I do not agree that much with the first two points.
- Tabs on Top
From a GUI Design perspective, it is best practice to use the corners and edges of a screen for elements of your program, that are used most of the time. That is the reason why the Windows/Super button is always in a corner. That’s the reason the close button for each window is in a corner. Et cetera.
Putting the tabs “on top” is a good idea, because you can just move your mouse to the edge of the screen and you are right where you want to be: at your tabs.
If you go to that link, where it shows Mozilla’s announcement about this UI change, then you can see that the old design does not use the top edge, at all. It’s just empty space, followed by the search bar. This is worse design than having the tabs on top.
Of course, one could’ve argued, that the search bar could be on the very top instead. However, what do you use more often, the search bar or the tabs? Even if you answer “search bar”, the edge is still better used for tabs, as they use more space, which means the edge is used more efficiently than wasting the whole edge length of a modern monitor for a single search bar.
Therefore, it was a good design decision to put the tabs on top.
- Removing Features
I know how it is as a user! You use a special and very helpful feature in your program and suddenly it disappears, because “nobody” is using it. I know how frustrating that is and it annoys me, too, seriously!
However, let’s see this from Mozilla’s perspective. You have a browser, that is used daily by millions of people around the globe. You already have tens or hundreds of developers employed. You have like a bajillion tickets, concerning bugs within your product.
It sometimes can be a great relief to remove even small features, if that means you reduce the amount of tickets and you stop the necessity of maintaining a feature, that is maybe used by 1% of the user base. From the perspective of the developers and publishers, it often makes sense to remove such features.
Therefore, it cannot be simply portrayed as “only bad”.
It has pros and cons, as all things do.
We discussed this topic before:
I think the main point I made with the previous thread is still the most important aspect. We don’t have two competing browsers, but we have 1 dominant browser and Firefox is its bitch. But it happens so slowly and subtly over years or decades, that most users do not notice, how they are not really competing.
