[barrkel]

I hear you - very few of Mozilla's moves have been to my liking, and I have to work harder and harder on every fresh install to get Firefox looking and working the way I like it.

However, thus far, I've been able to do it. I disable the magic address bar, I use tree style tabs, I have history disabled, and I use combo of menu, toolbar and status bar (Status 4 Evar, addon bar, whatever) to maintain what I consider to be a usable UI. These are all extra work, but I haven't been locked out.

My concern about this latest move is the lag when Firefox needs an upgrade, and not all extensions have been updated and signed. I've had to download and install custom treestyle tabs builds in the past in particular.

[byuu]

Likewise. I am currently running Classic Theme Restorer, oldbar, Cookies Manager+, Download Cleaner, plus the usual stuff (Adblock and such.) Not only do I have to trust a bunch of third-party devs I don't know; it also takes longer and longer to setup and start using Firefox on a fresh install.

And indeed like you said ... the signing thing is a huge issue. oldbar in particular hasn't been touched since 2008. I've also had to manually load Greasemonkey before, and many times I've had to manually edit the XPI file compatibility ranges so that I could install certain extensions.