Hmm, I'm on Firefox 3.6.26 (and I have auto-update disabled), so I guess Mozilla is willing to leave me alone for now. It's great that they want their browser to stay "fresh" and safe, but it's only fair to give users a bit more freedom over appearance and functionality with little effort. You shouldn't have to spend 3+ hours just to make something work the way you prefer. One of my biggest pet peeves (aside from them apparently trying to imitate Chrome's GUI) is that they re-ordered the context menus for no discernible reason. If they're not going to add/increase functionality in any way, why make a change at all? That is only one of the reasons why I won't update any time soon.
Microsoft is notoriously bad about this. The way they change Windows and Xbox frustrates me to no end, moreso in the case of Xbox because we are not given a choice (aside from the option of never going online again). I can adjust to visual changes, but as far as actual usability goes, they keep becoming less and less practical. At least Windows isn't forced, although you can only stick with an older version for so long. Surprisingly, their phone OS is a different story and they've made it reasonably customizable and user-friendly. Go figure. I don't like the way they're shoehorning the UI into Windows 8, but still, I see myself being a proud supporter of their phones for at least a few years. But I digress...
There are very few programs that I care to allow to update themselves -- not even Windows makes that list. Prompt me about it and let me know there is a new version, I'll take care of it when I feel like it.
I'm the exact same way. If I hadn't disabled Automatic Updates on my XP machine, it would've replaced my beloved IE6 with IE8, which my computer was not powerful enough to run. I do not like the idea of anything before I know exactly what to expect.
There have been some issues with Flash crashing recently but other than that I've always been happy.
That caused me major grief until I eventually figured out what the problem was. Just a couple of weeks ago, Firefox would crash on almost every site that used anything beyond simple pictures and text. Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration, but it crashed at least every 10 minutes. Switching to FF4 or newer completely cured everything, which seemed a bit suspicious. Apparently, the newest version of Java isn't compatible with my version of FF3, so I had to use JavaRa to roll back to Java 6. This drastically improved my situation, but I was still having frequent problems, which were apparently being caused by Flash 11 (so I rolled that back to 10). So, unless these issues are fixed, I may get stuck in the Browsing Stone Age again...but I stuck with IE6 until late last year, so I think I can manage it.