Only a few weeks ago I was singing the praises of vertical tabs and specifically threw praise at Firefox's implementation, when coupled with Tab Groups (for combining tabs into a collection that can be moved together, folded-away and restored later) and Multi-Account Containers (which allows tabs to have isolated browsing contexts, which is great for privacy and also helps a lot with logging into multiple accounts simultaneously).
At the time, my tabs looked a bit like this:
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Firefox 156 tab groups and container tabs in vertical orientation.
But this week Firefox 157 came out and messed it all up. Specifically, the problem is that the new UI engine Nova - with its insanely-rounded corners and space-gobbling design - in a single stroke made my sidebar significantly less-usable.
I followed Mozilla's recommendation and installed the Proton theme, which aims to make the browser look like it did back under the Proton UI... but it doesn't really cut it. Take a look at the exact same tabs today:
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Firefox 157 tab groups and container tabs in vertical orientation.
So now I guess I need to teach myself enough about Firefox theme development that I can work out whether a theme alone can "fix" these issues. Ugh.
Update: good news, for now at least. Turns out the browser.nova.enabled flag in about:config can be overridden to
false, returning things to normal:
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Firefox's about:config showing the 'browser.nova.enabled' setting overridden to 'false'.
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