heads up on upcoming firefox25 changes

those using firefox may be aware lately firefox has been dumbed down, but up until this point its been small changes here and there.

Firefox 25 unless plans change is set to remove the addon bar, stop the tab bar position been customisable, major design changes to copy chrome's layout and more restrictions. The idea been a more newbie user friendly gui which is familiar to users of chrome and less customisation to keep support requests down (conspiracy theory google pay firefox's bills so these changes requested by google).

Some infos here. Top link has a screenshot to show how bad it is.

http://www.ghacks.net/2013/07/29/so-this-is-your-ide...
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2013/05/27/major-com...
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=872209
http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2600&s...

Options are for those who wish to avoid changing browsers.

Use the ESR release, v24 will be an ESR release, so it will get security updates for around a year and have the existing gui, as ESR is a feature freeze. One could hope by then firefox dev's change their mind or at least partially go back on their decision so by the time ESR expires things may be better, is also possible by then it may be fixable by addons.
Use a fork, the palemoon and cyberfox dev's have both said they will maintain the existing gui with newer firefox, the palemoon dev said he will code an entire new gui to maintain it if he really has to as he expects mozilla to deliberatly strip out old gui code to make maintaining it harder.
Change browser.
Accept the changes.
Keep using v24 without security updates. not as bad as seems as patching the software is just one way to mitigate vulnerabilities, its not the only way and not all vulns are serious.

We are currently on firefox 23 so 25 is 2 releases away and the next ESR is one release away if looking to switch to it.

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/

Edited by Chrysalis (Thu 15-Aug-13 18:20:56)

I switched to Palemoon (64 bt) awhile ago as Mozilla have totally lost the plot.

I agree and I will be trying palemoon myself now.

Mozilla priority should be a stable windows 64bit build (which they abandoned) instead of fiddling with the interface to make it a chrome clone.