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Comment by chmod775 | Hacker News Reader

The new tabs are objectively bad and someone at Mozilla is awful at their job.

Another boneheaded thing they did with tabs was replacing the favicon with a loudspeaker when the tab is playing audio[1], instead of displaying the loudspeaker at the end of the title or overlaid like when you pin a tab.

Now I have trouble finding the tab of a YouTube video among a lot of tabs because I can't just look for the YouTube favicon. It was clearly better before, and that should have been obvious to any UX designer worth their salt.

They're clearly not asking "What is a good interface?", they're asking "What is a shiny interface?".

[1] https://i.imgur.com/T13tZXq.png

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> _replacing_ the favicon with a loudspeaker when the tab is playing audio

Ah, that explains how I've inadvertently muted tabs several times over the last few days, when I've never done that before.

This makes so much sense! I’ve also done that much more often over the past few days and wondered what was up. This explains it.

This interface style where there are no visible edges and where control surfaces are entirely indistinct is considered the gold standard today, unfortunately.

That's because you're using the unsupported "compact" mode. Switch back to normal mode and the speaker only shows on hover (in addition to the "PLAYING" text on the second line, which is omitted in "compact" mode).

I disagree with unsupporting compact.

"You're holding it wrong"

Thanks. That gives me another place to start looking when I try to fix this with a custom style - optimally I'd have the favicon work the same as on pinned tabs.

I won't be switching to "normal" mode as long as I use Firefox in a smaller window, displaying chat applications, videos, or whatever as I go about other things.

Mozilla seems to assume people will use Firefox in a maximized window, which isn't true for me 90% of the time, but I am getting exceedingly tired of having to fix the interface with custom styles every 2-3 releases.

Somebody at Apple is doing this to Safari. The iOS UI inexplicably puts the URL bar at the bottom of the screen and hides a bunch of stuff. On macOS they’re doing some really insane thing where the tabs are also URL boxes. It’s absolute madness.

>The new tabs are objectively bad and someone at Mozilla is awful at their job.

Nils a part of learning to be a good programmer will be learning to be a good human, too.

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