I totally agree. I am about to ditch firefox and move to Chrome.

Firefox was an awesome browser and I have been using it since it first rose out of the ashes of Netscape... many moons ago.

The new GUI does look nice and it has some nice new features ...BUT ..has nobody ever thought to ASK users whether they want a brand new GUI installed when they update??? Did it not occur to anyone at Mozilla that there are thousands of developers in the world with customised GUI's who might not want theur GUI wiped out and replaced - without warning???? In the past, when we received notification stating we need to update NOW because of security issues, we update, and that is that. There was no mention this time that this was a new GUI too. If you had warned me, I for one (and by the looks of the comments here and on the internet, many many others too) would not have upgraded.

I am a programmer working on some pretty important projects with the banks ... which run of browsers - and my GUI was customised for my work, something that took hours to setup over a span of 6 months. This has been wiped out in a split second due to your complete inconsideration with NO solution because your theme restorer cannot restore my cutomised GUI..

This is unacceptable, and to say I am fuming is the understatement of the century.

IMHO You guys have seriously dropped the ball this time. I cannot believe you did this

Ya I've been using it since before version 1, back when it was called Phoenix and we were trying to get it to build in BeOS. That's about 15+ years as BeOS died around the 2000-2001 mark.

It's moments like this I wish I had more time to contribute to projects so maybe I could have a hand in fixing this stupid scenario but most days I can barely keep up with the projects I already have going.

I'm downgrading while 28 is still in the repos and locking it until I can find something to replace things as I'm sure 28 will become a security issue shortly.

I can't help but agree with the above observations. Incredibly frustrating to have one's layout completely ruined and turned into a baby's toy compared to how I had things. I'm not against change and sometimes the unusual is tricky to get the hang of but this is a disaster.

So much for the claims about customisation, it's now really limited. Gone are flexible spaces, dividers and normal spaces for our toolbars. Can't move loads of things around and the lack of bars to put them on is totally pointless and counter productive. As for removing the Add-ons bar, what's the point of this? It just caused certain icons to go missing or move up to the top bars and crash all over the place.

Thank heavens for extensions like "Classic Theme Restorer" and "Classic Toolbar Buttons". After many wasted hours trying to work out this new Australis interface's limitations, I have now got things back to how they were for my productive environment and NOT like the limited layouts of Chrome and Opera.

Jeeze, why do this? If you want to make things simple for basic users why not just add different modes of operation "basic" and "expert" modes?!!! - The old features are still there, just masked by this play-version of Firefox.

It's as bad as Microsoft's stupid Ribbon interface, trying to make things simple but at the same time making it all more complicated and difficult to find. What's wrong with simple menus that just do things all in one neat place? Don't get rid of stuff that works and have evolved over a long period of time, add features maybe but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I am very annoyed about this pointless and limited forced version of Firefox. I'd heard about it but hadn't experienced anything to do with it until a version check forced it upon me before I could even backup/record the layout I had for everything before the change. Wasted hours and hours and I've had to adjust all my other computers (various platforms) as well.

I guess the Firefox team is going to do nothing to address this. It's hard to accept I now need to choose a browser I deemed insufficient in the past to replace the new broken by design Firefox Australis UI. This situation is almost like someone granted you the wish to eat Pizza every day for the rest of your life. After several years it's still as delicious as ever and the devil shows up, yanks the Pizza away and says CHOOSE! You can have your pizza with animal excrement or eat (insert food item you dislike here ex. Brussels Sprouts)!

From what I've read there isn't even a compile flag left behind to disable this bullshit should you choose to roll your own...yup Firefox is all about choice...just not Y/OUR choice.

I had made another post about this and the moderator locked the thread all the while ignoring the issue and not actually answering about the Mozilla decision to force people away from choice.

I've emailed the guy who makes the classic theme restorer add-on but in a way I feel bad asking him about the missing features I'd need to restore my work flow. Which is to say it's a shame he has to put time and effort into undoing the work of Mozilla's dev team. At some point he may just get tired of finding ways to work around the forced design philosophy Firefox seems to be taking.

Sadly I've also seen tons of people ass kissing the devs for the new design and I'm sure the few of us who have legitimate reasons for disliking it will be written off as the minority, ignored, or labeled as adoption trolls. I'm sure we'll get no real response either given my new thread got locked yet ignored...moderators have the time to police but not time to discuss, answer, or even empathize.

There are a few alternatives mentioned in this thread https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1000634

I'm going to try the ESR and Waterfox. I've known about Waterfox and a few other derivatives that I thought had died off. Hell even a lot of the official Firefox projects have died off, damned shame this Australis crap was kept alive. It's clearly a forced tablet UI. Probably the bastardized ruminants of the failed Metro Windows 8 designs.

While ESR and Waterfox might do the trick it bothers me that this is taking place. This is the kinda stuff that brings forks but in this case the forks would not have the money and man power to really keep things going IMO. It reeks of us being assimilated or herded into something. I touched on that in my initial post here, the UI reeks of dumb ideas that work for touch and screw the traditional users...soon they will come for our mice...

I'm seeing ESR is still on build 24.5.0 and curious how security issues are handled. Like wise Waterfox is built 28 which is what I have all my linux and windows firefox's locked at. If Waterfox is OK security wise with 28 what is wrong with the 28 I'm running? This branches into those questions about when the Waterfox 28 does have security issues how does the team roll in the fixes in the code base and not BS like Australis...or will they because it's easier...i.e. same problems simply put off a bit. Guess I'll have to read and wait and see...All the other browsers I've tried are horrible...

Hi,

Maybe you didn't read all the thread. James has indicated that the developers for waterfox and Palemoon and even the ESR people have no intention of using the New FF 29 UI and all three are kept fairly up to date security wise and being 64bit they are naturally more secure and faster

I did read that but it's one of those things that they can't foresee technical things in the future that might be done to the code base that make avoiding these changes problematic or impossible.

Quick Side note Waterfox is kinda useless. Not only did it have some odd issues loading pages but it's Windows only which is not a viable alternative when only one of an 9 machines runs anything other than Linux.