Related UI elements should not appear unrelated
43 points by untitaker
43 points by untitaker
I wonder what theme would’ve been most popular if Firefox allowed theming as it used to.
This puts to words why the floating tabs in the Firefox redesign looked weird to me. Oddly, I use vertical tabs which has the same issue without any problem. Maybe I'm just used to the UX?
They look like buttons
They are literally buttons that go to a different tab. I like the floating tabs a lot. They're pretty. They don't look unrelated, there's literally a long horizontal line of favicons and tab titles. We know which tab we're on because it's the one with a highlighted border and different foreground colour.
By default (in Linux if it makes a difference), there's no difference in foreground color and the background is slightly lighter. Moreover, there's no separation between these different "buttons".
Maybe I'm too old fashioned and expect "tabs" to look like in paper folders, where there's a small part of paper that stands oout.
They aren't buttons, they're tabs. You can move them around and organize them into tab groups, and the context they're associated with is a physical metaphor for organizing their content under a physical parent, like the app folders you can add to your phone's home screen.
There's a very nice book on design that covers this principle. I believe they phrased it as "related UI elements should be grouped together". The book is Universal Principles of Design.
About Nova: In Bugzilla there are several links to Figma, but they seem to be private. e.g. https://www.figma.com/design/i8wWurQ8yn9y5hCjnf8BYu/HNT---Nova?node-id=3-83
Related: You can get the old tabs style with https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix