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> It just appears to have been changed for the sake of changing things

Unfortunately it just seems to be the way things work now. People joke all the time about UI/UX designers needing to justify their salary, I guess it's not too far from the truth.

It's weird because Firefox is has a lot of fairly basic UX problems, such as imposing mobile conventions on a native desktop application instead of following native conventions.

Besides the missing top menu bar already mentioned, desktop applications don't have hamburger buttons and material design-aesthetics, looks really out of place. If you open a sub-menu in that menu, the entire menu is replaced with the submenu, that's also not how desktop menus work.

I hate the sub-menu thing as well. Because of the way it works currently, a sub-menu doesn't auto-expand when you hover over the parent menu, you have to explicitly click on it, and same thing when you have to go back. I have to access the "Reopen all tabs" function from time to time, and I can never remember where that menu item is, so I have to click around to find it, and have to explicitly click to go back to the previous menu when I make a wrong guess.

I miss being able to put a traditional menu bar next to the URL bar (and with the "Help" menu removed). I've trimmed the excessive whitespace with custom CSS, but it still wastes more vertical pixels than it used to do several years ago. There's no reason the URL bar needs to stretch all the way across the screen. Human-readable URLs are not that long, so the space could be put to better use.

Just use Seamonkey if you want it to look like Netscape, surely.

I actually do sometimes, but its CSS engine is sadly a bit out of date :-/

This is a good point. SeaMonkey is still maintained to this day, and it's basically that: Firefox, but it doesn't really change.

> Yeah I guess it's only bad when other people are doing it.

The "other people" don't do Telemetry like Mozilla does. You're making an apples to oranges comparison.

I just don't want my software spying on me, and I don't care if you pinky swear it's nothing to worry about, because literally everyone is saying that.

This should be opt-in, not opt-out in multiple screens and different dialogs and two about:config-settings.

To add my anecdote to yours, I've been with Firefox for some time and I weathered the changes fine. I might not be crazy about Web in general, but Firefox has been good to me and I have not found the choices they make to break my workflows. I guess I fall within the target audience of their changes.

>I don't care how the window looks, it's a tool

But don't you? Your entire post is complaining about how it "looks" :^)

I would be absolutely fine if it just stayed the same. I can deal with a crappy UI, what I don't want is to have to constantly search for things in that UI.