This new release is all about attracting new users to FF from Chrome. It will hurt those of us who actively have been using and living with Firefox.
In time, they say, they will bring back the various APIs for the extensions (although it's still "might" and there's no timeline yet) - so in the meantime, if you liked FF for it's customisation, we just have to suck it up. It's similar to when Ubuntu moved to Unity and attracted all the new users but pissed off all the existing userbase. We should expect a big backlash when all the linux repos get updated and the power users release they have a degraded experience.