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?".
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