I know this question is a year old, but I’m just discovering that this community is on lemmy so I guess it’s better late than never!
So it is not just a cosmetic mode. With the classic mod, your slider head click timing is a lot more forgiving than on normal lazer. You can try it yourself: if you click on a slider somewhat early or late it still registers as a great or 300. This is how it’s done on the classic version of osu!
I don’t know why it started this way, but maybe it was because Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan (the ds game osu! is based on) also registered acc like that too.
IIRC, the pp (performance points) system now awards you for playing without classic mode as it is, well, more challenging this way. So take that in mind if you want to climb the osu! leaderboard.
Wouldn’t it put Firefox on a pickle? Say Chrome gets bought out of Google’s hands, would they still bother to pay half a billion to Firefox to stay as the default search engine? Could Firefox survive being financially independent?