I will escalate this thread because personally I am having difficulty finding good explanations of this, or anywhere it may be discussed. The escalation tag draws this to the attention of other contributors and HelpDesk. Professional HelpDesk staff will probably provide a good answer, but you may need to give this a few days for a response.

The official suggestion currently would be to post a short comment using feedback. Ordinarily this sort of conversation is outside the scope of this forum. We did have developers answering a few questions in the first few days after the update to Firefox 29, but they will no longer be available and you are unlikely to get any developer attention here.

• A related open thread where I commented on this specific problem is
  The I-do-not-like-Firefox-29-layout topic
  /questions/998106?page=2#answer-572004
• To use feedback: https://input.mozilla.org/feedback

Thanks

The issue is mostly that they make these changes without consulting or informing the user. When Microsoft make a change in one of their Apps they provide roll out plans including full notifications so that big organisations can train and prepare users. Mozilla just hide it behind a security update.

I managed to re-install colorful tabs which immediately improved the tabs themselves making them square and they take up less space.

The has been this big push in the new customize feature but it actually takes funcionality away, you took away my refesh icon and stuck it at the end of the address bar, I did not want it there and in your arrogance you decide you will NOT give me the ability to put it where I WANT IT.

Sticking it at the end of the address bar is STUPID, the address bar is already cramped, in fact so cramped that I can't see what side I am on #NotFitForPurpose.

So what choices do I have, remove all the other icons off the toolbar where the address bar is, then create perhaps a new toolbar and move them to that, This would actually give me LESS SCREEN ESTATE and take up MORE SPACE.

I do not mind improvements but give the user OPTIONS to customize as they want, do not dicate your crap design on them.

I will be looking to see if the memory situations improves (previously Firefox would start creaking at 1.6gb of ram and crash at around 2gb even if the CPU load was not that much and despite me having 8gb of ram.

If you have some about.config feature that will allow greater customization that would be a great start.

You mention in your other post /questions/998106?page=2#answer-572055acceptance testing.

Two observations on that

1. The software usually spends six weeks each in Nightly, Aurora, and then Beta before it is released. That does give people a chance to test it.
   • Unfortunately in my opinion the Beta channel is not widely enough promoted. Or we would find more faults and not be needing to fix them as Chemspill point Releases.
2. Enterprises have a different channel and not as many changes and more overlap between versions. (See http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/ )

The other thread will give details of some of the workarounds and addons available. One not often mentioned and for a really retro look is this one https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/firefox-2-theme-for-firefox-3x/ I presume that allows you to add more bars.

Unfortunately Firefox is moving away from cusomisation without addons. see for instance this Developer's post explaining the policy shift that have quoted in another thread.

• Why have you changed design in new Firefox 29.0? /questions/998084#answer-566525

The attitude of the developers - not to mention the forum moderators beggars belief! How do we users get the Firefox we want - rather than what arrogent developers deem?

Moses and Tyler are flat out rude! You're not helping people. Telling us to use Chrome if we don't like your new Firefox? FF29 IS Chrome!

You're on the down, Firefox. Listen to the users or your market share is gone.

Drakejones, I; and I am sure others; are not trying to be rude.

I am just another Firefox user like yourself. Complaining here is not going to influence anyone's decision on Firefox development.

We are pointing out such discussions do not really belong here, and that it is hard to impossible to get attention of the Developers here on this support forum. This forum is intended for single users support questions relating to use of Firefox, not discussion of development decisions. It is not somewhere to post to make feature requests.

The situation may not be very satisfactory, but if a Developer is doing their job calling them arrogant or us Moderators rude is not likely to help you get any explanations.

I am hoping HelpDesk staff may comeback and either post answers to some of the specific points made, or link to articles about the decisions.

Look through the thread besides the questions you may get some answers.

You hit the nail squarely on the head: "...it is hard to impossible to get attention of the Developers..." Not just here, but anywhere. It's an elite group who report to no one. You moderators - volunteers all, and I appreciate that - aren't paid enough to defend bad decisions, so please be civil and tells us where to find the "Complaints to Developers" forum. They should open to end-user input, right?

Firefox 29 wasn't designed for users, the developers designed it to suit themselves, their likes and dislikes. Just ask them. They told me in posts that they owe us end-users nothing and we should learn to code our own browsers if we are not happy. I'm disgusted by their "end-users are idiots" attitude. Developers are in serious denial over the disaster they call Firefox 29 - or "Chromefox" as it should be called. (Who needs Firefox if it just mimics Chrome?)

Rather than passively wait for users to submit feedback (that has been ignored) the development team should ACTIVELY SOLICIT customer feed back and PUBLISH SOLID NUMBERS on how users really feel about their handiwork. In Mozilla's own beta test of FF29 80% of testers were UNHAPPY with the new design. That is a FAILED beta. But, the development fanboys pushed the stool out anyway and push back on the 80% number that they themselves published. It's called "cogitative dissonance".

