I wouldnt call the Australis reaction a backlash, in fact I believe it was very positive considering it was a big change. If your point was that there was and will always be people who protest against a change, then yup.

What is it that makes you think that the reception of Australis was "very positive"?

I'd consider the reception of a software product update to merely be "positive" if there was generally praise, basically no negativity at all, and people expressing that they are now significantly better off.

"Very positive" would involve no negativity, and complete and total jubilation from users. This is extremely rare.

A lot of people are not happy about Australis, and justifiably so. While Firefox has been imitating Chrome the past few years, Australis sealed the deal and made them nearly identical in the most critical ways.

The only mitigating factor is that there really isn't a viable alternative to either Chrome or Firefox these days. Opera has basically become Chrome, and Safari obviously has very similar roots. IE is engaging in the same imitation of Chrome. Both IE and Safari suffer from a lack of portability, too.

Many Firefox users are extremely disappointed with Australis, but they have no recourse. Switching browsers isn't really an option. And we wouldn't be in this position had Mozilla listened to all of the past feedback they've been given, so giving more feedback is probably a pointless exercise. So they suck it up, as best they can.

Australis was a debacle, at best. I think you're deceiving yourself, and people not familiar with the situation, to suggest otherwise.

>Australis sealed the deal and made them nearly identical in the most critical ways.

How is that? Using the hamburger icon, which was used by Mozilla in mockups before Chrome used it, or rounded tabs (which Chrome doesn't actually use), or making the customization UI (something which Chrome doesn't have, yet again) not look like it's from the year 2000?

Please identify the critical ways in which it's imitating Chrome.

The most important aspects for me would be customization, and Chrome doesn't offer anything in the same ballpark. And with Chrome, you have to resort to tedious workarounds to install certain extensions if you don't want to login to your Google account. And if we ignore all of that, Firefox's add-on ecosystem wins too.

People get upset at every UI rehaul; you could hear much the same sentiment after Firefox 3.

> I'd consider the reception of a software product update to merely be "positive" if there was generally praise, basically no negativity at all, and people expressing that they are now significantly better off.

I've never known a company to pull that off. Even Apple, praised for their design sense, has, according to you, never had a "positive" release of any software.

> A lot of people are not happy about Australis, and justifiably so.

The same exact thing can be said about the previous UI.

> And we wouldn't be in this position had Mozilla listened to all of the past feedback they've been given

That's a fairly selfish attitude to take. What you are really saying is that you'd rather piss off many other Firefox users who don't share your opinion.

The less tech savvy users that are unhappy about the Australis UI changes don't know who they can complain to or where they can complain. I think that the backlash from power users has been lessened because addons (Classic Theme Restorer and Classic Toolbar Buttons) can successfully undo the distasteful and unnecessary Australis UI changes. It is telling that one of the best rated extensions for FF is an addon that undoes supposedly positive changes.

Reliance on third party addons for functionality is almost always a step backwards, but it is possible to run the latest Nightly with the pre-Australis UI.

Users can report their [dis]satisfaction using Firefox Input, the happy/sad feedback form in Firefox's Help menu (if you know to look). And user comments are public and tracked closely. It can be a cesspool, but it is enlightening: https://input.mozilla.org

I wonder how long it will be before Mozilla are in real danger of losing control of the browser they call Firefox, if they continue on their recent trajectory. We're talking about Open Source here, so it is always possible to fork it under different branding, and a few groups already have for one reason or another.

Of course, in reality, forking and then establishing the fork as a mainstream replacement that aligns more closely with the traditional advantages of Firefox would be a huge undertaking. For any new browser to gain traction outside of geek communities would surely require both a substantial user base and substantial support from the development community.

But it's been done before, even for large and high profile projects, when the existing corporate stewardship wasn't getting the job done: the LibreOffice/OpenOffice split is the first example that comes to mind. If I were this week's CEO at Mozilla, I would consider a mainstream fork to be at least a plausible threat by now.

I think that they've already voluntarily given up control over the destiny of Firefox, in a sense. By imitating Chrome so closely these past few years, we haven't seen any real innovation out of Mozilla. They've been following, rather than leading. Since they aren't calling the shots, they don't really have true control over the future of Firefox.