I understand that the Heartbeat user rating system can be disabled, but I'm still very much against it and think it will drive a lot of less technically-savvy users mad. I honestly thought it was an April Fools joke at first through reading it.
> Every day a random subset of users are offered a rating widget
> After rating Firefox, an ENGAGEMENT page may open in a background tab.
That's... not the phoenix I signed up for.
(I'm sure I'll toggle this off)
I'm a big fan of Firefox, and I would find being prompted to provide them with useful feedback a positive experience.
It is much easier to flip a preference. If you wanted to get sophisticated, you could create an addon that disables all of the preferences you dislike.
That's a good idea. Another option is to patch the code to remove the new features, unless Mozilla has taken steps to deter unbundling.
If there's a big enough market, perhaps some company will backport the security fixes. How much are you willing to pay? Another option is that you could volunteer and start the fork.
Of course, there's that other problem where developers are only going to support the latest browser.