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The basis for this decision was a blog post titled Checkboxes that kill your product. In it, the author, Alex Limi, former "Head of Firefox UX" at the Mozilla Foundation, repeatedly questions the value of checkboxes and other configuration settings that benefit only 2% of users. Mr. Limi would be absolutely correct in removing these options if those checkboxes were on the face of the browser, where every user was exposed to them on a constant basis. What he completely fails to comprehend (or conveniently fails to bring up because it conflicts with his ideas) is that only about 10% of users know about or ever click on the options panel. That means the same 2% of Firefox users actually represents 20% of the users of the control panel. It's not the insignificant minority of users his choices are affecting that he says it is.

He goes on to claim these 2% are expert users, and that they are capable of maintaining their own changes through about:config settings. Again, he ignores that those people still often enjoy the convenience of a checkbox. He tepidly offers add-ins as a palliative, because those power users, well, you know, they like to add-in stuff.

If he had simply quoted figures that justified the decision, such as "we processed 153,926 trouble tickets last year due to people who turned off the JavaScript checkbox, at a cost to the Mozilla Foundation of $3,000,000 per year", we would understand why they were removed. We understand budgets. Even if he said "2.1% of users screwed up their browser, while only 2.0% of users actually intended to disable javascript", we would understand that there was an actual problem being solved. But he offers no such justifications. These choices were simply implemented without any factual basis.

http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/
Note: The author of that article left Mozilla for Facebook three weeks ago.

Haven't you heard? It breaks the internet! Don't you want it to work right for everyone!?

Apparently, they are satisfied with 97/100: http://limi.net/articles/firefox-acid3/

Please read this. Basically, that remaining 3% (SVG fonts) is irrelevant.

The new Firefox UI is not polished for this beta -- it is mainly getting the core underlying logic in place (see http://limi.net/articles/firefox-ux-team-update-14). It will get more refined as it evolves to next beta and beyond toward release.

Slowest JS: there are two aspects at play here -- (1) things slow down when the garbage collector is run to free up memory used by JavaScript; and (2) when JS tracing does not work, the interpreter used is slower than other engines. Work is being undertaken to address these issues, not sure what the status of them is (you can check in the platform meeting notes on wiki.mozilla.org).

The only citation needed is here.

There's somebody who thinks just like you.