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Comment by shock | Hacker News Reader

There's an extension called Classic Theme Restorer that aims to do it, as well as customize australis.

The fact that such an extension exists, and that it may get broken again in later versions, says a lot about what Mozilla really think of customisation.

> says a lot about what Mozilla really think of customisation.

Oh? And what is that? "Customization is great and you should have the option to do so"? Try having a "classic theme restorer" with Chromium.

> it may get broken again in later versions

Future changes may cause incompatibilities in any project. That is why such changes are released in major new versions so that add-on developers have plenty of time to make adjustments and fixes.

It's different when breaking changes are infrequent and optional. This is no longer the case with firefox: breaking changes can come at any time and you generally don't have the option to upgrade (although I do recall there being an option to turn off auto updating, I'm not sure this is a good solution though).

Mozilla periodically releases 'ESRs', or extended service releases, that are exactly what you complain they don't offer: the ability to lock yourself to a given release without being forced to upgrade (the most recent ESR gets security updates, IIRC.)

What used to be possible with the stock browser, without any extensions, now needs one or more. They're not quite at the level of Google, but it looks like they're heading in that general direction.

They didn't make the addon. What, you want them to go back on 15 years of history and make the UI non-customizable? What are they, Google?

I think he just wants them to not screw up the UI so badly in the first place that numerous addons and customization is needed to bring it back to a minimal level of usability.

I'm not sure what were the datapoints that suggested to them that the UI was in need of an overhaul but I would have been much happier if they lowered the cpu usage of Firefox. To be fair I have a massive number of bookmarks (12000+) and tabs :-/ I was happy with the UI as it were. I'm using Ubuntu, btw.

I've fallen in love with rekonq recently, it always has really low memory footprints, loads instantly, and uses webkit so 99.9% of sites that work in Chromium work in it too. (I say that because it hasn't updated to blink yet).

It is supposed to get Chrome extension support this year too, and if I ever had the time I'd try to expand their sync options (currently Opera + Chrome) to sync tabs and such.

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