[Pacabel]

You make a very good point.

That sensible and effective approach has become yet another victim of the failed quest to "improve the user experience" by throwing away or changing stuff that was working perfectly fine before. The new approach is almost always far worse than whatever minor flaws might have existed with the earlier approach.

And allowing the old, working approach to be toggled back on through some preferences dialog, through about:config or through some extension doesn't justify the bad change. If anything, it's actually somewhat offensive, because it now requires users to engage in yet more fixing of things that just shouldn't be broken to begin with.

When I start using a fresh installation of Firefox, I have to spend at least a good 10 minutes installing various extensions and reconfiguring it just to get a minimally usable experience out of it. That's not acceptable, and it's not justifiable.

[DCKing]

To me, browsers defaulting to the Downloads folder improved the user experience. You might care much about where exactly your files are going, but I generally don't. Of the two, I think "not caring much" is the default option. If you do care, right-click -> "Save link as...".

It's also incredibly arrogant to say that it's not acceptable or justifiable that Firefox does not exactly cater to what your personal opinion on "usability" is.

[acdha]

> When I start using a fresh installation of Firefox, I have to spend at least a good 10 minutes installing various extensions and reconfiguring it just to get a minimally usable experience out of it. That's not acceptable, and it's not justifiable.

You're assuming that this is widely applicable — very few people have spent a decade building a highly customized browsing experience and most people don't customize much at all. Ever walk around the office and notice how few people even removed Microsoft's default bookmarks from the toolbar so they spend all day staring at links to a service which they don't use?

I would also note that the history of computing is littered with loaded descriptions of things which were reflexively described as a "bad change" and a complete non-issue a year later. Mouse wheels, tabbed browsing, fonts and later CSS, JavaScript, all got the kind of grumbling you made above from a few people. Sometimes it's worth asking whether you really benefit from the old way or are just reacting to something being different.

[Pacabel]

I think your understanding of the history of computing is flawed.

As somebody who lived through the events you mentioned as an adult working in industry, I can assure you that the sentiment you believe was felt was actually not felt.

Mouse wheels were seen as a very good thing when they first came on the scene. They gave the power of the three-buttoned mouse, but also made scrolling much simpler.

The same goes for tabbed browsing. It was one of the best features of Opera for a long time. Everyone I showed it to at the time thought it was very useful. And it was one of the best features of Firefox, too, when it was still Phoenix.

And the same goes for fonts, and CSS (although to a lesser extent). Their benefits were obvious from the beginning, and I don't remember them facing really any resistance.

Contrary to popular belief today, JavaScript was not seen as good when it was first released, and it should not be considered good today. In the mid-1990s it was generally seen as a rather bad and limited language. That's why it didn't see much use until the mid-2000s. The first generation of developers who experienced it found it inferior to existing technologies and generally refused to use it. Even today, it's still a very flawed language (the problems with it are well know; I'm not going to regurgitate them here).

The problem with Firefox lately isn't that there has been chance. Of course change can be good. In the case of Firefox, though, the change has been utterly horrible, and caused far more problems than it brings in benefits, for a huge number of people. This is reflected very well in Firefox's ever-dropping market share.

[acdha]

> As somebody who lived through the events you mentioned as an adult working in industry, I can assure you that the sentiment you believe was felt was actually not felt.

My comment was based on my experience as someone who also lived through that period as an adult working in the industry.

> Mouse wheels were seen as a very good thing when they first came on the scene. They gave the power of the three-buttoned mouse, but also made scrolling much simpler.

That's easy to assume now but at the time there were people who complained that they required more precision to use, were inconsistently supported by existing software, etc. I remember people complaining that clicking the wheel was less reliable than using a proper third-button — no doubt true for the people who did a lot of pasting in X11 but that number was an increasingly miniscule fraction of the computing world and no doubt most of them adjusted after they stopped grumbling.

> The same goes for tabbed browsing. It was one of the best features of Opera for a long time. Everyone I showed it to at the time thought it was very useful.

… and yet other people complained that it was confusing to have tabs when you also had windows, duplicated with the OS window management, made it easy to accidentally forget you already had something open, etc. I'm sure all of those people use tabs now without even thinking about it but that doesn't mean that they didn't grumble first and learn how to use them second.

> And the same goes for fonts, and CSS (although to a lesser extent). Their benefits were obvious from the beginning, and I don't remember them facing really any resistance.

Outside of your corner of the web, there were impassioned rants about how the font tag overrode the user's font selection – that was one of the early selling points for CSS! Some people complained about CSS because it was harder to use than the font tag while others complained that it made pages slow or required downloading more data, etc. Some people complained about both because they made it easy to make pages which were hard to read on the wrong browser, operating system, or if you had a very small or very large display, or were color blind or visually impaired.

> Contrary to popular belief today, JavaScript was not seen as good when it was first released, and it should not be considered good today. In the mid-1990s it was generally seen as a rather bad and limited language.

I started writing JavaScript back when it was called LiveScript (oh, those heady days of downloading Netscape 2 betas when their FTP server wasn't overwhelmed). Then, as now, people complained about JavaScript being bloated or slow and there's a long tradition continuing down to your comment of complaining about the technical merits of the language. This wasn't wrong – even Brendan Eich is apologetic about most of it – and yet here we are in a world where the one language you can assume will be taught in 10 years is JavaScript because a billion people interact with JavaScript programs constantly.

Again, I'm not saying that the complaints are entirely without merit – only that there's a long tradition of people who overestimated either how serious a problem was, the degree to which their reaction was representative of the general computing public, or both. I remember plenty of advocacy that pages should work without JavaScript – and personally engaged in a fair amount – but much of the web today assumes JavaScript without any of the predicted disasters.

> The problem with Firefox lately isn't that there has been chance. Of course change can be good. In the case of Firefox, though, the change has been utterly horrible, and caused far more problems than it brings in benefits, for a huge number of people. This is reflected very well in Firefox's ever-dropping market share.

As they say, citation needed. That trend started well before the new UI and appears to have rather a lot more to do with Google's successful promotion of Chrome. Even in technical forums, there will be a ton of messages but they always seem to be posted by a small percentage of highly vocal users who assume everyone who isn't commenting agrees with them.

[psykovsky]

When I start using a fresh installation of firefox I don't need to do anything to get my normal use experience back because I already restored my profile folder before opening Firefox for the first time.