That never bugged me too much, but I'll at least be glad it can be disabled for people who really dislike it.
Firefox
A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox
Agreed. Being able to customize all elements of the top bar is one of the great things about Firefox.
I don't see a reason why it shouldn't be possible to remove newly added elements. Even the "Open a new tab" button can be removed, as well as the recently added "View recent browsing across windows and devices" button.
Holy crap, Firefox actually listened to it's users? Is Earth out of orbit or something???
kinda funny, though.. the functionality has been there for awhile. just flying under the radar with a less-noticeable icon.
the problem is probably actually that it consumed additional space, instead of being kept on the new tab button's right click menu
It was there and "consumed space". It was just a less noticeable icon before (dark grey downwards-facing chevron).
... who the hell are these special users that Firefox apparently pander to, and what mass of people do they constitute to make them so powerful?
More importantly, how do I join this special club?
It's probably the nature of the change, too.
- It's easy to add a switch to disable the button.
- It doesn't cut into their bottom line.
- It's damn good PR.
Other stuff that people have been complaining about, like the massive backlash against baking in 3rd-party AI, won't make the cut.
Relatively benign things like tab grouping are challenging, so despite being much more popular, the easier-to-implement AI features were given a fast pass to Release versions of Firefox.
I'm just confused why this has annoyed users just NOW since the button has always existed. It was just a down-pointing chevron before it got changed to a new icon so it's not like it suddenly popped up and took space away
Literally just obsoleted my 2 week old CSS hack haha. Another useless GitHub project on my account. https://github.com/barelyelectric/firefox-csshacks
Hey, the best way to learn / practice is to build tools for yourself. Just think of it as Mozilla gave you a useful coding challenge before they came to their senses.
Nice, that always bugged me.
Why do we want to be able to hide tabs in the first place?
tab management addons is one example, like those that make tab groups. maybe there are other use cases too, but this feature is for the addons, not to be directly used by users
Ok, that makes sense.
I still don't see why they (Mozilla) felt the feature was needed, since if you're installing an addon to manage tabs, that's all on you, the user.
Huh, guess i missed the drama with ESR.
I noticed a little folder icon had appeared just recently and that if I clicked it, it... listed all the tabs, so I guess that was the list all tabs button. I actually rather liked it but hadn't yet trained myself in to the habit of using it. I hadn't even noticed it's now gone, but curiously it seems like for me it hasn't really gone, so much as it's become a down arrow icon rather than a folder. Sounds like this change is to make it optional, meaning it will otherwise stay there which tracks with my experience, but why has it become a down arrow now?
ugh, finally
People only now notice an icon that has been there since at least Firefox 112
Media literacy is at an all-time low!