Does it have a status bar at the bottom?

If not, then it's still EPIC FAIL.

Browsers are going the way of minimizing the amount of space taken up by the user interface and maximizing what's available to the actual content. I think it's a good thing, especially as web pages transition from something like a post board full of stickies to having their OWN user interfaces that look odd next to the browser's. I don't see what's bad about not having a status bar.

The status bar is gone for good. Why? Because the developers said so, and like many other decisions, they couldn't care less what the users think and apparently have so much free time on their hands that they constantly look for ways to fix things that don't need fixing. Fortunately there's an extension that adds the status bar back in. Of course it's horrendously stupid that you now have to resort to extensions in order to get back things, like the status bar, that have existed in every browser ever made since the beginning of time. The issue here is not resistance to change. The issue here is removing functionality and actually making things less useful.

Fortunately the stupid and pointless "Tabs on Top" and equally stupid and useless big orange Firefox button in place of the normal menu bar are both optional. However, I have a bad feeling about this, given all the other stupid changes they've made, and I wonder how long it be be until they are forced on us and we will have to rely on yet more extensions in order to have a decent browser.

The more it copies Chrome, the less reason there is to use it, and more motivation to switch to Chrome instead.

I don't even use tabs at the top; I use tree-style tabs. Hopefully they'll still work.

In other news, I do like the status bar being visible. The primary reasons I don't use Chrome are the missing menu and status bars.

Additional advantage is that it squeezes even more space out of the UI, thus giving you more screen space for what really matters: the website.

One thing that confuses me about tabs on top is that it implies that everything below the tab is associated with that tab. Ok, I get that part. I watched the video by Alex Faaborg and it makes sense.

But I therefore expect that if I rearrange any items below the tab, such as customizing the layout by adding or removing buttons or moving the home button to the right side, or resizing the size of the address bar versus the search bar, that those changes would be limited only to that tab and be sticky for that tab. That doesn't happen and visually it's confusing. All of those elements are grouped underneath the tab and when I switch tabs, the changes are there too. Huh? It's completely counter to what I was expecting and doesn't make sense. The only thing that changes from tab to tab is the text in the address bar.

I would think this would be very important due to the ability to save app tabs. I might want to save an app tab to a specific site and have the navigation toolbar customized a certain way just for that tab.

Note: I'm using beta8 and haven't upgraded yet so maybe this bug has been fixed.

When I hover over a link, there's a few things I'm expecting to see. I want to see the protocol, the domain, and finally the end of the link that would have the actual page/file that the link is pointing to. When the status bar is at the top next to the URL, there isn't enough space to display all of those things. I much prefer the status information at the bottom because the available horizontal space is much larger, and there's a better chance I'll be able to see all the info I need. In that sense, I believe locating the status information at the bottom is much more logical.

If LCD manufacturers would actually stop making 1900x600 screens then we wouldn't be having a lack of space for the status bar. (1900x600 was a random resolution plucked from my backside that highlights the stupidity of current low to mid range displays currently available)

As long as Chrome lacks NoScript, there will continue to be a reason for Firefox. Fix that dealbreaker, and all of the rest is negotiable.

Do you guys really care, or do you just say that you care?

There are absolutely no users who think that getting rid of the status bar is a good idea. Absolutely none. Had you guys even bothered to consult with any actual users before making this change, you'd immediately have known that it was a stupid change to make.

You're ignoring the millions of cheap laptops sold each year with 1366x768 resolution. It's a stupid trend but we're in a period where vertical res is shrinking not growing. Even most LCD monitors aren't truly 1080p, an underdeveloped standard.

In general it is a good thing. But why not go a bit further. I have the line File/Edit/.../Help and there is a LOT of place right there after that. Perhaps a good place to have the status bar icons from right to left.

Or make it possible to use it for other things. Now it is just a big blank useless emptiness.

I'm using Firefox because I prefer it over Chrome and such. I don't want the layout changed every major release.

Changing the default behavior is always bad. Always.

If that were true then you'd turn on the computer and get "C:\>" (or "$" as appropriate). Clearly absolutes are not so absolute.

Or maybe they do care what users think, but not all users agree with you...?

If your complaint were simply, "I don't like the design," then I think I'd say, "fair enough." But you seem to be complaining that the developers are making design decisions about the project, as though it's somehow improper. Like they're supposed to just take a vote on everything, and literally design by committee? But it's not even that, it's more like you think the developers should cede their own tastes and judgement and do things the way you would personally like them to, and if they don't, then they're committing some abusive act.

Developers need to make decisions, and no, sometimes those decisions won't adhere exactly to your personal tastes. If you don't like the decisions, maybe you could get more involved? Or you could help to create a fork somehow? If all the users are really being alienated by these changes, then it should be possible to get a fork going. A lot of people didn't like it when Mozilla dropped the old suite, and so Seamonkey development has been going on this whole time.

But, why remove it in the first place? For a decade or more, the status bas has been useful to check what that link you are about to click on actually points to. Removing it just opens people up to all sorts of things.

To me, that is kinda like having a mod to my car to add back the rear view mirror. I just don't see why removing it in the first place is 'progress' ... I am beginning to fear Firefox may have jumped the shark.

Which is annoying, because IE still sucks, Safari is annoying, and I can't even begin to care about Chrome.

The last cool innovation in a web browser that I actually found useful was tabs. Quite sad, really.

What a complete and utter disconnection between summary and data, who the hell made this UI decision?

