Very nice, but those designer tabs from FF29 still make my eyes bleed every time I see them, so I'm stuck on FF28. I wonder how many people are in the same situation :-|
1. Upgrade and use one of the theme and extension combinations to get a look you want.
2. Upgrade and just get used to the new look since it's similar to Chrome and others.
3. Downgrade to Firefox ESR 24.5.0 which IS fully secure.
If security is such a hot button worry wart issue, then it shouldn't be permissible for Mozilla developers to bind minor UI tweaks to security fixes. Firefox user interface changes should not be tightly coupled with essential security updates, since they introduce the hazard of many users refusing to comply with good security practices, simply because some asshole design wonk decided to enforce their tastes upon millions of users and disrupt existing, productive, habitual user interface behavior.
And by the way, it's absolutely possible to securely run an instance of Firefox 28 in a read-only, sandboxed, firewalled VM, restricted to connecting to specific trusted hosts.
Permitting a third party to control and modify your behavior by enforcing automatic updates in a manner that does not match your schedule can be an insidious security hazard unto itself. Organizations like Mozilla, Google, Apple and Microsoft have no interest in and no concept of what might be hugely disruptive to their end users, nor do they necessarily have any concept of a given environment's actual security posture. They simply cry "security" and then rampage all over everyone's shit with righteous entitlement.
Nope. I define my security practices (including whether I run a javascript-enabled browser at all), and I define my update schedule.
And a bonus of actually having a 64 bit build for my Windows partition without having to run Nightly.
And it's rather notably more lightweight in terms of RAM usage.
Or rather, the latter is dramatically slower than 28.0, just about unusably slow. And this is true with a very minimum installation and usage, Session Manager and Track Package the only extensions, a version of Shockwave Flash auto installed the only plugin. As little as 3 windows with 7 tabs.
And it might just be my impression, but Pale Moon might have been faster than Firefox 28.0.
Have you tried the two side by side?
However the Firefox builds I'm using are the generic ones from Mozilla, Debian doesn't supply Firefox due to IP issues, they do their own "Iceweasel" build (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_r...).
Out of curiosity, I ran the tests again on FF30 on Windows and Sunspider is about the same as FF28 was while PeaceKeeper and Dromaeo increased a couple percent.