Firefox 6 Shenanigans

After upgrading from Firefox 3.6 to Firefox 6, I had to out quite some work into it in order to make Firefox usable for me again. I had postponed the upgrade from 3.6 for quite some time, because I didn't like the changes to the interface at all (as I had seen in Firefox 4 beta) ..

The major issues were:

• The tabs for the individual pages were on the tab. This is the area I use a lot, so why putting it on top of the program?
• Translucent menus/bars/... (as inherited from the Windows Vista settings). While translucent menus look cool on frame, it totally makes the menus less readable (if at all).
• Order of the buttons in the Navigation Bar. Total random change. Why it not make these buttons movable at all. --> Still needs to fix this
• Lack of status bar. First of all it separates Firefox more clearly from the Windows Status Bar, secondly, I like status information in one neat space (where links point to, how the download status is, etc.)

Steps to fix these issues:

• Right-Click on the Menu Bar to remove the "Tabs on Top" in the context menu there.
• Install an extension ("Status-4-Evar") to get the old menu bar back. An extension for this, Firefox developers. Really?
• The quickest to fix the translucent menus was to install a theme ("Firefox 3 Theme") which brings back the old Firefox 3.6 color schema/spacing/.. The new schema may look cool, but the old schema was just clean and neat.
  

A lot of work for a simple upgrade. Cost me about 2 hours of work.

Horrible, horrible. The Firefox developers should really consider not making such drastically changes to the interface without making sure that you can bring back the existing features/changes configuration. If there are these kind of drastic changes in one of the next versions again, then I am strongly considering switching the browser software. If I have to learn the interface overall again, I can switch to another browser altogether ...