I would say Mozilla should also not forget us power users. Some years earlier we had a well going Mozilla fangroup in our town of around 50 users. After Australis and the more and more upcoming feature removals it dropped to around 28 users still using Firefox.
And as it seems this upcoming changes will make some more 6 members jump away, including me most likely. What is left then? Obviously the user group Mozilla seem to see today as their core user base - Non tech users! Many of those who left have supported Mozilla with monthly donations for quite a long time btw. I know those numbers are ridiculous compared with the whole user number of Firefox, but power users are still a high number of users and losing them would hurt Firefox and Mozilla’s reputation a lot!
What i want to say… Non Tech users get their features now into the core or bundled as system add-on - Why is that not possible with power user features like advanced UI customization, having a status bar or the option to combine urlbar elements with other elements like in Firefox 22 url field, buttons and tab bar? Why we have to get these back on our own somehow while the non techies do not have to worry and get features which need more maintenance time compared with features mentioned earlier ? It would be nice if Mozilla would remember that we tech users have been loyal all those years to a large degree. And we have been the ones who brought other users towards Firefox, we have constantly advertised and evangelized Firefox to almost everyone, we have been a large part that Firefox has become that big around version 22 - that is no arrogance, that is a fact
Would it be that bad to get a bit of respect back and keep those features or port them almost 1:1 if possible?
Brand loyalty is a powerful thing, but what Mozilla has done recently have weakened this value by a lot in my opinion. Do not forget Mozilla, there are some new awesome power user browsers out there. Sure, you could get along without us, like Opera without their advanced users, but don’t you think you should do a little bit to keep us on board too?
Just for your information, still using Firefox 22 at home as this was the last version which supported both, design for non tech and design for tech users! I would update in an instant if you treat power users and non tech users as equals again. Will use Firefox 22 as long as possible in the hope that you still decide to offer again the same power user dedicated feature set in the future instead of what you are planning right now. Otherwise, when Firefox 22 totally gets unusable i make a switch to Otter-Browser as it seems.