I hate it when they change something like this and:

1. They don’t warm you (like “upgrading to 3.6 will disable this and that…”).
2. They don’t give you and easy alternative (like an option to revert the change).

And when I say they don’t warm you, I don’t mean a warming in some VSN or website or list that only experts or coders visit, like Bugzilla. I mean a straight warming for end users without technical background or the time to closely follow Firefox’s development.

I wish I could easily decide if an upgrade would be worth or set in the preferences a “no thanks, don’t touch this, I really like it”. But no, they just remove whatever they please and you are left wondering where the hell does that option that you love so much gone. Believe me: when one of this changes happens I sometimes think I’m drunk or need more sleep. Just like when they suddenly decided that it was better to open new tabs just after the tab you were in instead of opening them at the far right as it has been for years. After minutes of frustration and asking myself what could I have broken I realized the kind of people I was dealing with (like the lovely Nightingale) and headed to Google just to find that thousands and thousands of Firefox users were as upset as me. See for yourself: here, here or here. Great move Firefox team.

Fortunately someone took the time to write an extension that will fix link properties menu problem (and there is an easy fix for the tabs opening order as well). What the extension won’t fix is this kind of behavior at Mozilla though.

One day Chrome and Chromium will be the leading browsers and people at Firefox will wonder how it happened.