DrakeJones, I'm afraid you are very mistaken on the public reaction to Firefox 29. We have been very busy surveying tens of thousands of users from around the world and reading all the feedback that users have been giving us since the new design was first implemented. My team has been spearheading this research.

We have done investigation of all sorts into this new interface for the past 4-5 years as it's been developed. Including going to Firefox user's homes, installing the new design and watching their reactions, having third-parties that are unaffiliated with Mozilla do the same to get an unbiased opinion, surveying tens of thousands of uses with every release, and working very hard to make sure we made this interface both powerful and easy to use. Overwhelmingly, users have loved the new design, Most users coming back and saying they couldn't imagine using the old interface after using the new design for awhile.

Obviously, we can't make everyone happy, which is why Firefox is so customizable (unlike any other browser). You can install add-ons, change css files, move things around, anything you want to do to make Firefox look uniquely yours.

Unbelievable. Pretty smug... You are are real company man. I really wish I could believe you about the overwhelmingly positive response to FF29, but I don't. Publish your data on how many people love what you've done, or even think it was acceptable. You in the developer community are taking a political approach to a massively unpopular action. Ubuntu did it, Microsoft did it, and now you. All lost market share as a result.

Everything the development team has offered as evidence of the mass appeal of FF29 is anecdotal and "we did a study" with no data presented, or "Many users like it...", and so on. Mozilla's own Beta numbers let you know that 80% of Firefox beta testers didn't like FF29. (Look it up). That is failed beta in anyone's reality - except yours and Microsoft's. Post the hard numbers on how many people are happy with your handiwork and how many feel betrayed and angry at the ambush upgrade; then we can talk about the facts.

You boys are too in love with yourselves to cave in to public opinion, but you'll continue to lose market share (like Ubuntu and Microsoft) because of your insular view of internet communications interfaces.

PS - If one quarter a BILLION people use Firefox and a few tens of thousand are happy with the new ChromeFox, what percentage approval would that be? Boy, that down in the 0.001% range, isn't it? Since you don't prove actual honest real numbers, it is impossible to do the math from here. How did you conduct the survey? What questions were asked? How did you select respondents? Facts would be nice. Or are the data "Top Secret"?

Drake, I'd love to share some of the methodology that we use to survey our users. Unfortunately I can't share some of the specifics because of user privacy, but I can help explain some of what my team specifically did (there were other teams working on investigating other ways of gathering feedback.

• Nightly: We ran a very detailed survey in Firefox Nightly after the new design launched, asking users to rate how they liked the design when they first saw it, and how they felt after using it for a few weeks. We received over 10k responses (about 100k users run nightly, so this was a 10% response rate, an incredible feat). These users overwhelmingly said they loved the new design, and even more after using it for a few days. There were some issues they had with the design, and we worked to improve the experience to make things better before we moved to Aurora.

Now, before you say it, yes, nightly are more advanced users than regular Firefox, and we can't use them as a base metric for what a regular average joe thinks of the new design. Fair enough. Continue reading.

• Aurora: For Firefox 29 Aurora, we had not only tweaked and improved the design, but we had a test of the UI tour presented to all users after they updated to the new design. We not only ran the same survey we ran in nightly, but we also surveyed users who took the survey and those who didn't separately. We had a total of 5 surveys in Aurora, with a combined 15-20k responses (depending on how you count it, some users may have taken two surveys). Again, Aurora only has about 100k users, so this was a phenomenal response rate (as much as we'd like to, there is no possible way we can survey every user, and there would be no statistical advantage to doing so.

Users of Aurora not only rated the new design higher than Nightly users, users who completed the tour were significantly happier and had an easier learning curve than those who didn't take the tour. Now, before you say it, yes Aurora is much the same technical audience that Nightly is. However, we made things better from Nightly to Aurora and it showed.

• Beta: Now we came to the real test. Beta. With 2.5-3 million users, Beta is the most like Firefox release in terms of audience and scale. We again ran a series of surveys, a bit simpler than we ran in Nightly and aurora (those were 10-15 minute surveys, we cut them down to 5 minute surveys in Beta), but again, we saw significant improvement in user sentiment from Aurora. We revamped the UI tour, tweaked the interface and fixed a bunch of bugs. This was shown in the results.
• Finally, Release: We initially released Firefox 29 to only 20million users, to gauge feedback and gather the first round of feedback. After fixing the bugs we found in the release (we try really hard but sometimes bugs slip through) and releasing a Firefox 29.0.1, we released to all the rest of our users. These users again got a survey that we give after every single Firefox release, and one of the questions is to rate Firefox from 1-5 (1 extremely unhappy, 5 very happy) and while I can't disclose the exact numbers, we were within 0.02 points of a typical release, well within our expected range (and that was with about 5 times more survey takers than usual).

