Yeah, I had no idea about it, but flipped it on solely because of this story and I like it. I even enabled telemetry because I'm sick of stuff like this.
Personally, I hate the current fad of low-density, white-space-filled UIs. Sure, it might be suitable for some airport kiosk that I'll use exactly one, but for the things I use frequently I want their UI to be as compact and information dense as possible.
The problem is FF had once been that "1000% of all features you can imagine most of which are used by at most 1% or 2% percent of users" browser.
This was so because of the huge customizability of XUl and other parts.
But this became a maintenance nightmare the moment it was put in context with requirements like stability (there where many extensions which made FF unstable) and security (how extensions are sandboxed, how likely they can escape, what damage they can do without an sandbox escape), change (new internal engine, changed rendering pipeline etc.).
A Company of Googles size could probably have maintained it, but for FF it became increasingly more infeasible to go on like that.
So they switched to remove XUL and support mainly the parts most users use, sometimes adding new features but also removing them if they don't gain any traction in the user base.
I personally see little use for the compact density as it just removes some spacing which is mostly vertical. So (at least in my case) using compact spacing doesn't at all create more space for tabs or similar it just adds a view more pixel to the vertical axis of the websites view.
But then I'm only using 1080p and HiDPI screens. I guess it might matter if you are still on a 720p screen or alternatively have a high layout scaling (font size etc.) due to other reasons.
> But then I'm only using 1080p and HiDPI screens. I guess it might matter if you are still on a 720p screen or alternatively have a high layout scaling (font size etc.) due to other reasons.
That's the most baffling argument to me in this whole discussion. People invest in screen real estate and then devs decide to just fill it with more UI-chrome. How is my bigger screen an open invitation to waste it on buttons, margins etc?
But people bought those bigger screens in order to use them -- for more Web page content, more spreadsheet cells, more word processing, well, words -- not in order to not use them and have a bunch of UI designers appropriate them for whatever "aesthetic" white-space waste they feel entitled to.
