Re: Get real Mozilla! There are more important things to fix:
"I would humbly suggest that blocking all images is such an unusual install case that changing an obscure setting as a one-off after install is, in fact, perfectly acceptable."
There almost certainly exist addons for every such thing like this. Such extensibility, and the ability for addons to do powerful things like reshape the browser UI to suit the user's needs, is at the core of what FF has always been about.
Mozilla has been making Firefox worse for years with changes like this, but it's always been possible to reverse the many Mozilla blunders with addons. The original vision of Firefox, then called Phoenix (as opposed to the main product at the time, Mozilla Suite, now called Seamonkey) was to have a fast, light, lean core product that only had the features everyone would want, with the more obscure stuff pushed to addons.
That's why none of the dumb decisions Mozilla has made over the years (and there have been a lot) have mattered as much as they might in another browser. It's also why the abandonment of the powerful Firefox addons in favor of the much less capable Chrome-style Webextensions annoys so many of us-- they keep making these dumb decisions, which was bad enough, but now one of those bad decisions is to remove the ability for us to undo some of their other bad decisions.
I used to use the "ask before accepting a cookie" setting ages ago (and not just for third-party ones), but even then it quickly became tiresome. Instead, I let every site set whatever cookies it wants, and an addon (Self-Destructing Cookies) will delete them as soon as that tab is closed. I have another addon to delete cookies on demand, if I don't want to close the tab just yet. Now, of course, the "ask before accepting" code is long gone, but IMO I have something better now anyway. Blocking cookies to sites I didn't trust (most of them!) was problematic, as many of them failed to work properly in that configuration. It's a much cleaner setup to let the site believe it gets to do whatever it wants, then simply remove the cookie when whatever I am doing is finished.
I am not sure if addons like that will continue to be available in "new" Firefox. I won't be trying it, so I guess it is merely academic. My guess, though, is that this will be one of the things that will work with the new setup. Webextensions can do some of what "legacy" addons can do, but not all of it, specifically not permitting changes to the disastrous post-28 Firefox UI. It would seem that the ability to remove cookies would be within the scope of what the less powerful addons can do.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
