Mozilla team is taking the project, particularly in terms of basic functionality and UI. It started around the time of FF4, with various button merges and the default to "tabs on top" appearance (complete with a laughable video detailing why it was "the better way to browse"). In the past year or so, since the move to the rapid-release schedule, the idea seems to be to turn FF into as much of a Chrome clone as possible in both appearance and functionality (ignoring the fact that if people wanted something that looks and feels like Chrome, they'd just go download ****ing Chrome instead).
The main takeaway from this is that there have been any number of features I consider integral to my daily browsing experience that have been moved from the standard options menu to toggles buried somewhere in about:config, or else just removed from FF entirely. There have been a few different occasions when I've been forced to download an extension just to keep the browser working as it did previously. The most recent casualty with the update to FF26 was the complete removal of the old separate downloads window: Mozilla had removed the options dialog for this in favor of pushing their new (overly-convoluted) integrated downloads display, but they at least left the old system in place if you tweaked an about:config option, which I had. Now that older option has been removed entirely, and the only way I'm able to keep using it is via an extension some kind developer whipped up. Looking ahead a bit, it seems as though the straw that will break my back will be the release of the completely-redesigned "Australis" theme at some point next year, when even the ability to keep my tabs right above the page view will be removed for good. There's already someone who's whipped up yet another extension for the beta release to revert things back, but it's come to the point where I feel like I'm having to rely on the whims of various third-party developers just to maintain a sane browsing experience, and there are no guarantees that said add-ons will be maintained into the foreseeable future. (Case in point: I was using a lovely little theme that adapted the colorful old FF3 buttons for more modern versions, but the developer eventually gave up on it because of how disgusted he was getting with Mozilla's policy directions.)
I've used Firefox for long enough that the idea of completely jumping ship is really unappealing: Chrome is right out, because it's the exact unappealing direction that Mozilla is currently heading, and beyond that there are who knows how many obscure options. However, I just stumbled across something that might solve my problem:
Pale Moon, an independently-developed browser based on the FF source that aims for increased efficiency and (most importantly for me) rejects the Mozilla team's more recent UI philosophies. Since it's basically FF at heart, most extensions apparently work just fine on it, so it seems like it should be a fairly-seamless transition. I don't know that I've ever seen it mentioned around here, but does anyone have any experience with it?
