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Chrome For Mac Drops 32-bit Build
jones_supa writes Google has revealed that it's launching the finished 64-bit version of Chrome 39 for OS X this November, which already brought benefits in speed, security and stability on Windows. However at this point the 32-bit build for Mac will cease to exist. Just to make it clear, this decision does not apply to Windows and Linux builds, at least for now. As a side effect, 32-bit NPAPI plugins will not work on Chrome on Mac version 39 onwards. The affected hardware are only the very first x86-based Macs with Intel Core Duo processors. An interesting question remains, whether the open source version of Chrome, which is of course Chromium, could still be compiled for x86-32 on OS X.
They're trying to force others to adopt their own PPAPI, in the most heavy-handed way possible. Because once they do, other browser vendors will have no choice but to adopt it. All in the name of our "security". It's almost glorious. Soon there will be no need to pretend that the web is an open place driven by many voices.
You're just whining about minor cosmetic changes. The reason why Firefox lost share is because for a long time it was much slower at JavaScript, it had memory leaks, the interface would freeze when doing anything, pages didn't render quickly, and so on. None of that was something that Mozilla could easily fix because it was baked into the DNA of the browser.
They have put in the hard work to fix these things. Regular JavaScript in Firefox is as fast or faster than in Chrome and asm.js is much faster in Firefox. Memory leaks are almost all gone. The interface freezes sometimes, but not nearly as much. Pages render much faster.
The real problem for Firefox is not the interface changes that people like you whine about, it's mobile. Now 30% of traffic is mobile and Firefox doesn't have an app for any Apple mobile devices and is effectively excluded from Android by Google's Microsoft-like illegal anti-competitive licensing deals with manufacturers (you can get the app, but it's not preloaded and only a few geeks ever would). They're also up against a massive advertising campaign, with every Google property having a huge pop-up like ad telling users to use Chrome. Chrome users don't see this, but Google is doing everything they can except adding the words "or else".
Mozilla is doing a great job with Firefox, but they are up against a billions-dollar corporation that has set its sights on owning all the means to access the web that is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year and is willing to break the fair competition laws to do so.