Now, you may be wondering how we get these surveys out to users. We launch them in the snippets sections of the about:home page of Firefox. So anyone who has about:home as their home page, or goes to it at anytime we have a survey running, either gets the survey (in the nightly and Aurora cases) or is randomly selected to receive it (we couldn't possibly survey every single user that uses Firefox).

We also closely watched input (which is probably where you are getting your erroneous 80% of users didn't like australis number) through the whole time the release was out. By it's nature, Input ALWAYS gets ~80% negative feedback. Unhappy people are far far more likely to give feedback than happy people. And not every user gives feedback on input (few do). We also have had a problem with spammers giving tens of tousands of unhappy pieces of feedback, which skews things more negatively. So while it all sounds very nice to just look at the graph and say "80% of users hate Firefox's new design", well, that's simply not the case. You'd be more accurate to say that because 95% of the US population drinks soda, 95% of the US population hates coffee.

So, still have questions? You can see we do listen very closely to our users, and this is just a small portion of what my team worked on. There were many other projects that my team of 4 worked on, and what other teams throughout the company worked on to find out what users really thought about Firefox's new design (social media, going to user's homes, paid research, etc.). So please, before you claim we don't listen to users, please think again.

I'd also like to see where you saw a Mozilla employed Developer say "they owe us end-users nothing and we should learn to code our own browsers if we are not happy." I do not know a single developer who would say that. You either grossly misunderstood him or are fabricating things. Also, just to clear up any confusion, I am not a developer. I am project manager for Mozilla's User Advocacy team, employed by Mozilla since early 2012 and a community member since 2008.

"User Advocacy team"... That's funny. You're advocating for the Mozilla development team.

RE: I'd also like to see where you saw a Mozilla employed Developer say "they owe us end-users nothing and we should learn to code our own browsers if we are not happy."

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=2840405&e=0

The little people banned my IP, so I can't pull the the direct quote, but you can. It's all there.

You claim that "By it's nature, Input ALWAYS gets ~80% negative feedback." Really? Where did you get that? But in your surveys the feedback is more like 80% positive, right? By your own reckoning that would mean you've tailored your survey methodologies and/or results to support your objectives. You know that Microsoft reported that Windows 8 got the same kind of "glowing" feedback as you offer in support of FF29, and we all know how how that is going.

The average user is not very browser savvy, but over 350,000 users have downloaded the Classic Theme Restorer and that number will continue to grow. Most others will move back to IE or Chrome. You make your case using a very non-representative group of Firefox users. You know that. We'll see how your market share does.

The defensive comments from the Firefox team are missing the point of my OP. Here are the highlights

Complete lack of respect for your users.

Rolling out a new version but calling it a security update, these are two separate things.

It did NOT NOT NOT warn me that it intended to install a completely redesigned application.

Have you guys heard of change control management?

Change control does not mean you test it on a bunch of FF sycophants, it means that you give end users the option to switch on the changes and to roll back.

I have been involved in huge rollouts of MS Office (100k+ users) when the ribbon came, it was so radically different that we had to implement a training program, this is the same.

You have to realize and accept what makes Firefox is the personalization, so DON'T MESS WITH IT. If you can't figure a way to implement it without screwing up people's customization, then scrap your changes. You really ought to be able to offer users a chance to try small changes and roll back if they do not like it. It should be a requirement of all UI changes. Oh and I mean SIMPLE "try and no thanks" roll backs, not some hidden code buried on an about page or hidden on the web.

I still think the important issue you should be focusing on is performance and the ability to see which tab is using resources or leaking memory, I would like to see an option to display the memory/cpu in the tab instead of the title, you could even have the tab go red.

You need to be able to isolate and shut down these tabs, I do NOT think you should have the multiple instances that Google Chrome has because they do not relate to tabs or help in any way to stop a badly performing page.

I think that every time you get an inclination to copy Google Chrome you should slap yourself around the face and if that does not help you should have your team queue up (think airplane movie) to slap you. In fact I think that Mozilla developers should have slaps for stupid or badly implemented ideas.

I hope that you can learn that bulldozing over your userbase is unacceptable.

Now it would be churlish not to mention the best way to copy with this screw up, first I had to install colored tabs, this gave me back square tabs and stopped the awful waste of screen estate.

I then used the (drastically bastardized) customise option to move icons to the top bar next to the menu, they are very small and it would be good to have some option to increase the size.

