I’ve been using vertical tabs for a while, and I do think that the round icons are 1: better suited to the design of the majority of favicons, and 2: offer a quicker visual separation at a glance. It’s easier to distinguish between tabs.
If you prefer horizontal tabs, the rounded tabs with a light stroke are even more stark. Firefox has long had a problem with the visual language of the tabs. It has been hard to clearly distinguish between active and background tabs. If you were not already familiar with the color scheme, and someone showed you a window with two tabs, you’d have to make a wild guess to know which was the active tab. Chrome for example represents this by connecting the active tab to the window view - immediately clear. The old Firefox tabs were ambiguous because they didn’t connect, and they also weren’t clearly separated. This design makes a clear commitment.
The new app icons are gorgeous. The design looks more coherent across the app. It manages to be modern and clean, while presenting a characteristic personality. For too long, Firefox has been chasing trends and aiming for a middle that doesn’t exist. Firefox is different and should look different. I think it’s much better to make a visual statement that not everyone will love than to have no perspective at all.
Some people have railed against the new default theme. It’s not for everyone, but there are 1000s of official and user-created themes to choose from. I have been using a custom theme for ages precisely because the old default theme was ugly.
A small addition, I use Firefox as my default PDF viewer. The new viewer has a few minor improvements and fixes one or two past missteps. I’m sure folks will (rightly) say there are better options for a PDF viewer, but it meets my needs.
If the only objective is to get into the news, their CEO could just say something bombastic on TV.
“There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” is an antiquated notion in the Information Age. People’s lives get destroyed and products have been boycotted out of existence overnight in the modern era.
But it isn’t bad publicity. The reporting on a new theme or icon is generally pretty neutral.
That is true, but again, Firefox users practically all intentionally chose that browser, and often for one or more very specific reasons, not all the same as one another. The articles about it are not what is going to color their opinion of the changes, but their using it and having new problems or challenges that they didnt have before. Of course there will always be those resistant to any change at all, but when you have changes for no clear purpose that also cause these issues, you get dramatically more displeased users, and ones that have a point. On top this, there is another thing some people that don’t mind these cutesy changes don’t seem to realize about the people that do. That is that Mozilla has very limited manpower and other resources to commit to any task, so every time they go off and do something that has no clear purpose, it is extra obnoxious that there is no progress on decades old documented bugs, missing features and functionality, and overall lack of focus on the main thing the software is for.