I dunno, that page looks like 110% received wisdom. It's "clean," "inviting," "streamlining," and so on. All positives, sounds like every change listed is awesome!

"Good design is invisible. So if things just work, you don’t really think about it."

Ah yes, and if you can't see the benefits of a change, that just means you're blind to its invisibly good design.

"Bookmark bar – About 5% of the clicks go to the section where people bookmark their frequently visited place"

"5% of the clicks go to the thing we haven't touched in forever and have actually made worse over the years. Naturally we're going to continue this strategy of fostering attrition until you only ever go to the sites listed on your new tab page (which we're watching how much you use)."

It's all basically that, more of doing whatever they want and calling people who don't like it wet blankets. I still don't know why they changed to that supremely unintuitive "sliding panes" menu design. Ah, such is the cost of being on the cutting edge with my ESR installation.

That page says they "put a lot of thought into it," but I haven't seen where that thought might be reviewable, because I'm skeptical that a lot of thought went into this. A lot of thought may have been how to counter criticism, but that's not the same thing.

I think the way I'd put it is that most of the claims there are orthogonal to the UI complaints people make. I don't see people complain about the ease of browsing to a desired place, sometimes I do it with the toolbar, sometimes the URL bar, sometimes the start page, who cares? None of these things have anything to do with borders on buttons...

If something has a clear advantage people don't tend to complain about it. The ability to search from the URL bar has a utility that is clear. Making tabs break a paradigm and be (mildly) harder to see doesn't really seem to have any utility and the system would work the same both ways.

I still use Firefox, don't get me wrong. But I don't understand why this stuff is changing before being made into a skin so that us old people can have something stay the same for a few weeks.