Seriously now, try to imagine a proper filing cabinet with the files containing the data, only the labels per file are 4" higher than each file, with stuff inbetween obfuscating and disconnecting the information?
Thank christ this stupid, stupid option is able to be disabled.
Furthermore, the status bar being on the address bar - ok I tried to like it, I tried not to be 'backwards' and old fasioned (as I am with classic UI in Windows) but I just can't do it, I like to see a huge, giant URL down the bottom - I want to see the full thing incase it contains something dodgy. I'm a tech, I need to know what I'm clicking - I find it an utterly stupid design decision.

Furthermore the performance is better but hardly sufficient, the performance is the only thing chrome has going for it in my opinion, sorry but I'm not going to bow down and love it just because it's googles product. Firefox has and continues to serve all I need in a browser, even then with a couple of addons ("tabs menu" - "tab mix plus" etc)
I will continue to adjust FF4, FF5, FF6 to look like FF3. (Oh and I'm not too old fasioned, the awesome bar is bloody incredible)

ALL firefox needs, the ONLY thing it needs in my opinion is speed, I have a quad core 64bit machine with 6gb of ram, I browse between 3 and 18 hours a day,.. I absoloutely don't care how much resources my browser takes, I just want the best performance possible, period.
Fuck copying Chrome, ugh - don't latch on to fads which are stupid but popular (see: white plugs on everything after the ipod, see: fucking glossy screens on laptops)

It appears if you want all the other FF 4 goodness (faster Javascript, etc.), you have to live with some questionable changes to the UI.

Would it have been so hard for the Mozilla developers to just add a config option to pick where the status bar display goes? Pretty much everybody would be happy then.

This is a repeat of the FF 3 "Awesome Bar" disaster, which also could have been averted with a choice for the user in the form of an easy-to-find config option.

Not really true. There are tons of little detail differences that favor FF over chrome.

It's a good thing that they're copying each others' best ideas; they're both still vastly different implementations, produced by very different teams, with different priorities, and will always have many differences.

When web browsers were new and screen real estate was limited, that might have been a good idea. What the hell is the point of removing functionality to save a dozen or two vertical pixels today?

The status bar can be hidden with two mouse clicks. Were people really having so much trouble with the "View->Status bar" option that the devs needed to take matters into their own hands?

Worse, they knew it was controversial and was going to piss off a lot of people but they did it anyway.

With this version, it becomes apparent that the end of Firefox is coming.

It has a very strong bias towards Microsoft Windows, which they justify by saying that's where most of the market is. Virtually all recent features are only available on Microsoft Windows, some of which are even only available on Windows Vista or Seven.
As far as I'm concerned, Firefox has only seen regressions on Linux and Mac OS X since version 3.5. It's clearly become slower with each release, despite the announced performance improvements for Windows.

That bias is hurting them much more than they realize : they're alienating the open source community on Linux, which is where they originally came from, and all the cool and techies, the influential people, are either using Mac OS X or Linux. So if they stop using Firefox, how long before they relatives see that and try to copy them?

Also, the fact they only work on Windows is a demonstrator of their technical weakness. It seems Mozilla has now become an aggregation of marketing people and inane UI designers, with Q&A testers on top, instead of the coding gurus it used to be.
Good code is portable code. Good programming practices are to organize your code in such a way that you never have to write platform-specific code more than you have to, by isolating the strictly platform-specific parts. The fact that Firefox on Windows and on other platforms is so different is a testament that a significant design mistake was made somewhere.
Other platforms are not even prioritized for testing. That's also against good practices. The best way to find bugs is to make code run in separate environments, as the differences in those environments are what might trigger some otherwise rare code in the "main" environment.

What's that with using Direct2D for accelerated 2D rendering? All rendering is done by Cairo, which should be exploiting hardware acceleration. If Cairo cannot use Direct2D, it should be extended, rather than modifying Firefox itself to support Direct2D.
What happened to the projects of modernizing the Mozilla codebase, which is written in C with classes and macros crap? Brendan Eich, Mozilla's CTO, had ambitious projects to do that. He has had them for what, almost ten years now? It was due for Firefox 2. Why was that delayed? So that we could have personas and tabs on top instead?
Adobe, one of the world's greatest software companies, GAVE them a JIT virtual machine designed for Javascript (i.e. the hard part in getting a Javascript JIT compiler) FIVE years ago. They're still not using it in Firefox, which makes it the ONLY modern web browser lacking a Javascript JIT engine. With all the money they've got, they could have hired a couple of compiler engineers and created a new Javascript compiler from scratch that targeted that virtual machine in a couple of years at most. Google certainly didn't have any problem doing that plus the virtual machine in less than a year.
What's up with HTML5? They're clearly lagging behind Webkit and Opera, even though they were clearly at the front a couple of years ago.

Firefox has lost its appeal, is lagging behind, and is now desperately trying to copy Chrome so that it has new things to put in new releases. The highlight of releases are now useless gimmicks that are really regressions, instead of the major innovations they used to be in the past.
It is clear to me there is a real problem in leadership, with too much "rethinking the web experience" buzzing and not enough technology. Coders have deserted Gecko in favour of Webkit, since the codebase of the latter is much more modern, streamlined and nice to work with. They're losing all that made them what they were bit by bit.
The only thing holding Firefox together is that before it became popular and amassed a ton of money, which unfortunately killed it, it used to be high-quality open-source software, the state of the art of web technology. They lost that, and with that, their end is ineluctably coming.