After a raft of pointless UI changes and a move to a senselessly rapid development cycle, the Mozilla developers have decided in their wisdom to make it harder to find the version number in Firefox. Way to go guys, that will solve so many problems in one go.
The rot at Mozilla Central started when Mozilla released the alpha quality Thunderbird 3. It auto updated itself without first directing users to the “What’s new page” so that we could check if we really wanted to update. TB3 was buggy and slow, introduced UI changes that many didn’t like/want and broke the Lightning calendar plugin. Even worse, the Mozilla developers insisted that because we liked tabs in Firefox we’d love them in TB3. I ditched Thunderbird at that point.
It was only a matter of time before Mozilla started messing around with Firefox.
It is a remarkably refreshing revelation to find out that this style of arrogance towards your customers, typified in the past by Microsoft, has nothing to do with your software being open or closed source. It has to do with the fact that organisations forget that their user base, their market, is built on mutual respect and not on an immutuable right to exist.