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Comment by seumars | Hacker News Reader

The tab redesign is such a nonissue. "Is it a tab or is it a button". UI is very contextual, and in Firefox's case they're very obviously tabs.

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I beg to differ, to me they lost the tab identity. I'm no purist but I'm really tired of the reinvention of wheels here. Latest firefox ui efforts (beside the download progress icon which was great) were a negative on me from day one. Sorry. Mozilla, save your energy for other things .. I don't think you're losing users due to the shape of tabs.

- some people are doing tab summary in their browser (nlp)

- tab grouping is re-explored in chrome, it was nice in past firefox, it's not a useless idea but could be revisited

- archiving helper (no more 404 maybe ?, partner with wayback machine maybe ? or archive.is)

- history view

> I don't think you're losing users due to the shape of tabs

They very might lose users because of the design of tabs. Tabs is almost the only UI most users see. If they feel dated, the whole browser feels dated.

The "floating tabs" style is very minimal, fresh and modern, and honestly still unambiguous. I'm pretty sure this new style was a good move.

Well that's interesting. I'd be curious what average users see.

Average users are more likely to think "WTF happened? Why does it look different again?"

...and to them, "dated" is more likely to mean a step towards having a relationship with someone.

You know, I try to not be biased but that's what I thought inside. The average Joe has zero understanding of what's going on and this indeed is a strange unexplained change that also brings zero feature. For some older folks it's mind boggling I assure you.

What do we gain by separating the button from the content it's connected to?

I'm not a fan of the new Safari style either, but in that case it's at least because they are trying to let the pages bleed into the full window.

Good point. In Safari's case the redesign "tab as button" approach makes sense for the overall UI approach, whereas Firefox only made it half way.

If you have more tabs opened than the window fits, there is no separator between them, other than fade away.

The favicon acts as a separator. I often have way too many tabs and the new style doesn't change anything, it's still very clear where a tab starts and where it ends.

> "Is it a tab or is it a button". UI is very contextual, and in Firefox's case they're very obviously tabs

Agree. I don't believe one second anyone was like "geeee, where are tabs and what are these buttons?". It's very obvious it's just a tab redesign which doesn't change anything at all.

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