Can’t blame neither developers or users, the times are changing and having an old-looking, bloated with useless features browser can be off-putting for many people. Customization is a good thing, but nowadays, I can really go for a stripped down browser that has only bookmark sync, adblock and popup block.
Streamlining the product can be both a good and a bad thing at the same time. Customization may suffer, but the overall product becomes more lightweight and less complex.
I’ve seen people complain when their browser of choice ditches customization in favor of commercialism. What happened to Opera, made their most loyal of supporters to stay with Opera 12 or start looking for a new browser, like Vivaldi.
I like having customization to some extent, but not that all-in-one browser. The only reason I’m using Vivaldi and I’m curious as to what will happen with it in the near future is because every other browser that I’ve used over the years (Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Maxthon) has proven to be causing me enough issues here and there to drive me nuts. My last hopes are in Vivaldi, Edge with extensions support and maybe Firefox in the future 1-2 years when it’s been stripped of all the legacy code it’s currently carrying.
It would be nice to have two versions of a browser – Full Version and Lite Version. With the Full version containing all of the features and the Lite version containing only the ones the majority of people use.
While I agree that removing full themes can be bad, only because some themes can make the browser more functional, they are also pretty useless at the same time, considering that the current Firefox skin is just perfect – tabs can be clicked when you drag the pointed to the edge of the screen, they are on top, just like the standard for a modern browser.
At the end of the day, people, who don’t like those changes, can either stay with the old versions, find a Firefox fork and stick to it, make their own, or look for alternative browser.