I have the address bar under the tabs taking up most of the width of the screen with one icon to the right of it. I still do not like the back and refresh and being forced into their locations and would like to be able to drag and drop them where I want (including where I have the other Icons).

I would like to be able to put the address bar where I want, including on the menu bar.

I would also like the ability to change the spacing in toolbars, I have quite a thick line under the bookmarks and too much space above them, overall this wastes screen estate.

In future can you PLEASE respect your users by doing the following:

The performance of the browser has improved, it is snappier but memory management is still an issue.

It seems to have a higher capacity before it crashes (from 1.6gb in old version to 2.4gb in new version) but it seems to use more memory so I am not really able to do more. I have 8gb of ram so I would like ot see it able to use 3 to 4gb if it is available.

This version does crash more often, it seems that some webpages leak memory and it gets to a point where is just blows. What it does do better is recover memory when you close tabs, it is not perfect but an improvement all the same.

I am still seriously pissed off with the way this was implemented and all of the issues I raised in my OP still stand. What I want from the Dev team is NOT more excuses but a commitment to not do this again and only implement Ui changes with roll back options for users.

Bravo, Fedup. Too bad our discontent is falling on defiant ears - they (developers) knew they had to ambush us with the new ChromeFox motif or the vast majority of formerly happy users would reject it like they are rejecting Windows 8 and Ubuntu's Unity interface. You are spot on about the skewed pre-release tester approval data. The fanboys in this forum tell me they reject our criticism because feedback in general is always 80% negative - but when they solicit feed back they claim it's overwhelmingly positive. It's a paradox that reminds me of "burning the village to save it".

I am using Pale Moon from now on - they promise not adopt "Aurora" EVER. Developers disillusioned with Firefox have a new home waiting for them.

Mozillazine is not affiliated with Mozilla, and those people you talked with are not Mozilla developers.

But Drake, it's obvious you don't care to listen to me, so I'm simply going to tell you that I've told you the truth, and if you have an honest question, I'd love to help you. However since you obviously have no intent to ask a question but simply want to whine, then this forum is not the place for that. Our survey methodologies are industry standard, and we are very accurate in our measurements. You obviously don't understand how surveying user sentiment works or you wouldn't be saying such non nonsensical things.

FedUp, we are working on performance in the browser, every new version has performance improvements, especially versions like 31 and 33, which are coming down the line. If you want to customize Firefox 29's interface, try reading these articles, Learn more about the design of the new Firefox version 29, How to make the new Firefox look like the old Firefox, Customize Firefox controls, buttons and toolbars

Yeah. I've never seen anyone actually admit to being a Firefox Developer. Wonder why?

Hey, Tyler - one last question and I'm done forever with the forum and with ChromeFox - I am using the Pale Moon fork of Firefox now.

My question: What does the "88% Sad" mean at the OFFICIAL Firefox Input site at https://input.mozilla.org/en-US/?date_start=2014-03-12&selected=90d? Just lowly complainers? Oh well, I'll trust the official published data on FF29's general popularity: 88% negative for a lot of different reasons.

Its actually 80% (https://input.mozilla.org/en-US/?product=Firefox) you need to filter out other products like Firefox for Android, and FirefoxOS.

And what it means is that 80% of the feedback we receive is sad. It doesn't translate into 80% of users are sad (not every user gives feedback) and the users that do give feedback are more likely to give feedback just based on the nature of organic feedback gathering. It is recognized that unhappy people are far more likely to seek out ways to give feedback than happy users. Just think, if you receive poor service at a restaurant, are you more likely to write a letter to the manager complaining than if you had received good service?

Input doesn't tell the whole story, it's a self selected group of users. Which is why we have other ways, such as surveys, to find a more balanced and random selection of users.

I fully agree with this statement "I got a message saying that there was an important security update, it did NOT NOT NOT warn me that it intended to install a completely redesigned application."

I, too, got an update notice on Aurora and again on Thunderbird. I have auto update so it loaded and completely erased my existence on both apps leaving them totally 'clean'! I lost everything - some of it very important addresses and saved files that cannot be replaced! All of my saved emails from my brother who died in 2010 - GONE! I was FURIOUS!!

There was absolutely NO WARNING! This is absolutely inexcusable and incomprehensible!

Where does Mozilla come off having one of their updates do something so egregious like that without the permission of the computer's owner? I felt like I had been hacked by Mozilla's update!

Is there anyway to get my information back again? HA! Doubt it! Does Mozilla actually take any responsibility for Aurora and Thunderbird updates aberrant actions that removed all personal information without any form of a warning to me or anyone else who had this horrible event happen to them, too? Just saying 'sorry' doesn't cut it I am afraid.

Install the Pale Moon fork of Firefox and use the migration tool. You'll be back to the "Firefox" you want and it's totally painless.