Why does a new firefox version disable common features and hide them completely from use
When a new version of Firefox comes out of late, all to often when it has new features or a programmer has a different idea of what they like compared to the previous release, the features are enabled by default and things are rearranged without user choice. A case in point is that when I installed Firefox 24 on my wife's computer it disabled the menu bar and put the tabs on top. To add insult to injury there was no settings option to put the tabs back underneath!!! I don't care how much someone likes tabs on top, the proper way to handle these sorts of feature upgrades is to leave everything as it was in terms of settings and display a web page that has a button that says what each change is with a yes and no button so the user can try if they WANT or not, not just say (effectively) "we are the overlords and want you to use this and we know better". If this method is too difficult then just DON'T change the settings and leave it up to a "what's new" page. I know this is free SW and a lot of dedicated people contribute, but to do your darnedest to confuse or annoy your users is not the way to do it. Imagine if you took your car into have a new radio fitted and when you got it back the brake pedal was in the backseat and the guy said "we like it better that way"
BTW, to have the tabs immediately above the web pages you are viewing makes way more sense than having them 3 lines away.
Solución elegida
Hello,
Most of the people answering on the support forum are Mozilla volunteers (including me) so we are not able to comment on these types of decision. We are not involved in choosing how new versions are rolled out.
The best place to give feedback would be this page:
https://input.mozilla.org/en-GB/feedback
If you would like to make Firefox v24 look like v3 then you can use a theme such as Firefox 3 Theme.
Also see here for more info: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/895542
I hope that helps. Let me know if not.
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Solución elegida
Hello,
Most of the people answering on the support forum are Mozilla volunteers (including me) so we are not able to comment on these types of decision. We are not involved in choosing how new versions are rolled out.
The best place to give feedback would be this page:
https://input.mozilla.org/en-GB/feedback
If you would like to make Firefox v24 look like v3 then you can use a theme such as Firefox 3 Theme.
Also see here for more info: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/895542
I hope that helps. Let me know if not.
Modificadas por Ed el
How to put tabs back on the bottom - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/put-tabs-back-on-bottom
Dear Eddy, first thank you most of all for taking the time to reply.
I want to make clear that I am indebted to the Mozilla community for the product they provide and I am intimately aware of the amount of effort that must go into Firefox from mostly unpaid contributors.
Al so want to thank you for providing the link to where I would best provide my feedback, I shall do so.
I also want to just in response to your suggestion on how to fix my issue just again reiterate that for a majority of users this is a WALL that is difficult to cross and why an upgrade shouldn't change settings used by users or require long searching on the web to get it to work. It ultimately discourages people from upgrading which then leaves vulnerabilities that then in turn maligns this great product.
Hi,
I certainly agree that there were considerable changes made in Firefox v4 when it was released in March 2011. I was not a volunteer on this forum back then but looking back through the history there were quite a few support requests asking about how to make Firefox look like it used to. It was a big change to the UI.
From the support volunteers' perspective all we can do is to try to provide clear, and easy to follow, answers when users ask about changes made in new versions.
From Mozilla's perspective I believe one of the motivations behind introducing the rapid release calendar was to ensure that updates were more incremental and less intrusive to users (i.e. only a few changes made with each release).
The Firefox UI continues to evolve (for example a new logo was recently adopted) but since the update to v4 updates have been more continuous and each release has been more minor.
My experience as a support volunteer is that this is an improvement for the users. The changes are made gradually and people have time to adapt.
Having said that the next release of Firefox (v25) will introduce the first major redesign since v4 (Australis).
Those that prefer not to install feature updates and instead to just get security updates tend to use Firefox's Extended Support Release (ESR) versions. See here for more information:
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/
I hope this helps.