I think it's beautiful. I can't explain exactly what I like (I'm not much of a designer) but I can say that I now find it more visually appealing than Chrome. The only reason I'm staying on Chrome is because of a few extensions and because it syncs so well with my Android phone.
I think there is a lot of hate here with the tone "I liked it the old way because I was used to it!". New designs change things, that's why they're new. If we didn't ever want anything to change, we'd still be looking at this every day:
And just like the old Firefox design, that has more features up front and almost everything today's version has. But I'm glad I see this instead http://cl.ly/image/2d3a0c2h1Z2R.
Maybe I'm an idiot, or not a power user. But I like pretty things and I appreciate Mozilla's effort here. I'll be using Firefox more often.
Not too many critical extensions, but a few: Motorola Connect, Google Hangouts, and Hacker News Enhancement Suite.
The real reason I stick with Chrome is because it works so well with my Google accounts and syncs everything I do to my phone.
I could partially move to Firefox if I could find a good way to do bi-directional bookmarks sync between the browsers. I tried XMarks but it would totally fuck up all of my Chrome bookmarks once in a while.
I have been using Sync ever since it was introduced in FF(4 I think?!?) and I have to say it worked really well for me.
Not only does it sync your usual suspects bookmarks/passwords/history, but it also syncs your installed addons and their settings (if supported). For example it syncs AdBlockPlus's list of whitelisted websites.
Another neat Sync feature is the possibility of seeing the open tabs on all your synced devices. For example I am looking right now on my phone and I can see the add HN comment tab in the mobile version of FF (Android).
On top of that the Sync server is open source so basically you could deploy it yourself if you have privacy concerns, although your data is encrypted before it is uploaded to the server anyway.
I think there is a lot of hate here with the tone "I liked it the old way because I was used to it!". New designs change things, that's why they're new. If we didn't ever want anything to change, we'd still be looking at this every day:
http://blogoscoped.com/files/google-old-new-design-2007.png
And just like the old Firefox design, that has more features up front and almost everything today's version has. But I'm glad I see this instead http://cl.ly/image/2d3a0c2h1Z2R.
Maybe I'm an idiot, or not a power user. But I like pretty things and I appreciate Mozilla's effort here. I'll be using Firefox more often.