Firefox Nova - our first look at the browser's big redesign

Google, Brave and so on also use rounded Tabs, and it doesn’t look that terrible. So as long as Mozilla’s designers don’t do shit.

They use tabs with border-radius yes, but not entirely pill shaped like in this Nova design. The pill shape brings the corner of the tab much closer to the square favicon that the rounded rectangle in case of Chrome and other browsers. It isn’t end of the world, but showcases completely unnecessary change that will look worse.

The thing I would ask everyone who doesn’t mind this new UI: what exactly does this improve? Is it more usable in any way? All I see it objective regression in taking away space from the webpage content, most shamelessly by cutting into the corners of webpage. It was completely unjustifiable when Edge did it, and it still is now.

Looks are always subjective, but I don’t see anything in the current Firefox UI that is remotely outdated in the current landscape of UI design. The current fad of maxing out border-radius everywhere has already gotten a lot of public negative feedback for Safari, macOS Tahoe, Windows 11 and so forth. I’m all for iterative improvements in UI, but so much of the changes seem to serve no purpose beyond looking prettier to some in screenshots.