hello, firefox 3.5 was released close to three years ago. there were more than 100 critical security vulnerabilities fixed since. the integrity of your system and your personal data is at great risk or may already be broken. the bowser is your door to the web - so from a security standpoint it's highly important to keep it up to date. please keep that in mind, even if you like the old version...

While there are some unavoidable changes in Firefox 12 compared with Firefox 3.5, many changes can be adjusted to your taste, just as in past versions.

You wrote: The old version does NOT have progress reports on each page etc.

Could you clarify your objection here? Firefox shows the URLs it is loading. Older versions showed it in the Status Bar while newer versions show it in an overlay at the bottom of the web page. There is an add-on that simulates some of the features of the old status bar (Status-4-Evar) which I believe can place those notices in the Add-on bar.