Why does a new firefox version disable common features and hide them completely from use

Question

When a new version of Firefox comes out of late, all to often when it has new features or a programmer has a different idea of what they like compared to the previous release, the features are enabled by default and things are rearranged without user choice. A case in point is that when I installed Firefox 24 on my wife's computer it disabled the menu bar and put the tabs on top. To add insult to injury there was no settings option to put the tabs back underneath!!! I don't care how much someone likes tabs on top, the proper way to handle these sorts of feature upgrades is to leave everything as it was in terms of settings and display a web page that has a button that says what each change is with a yes and no button so the user can try if they WANT or not, not just say (effectively) "we are the overlords and want you to use this and we know better". If this method is too difficult then just DON'T change the settings and leave it up to a "what's new" page. I know this is free SW and a lot of dedicated people contribute, but to do your darnedest to confuse or annoy your users is not the way to do it. Imagine if you took your car into have a new radio fitted and when you got it back the brake pedal was in the backseat and the guy said "we like it better that way"
BTW, to have the tabs immediately above the web pages you are viewing makes way more sense than having them 3 lines away.

Answer 1

Hi,
I certainly agree that there were considerable changes made in Firefox v4 when it was released in March 2011. I was not a volunteer on this forum back then but looking back through the history there were quite a few support requests asking about how to make Firefox look like it used to. It was a big change to the UI.
From the support volunteers' perspective all we can do is to try to provide clear, and easy to follow, answers when users ask about changes made in new versions.
From Mozilla's perspective I believe one of the motivations behind introducing the [https://blog.mozilla.org/channels/2011/07/18/every-six-weeks/ rapid release calendar] was to ensure that updates were more incremental and less intrusive to users (i.e. only a few changes made with each release).
The Firefox UI continues to evolve (for example a new logo was recently adopted) but since the update to v4 updates have been more continuous and each release has been more minor.
My experience as a support volunteer is that this is an improvement for the users. The changes are made gradually and people have time to adapt.
Having said that the next release of Firefox (v25) will introduce the first major redesign since v4 ([http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/01/mozilla-readies-major-firefox-redesign-as-it-ponders-what-the-browser-of-the-future-should-look-like/ Australis]).
Those that prefer not to install feature updates and instead to just get security updates tend to use Firefox's Extended Support Release (ESR) versions. See here for more information:
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/
I hope this helps.