With this change, Firefox targets the lowest common denominator just like every other major browser (tracing the footsteps of Chrome). In the progress, it too, is becoming just like Chrome.

This whole saga begun back when Opera dropped support for their 12.x browser, and became just another Blink-based browser. At that point, the only way to get a usable browser (with vertical tabs, MRU tab switching, gestures) was Firefox with a number of addons (Tree Style Tab, Tab Mix Plus, Firegestures).

One may argue that users like this should just use a fringe browser with such features built-in, but that's not viable because they're either unstable or lack timely security updates.

You may also argue that you can get all those features, even in Firefox 57, but that's only true with caveats:

Tree Style Tab still exists, but if you use either the history or bookmark sidebars, you better get ready to switch back and forth all the time (since only one sidebar can be active at a time).

The about:config setting browser.ctrlTab.previews (now also exposed in preferences as "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order") is mostly useless, since it is limited to the 6 most recent tabs (probably even fewer on lower resolution screens).

There are several mouse gesture addons for Firefox 57, but none of them currently work on Linux/Mac. Even on Windows (and the others when they're fixed), gestures will work neither on internal pages nor on addons.mozilla.org.

It's likely available from your package manager.

It's a shame tradeoffs are necessary, but I think it's worth highlighting that it's a tradeoff that also brings substantial advantages. For all users, including the power users.

Things that bother me on desktop developer edition:

    * no usable mouse gestures extension
    * constantly changing UI
    * hid really useful things like file/edit/history/bookmarks/tools menu behind
      holding alt button on Ubuntu. 
      Pretty sure that whole menu will be gone soon.
    * it's impossible to clear for example last week, last month  etc of browsing data (not sure if you could do it before).  
      In fact, I'm not sure if I can clear cookies but not site history anymore after spending 5 minutes in the settings.
   
    * tree-style tabs turned into something unusable
    * getting rid of all the rare extensions that worked previously and are no longer supported by the original author
    * tons of greasemonkey userscripts broken
    * greasemonkey a lot less usable now (still can't figure out how to write a custom script from scratch)

Unfortunately, on desktop I'm stuck between this new FFX and Vivaldi. On mobile, I already switched to Brave even though it's terrible because you can't easily google for selected text or select a part of a paragraph easily.

But couple of your annoyances can be fixed rather easily:

1. Get back the toolbar back: View (or Alt-V) - Toolbars - Menu Bar

2. To clean recent history: Ctrl-Shift-Del will give you the clean recent history dialog box. It can be accessed from toolbar too: History - Clear recent history.

Weird that the only way to get to that menu is through a toolbar that's not visible by default.

What's unusable about the new tree style tabs? I use it constantly.

If you want old greasemonkey scripts to work without changes, use violentmonkey.

There must be a bug with the new greasemonkey that I can't find the editor either. Use violentmonkey for that too for now.

I'll grant that the new responsiveness of FF makes TST feel much better. But there's one thing that's constantly giving me headaches. I don't feel like the highlighting given to the currently-selected tab is in-your-face enough, so that I'm always scanning up and down the tree trying to see which one it is. The other formatting options it used have were nice, but being able to at least make the selected tab's title bold was a big deal for me.

I realize that this is technically possible in the new regime via userChrome.css. However, the element classes are completely undocumented so I have no idea how to accomplish it.

Before FF57, I was able to set the font and background color for tabs depending on their status (current, inactive, unread, etc.), and that's what I want now. IIRC, this was actually a feature of Tab Mix Plus.

It's clear that this is still possible even without TMP, but requires putting code in userChrome.css. That would be fine with me, if I could just find any documentation on what element classes (or whatever would be the most appropriate selectors) I need to reference.

    document.querySelector('#sidebar')._contentWindow[0].document.querySelectorAll('.tab.active')

[1] https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...

With tree style tabs I didn't realize there is a CSS hack to remove the top tabs.

It takes 12s after launch for my newtab to populate with icons -- which incidentally I dislike compared to the previous page thumbnails -- there's regular stalling when it fails to respond.

I'm prepared to give some space to get acclimated to new versions, there were font problems on lots of pages (including newtab) for me which I've worked through. But I'm failing to see any benefit yet - even then turning the icon super bright has annoyed me ...

Obviously there's something slowing down your Firefox, but it's definitely not to do with how modern your hardware is because 57 is noticeably faster than the previous version on my 2011 MacBook.

browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.enabled = false

browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.section.topstories = false

browser.newtabpage.enhanced = false

browser.newtabpage.enabled = true

seems to respect my 5 columns and 3 rows with large preview icons.

And on the "improvements" side -- I have to say I've never felt the browser was too slow. Sometimes the network is lousy, sometimes stupid websites are terrible, but the browser itself has been just fine for me for years. So I'd rather have had a less painful and abrupt transition, which maybe took a bit longer.