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Comment by yoavm | Hacker News Reader

I loved Photon. Proton added a lot of nice touches, but I never understood why would you want to turn the tabs into buttons. Tabs is a great metaphor from the real world, and they take less space. I don't see a single advantage of styling them as buttons. The whole point is that they're visually connected to the currently visible page.

Thankfully however I don't care too much because I can still completely hide the tab-bar with my userChrome.css, and use "Tab Center Reborn" to have my tabs on the side instead.

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You're not alone. Here are some steps to restore the old tab style:

https://superuser.com/a/1669549/9067

Here's what I've been using to get the older design, while also keeping some new niceties.

https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix

That's what TFA is from.

Excuse my blindness. Haven't had a coffee at that time.

Completely agree. Objectively buttons don't seem to have any advantage and personally I find them fugly.

Seconding the tab idea. I need to know in which tab I am. Sometimes I have the five tabs of the same page (hello hn), look up, and I don't know which tab I am. I end up closing the tab with Ctrl+W when I'm done and learn where I was.

Thanks for the extension suggestion I may give it a try.

I think using a theme with a high contrast between the active tab and inactive tabs is probably the easiest way to fix the UX for you. E.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/proton-redone-hybri...

If I only had just 5 HN tabs open...

One advantage I could see is a vertical tab bar mode that’s more visually consistent with the standard horizontal tab bar. Could even animate seamlessly between those modes.

Tree Style Tabs. Essential extension.

In the early mockups I saw for Proton the floating tab buttons never existed. I wonder what happened that we ended up with such odd tabs.

Unpopular opinion: I personally like the 'floating tab' look more. It's sleek and consistent and doesn't bother me at all. Though I think it should be a toggleable setting not a default.

> why would you want to turn the tabs into buttons

I think I read somewhere that the reason was that user studies showed that people did not understand that the tabs could be dragged around, moved to other windows, and generally were "detachable". Floating buttons should make that more obvious.

I'd be interested in research on whether they achieved that goal.

I can't off-hand remember any application where I was able to drag around buttons or, really, interact with them in any way other than pushing the button. That said, I don't think the widgets look particularly button-like (e.g. only the selected tab widget as any depth, the other widgets are flat).

Yeah good point, I don't know any either; guess it's more the "detachedness" than the "buttonness" that's supposed to hint at that. As I said, I'd be interested in seeing data on whether or not they were successful.

The problem with user studies is that privacy-conscious power users (which are the majority of Firefox user base) don't like to participate in those studies, which make them really skewed.

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