I'm a little curious about the motivation though - I've heard several people complain, but I don't really understand what's bothering them.
I noticed tabs look a little different now, is that jarring? Or is there something I'm missing?
2. The active and inactive tab colors are so close that it's difficult to tell at a glance which is which. Especially in low-contrast situations (e.g. outside) or for those with vision disabilities.
3. Massive amounts of pointless padding. Which means you can't fit as many tabs in the window, and makes the browser a challenge to use for those with small screens. It also wastes horizontal space which is precious now that all monitors are widescreen.
4. The most important reason: they tried to fix something that wasn't broken and made it worse instead. There was nothing wrong with the Firefox UI but plenty of things they could improve where it comes to performance, extensions, HTML/CSS/Javascript behavior, and the large stack of open bugs in Bugzilla that have gone years without any attention.
Instead, they paid someone (or possibly a team) hundreds of hours to fluff up the UI.
Just use another theme.
> Massive amounts of pointless padding.
Yeah, that's a bit annoying, but it goes away if you use vertical tabs through an extension like Sidebery. Tbh I stopped noticing it after a couple of months.
I did find a compact mode: https://techdows.com/2021/04/how-to-enable-compact-density-o... - which works and makes things less padded, but the "not supported" but sure sounds ominous.
...their market share stats show they were wrong.
Yes it was a little jarring at first. I've been using the new ui for a while now and likely wouldn't want to go back (I tried the ui hot fix for a bit, but ended up removing it and going with the default).
Things like lower contrast aren't just about taste or getting used to it.
I've also done a turnabout and switched over to compact / Lepton. So go figure ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I still don't get why they decided to get rid of compact.
I'm personally a happy user and like almost all the changes they've made over the last few years. I like the new UI. I haven't felt the need to post anywhere about being roughly content with it.
The market share stats looked bad long before they started messing with the UI, no?