Mozilla in recent years has been flagrantly ignoring the usability costs of their changes and has shown a willingness to make gratuitous changes. Many of these changes could make sense if Mozilla expected their user base to be on an exponential growth trend, such that the existing users who are alienated or annoyed by changes will soon represent a small portion of the overall username. But that's obviously not the situation Mozilla is in.
Considering that the visual processing model of the human brain is based on change detection (hence why animations will get your attention and are distraction), all unnecessary changes do is add mental noise and force reaccommodation, wasting countless hours of trained behaviour. Once a UI becomes familiar, you don't need to pay attention to it and can focus on the content instead. But when it changes, it attracts attention for as long as it takes to changes one's long-term-memory of it.
I haven't done any studies on it, but it wouldn't surprise me if those who hate these sorts of changes the most are also the ones with the best long-term memory and observational skills.
Why would I want the UI to take up more space? I am using it as a browser, most of the space should be available for the page I "browse" or serve as an efficient way to navigate pages.
> don't make it look more like modern UIs
If making something look more modern is the goal just take a dump in the middle of an art gallery, that is plenty of modern and about as functional.
> Be that Windows or Gnome
Edge still has proper tabs, so are you just making shit up now?
I don't care what you want, that wasn't the question. The question was how it is consistent. Preferences are notoriously subjective, plenty of people like less clutter, it tends to make things more readable.
>Edge still has proper tabs, so are you just making shit up now?
On my machine in edge and chrome both unfocussed tabs are flat and divided by like a 1 pixel grey-ish divider or something. I can't really tell much of a difference between that and firefox.
The active tab looks like a button, it has no connection to the content at all, while on edge I still have a clear connection. That might just trigger an ingrained mental "fuck another incomplete UI framework" response in me, it looks wrong and that the tabs actually still behave like tabs is more surprising than expected, why would anyone expect a button to behave like a tab?
Last point, as the new tab style takes up more space than the old style I had it disabled. Of course that didn't work long but somehow the option still fucked up highlighting of the active tab. With that fixed it is at least slightly lighter gray on light gray instead of just light gray for all. Still missing an option to fix that waste of space.
> The question was how it is consistent.
Then why does it take up more space then the bookmarks? Both are just an Icon with a line of text. Hah, just comparing both lists in the UI makes it clear that consistency is not something Firefox devs. have ever heard of. Note: This is not meant as a request at the Firefox designers to fuck up the bookmarks.