Personally I think this is sort of missing the forest for the trees. The big picture is, Mozilla and Google don't like extensions or extension developers. The

Personally I think this is sort of missing the forest for the trees. The big picture is, Mozilla and Google don't like extensions or extension developers. They don't like people customizing their browsers. We see feature after feature drop from being a button in the menu, to being an option in the about:config, to requiring an extension, to requiring manual modification of files, to being entirely disabled. Look at something as simple as putting the tabs below the address bar. If Mozilla respected their users, it would be as simple as hitting the Customize button and then dragging the tab bar to the bottom. Then they stuck it in an about:config option. Then they required you to make a custom userChrome.css. Now guess what, in the newest version userChrome.css loading is disabled by default and you have to manually turn it back on. How long it will take before it's entirely disabled? I have no idea, but the message from Mozilla is clear: "You can use it the way we want you to or you can go to hell".