“Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once wrote, ‘perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.’ To make sure perfection doesn’t slip through its fingers, Apple always errs on the side of taking away a bit more than some people think is necessary,” Iljitsch van Beijnum writes for Ars Technica.

“Although Mountain Lion doesn’t ruthlessly excise big-ticket items the way Lion did — such as compatibility with PowerPC binaries — there are still many smaller features that have gone away,” van Beijnum writes. “After living with Mountain Lion for a few weeks, we’re really starting to miss some of these.”

Here are 10 of the ones we miss the most:
10. Non-smooth scrolling
9. Automatic document locking
8. iChat
7. (The GUI to) Web sharing
6. The Safari search box
5. Displays in the menu bar
4. Using a laptop with the lid open, but with just an external display active
3. Battery time
2. Safari’s Activity Viewer
1. RSS in Safari (and Mail)

Read more in the full article here.