The new Firefox floating tabs are a bad UI decision that violate modern web design standards.
New Firefox Tabs Are a Hard Pill to Swallow
The new Firefox floating tabs are a bad UI decision. The gap between the bottom of the floating tab breaks up the visual contiguity of the visible space. The information in the tab relates directly to the contents of the address bar and the content below. Adding a gap breaks up this informational contiguity.
In modern web design we would call this style of "tab" a "pill" because it resembles one. The pill shape is great for a filter-button or to represent a list of tags: situations where the contents below the pill are partially related. A great example is a horizontal list of buttons that filter the information on a page.
How to Get The Old Tabs Back
I used the userChrome.css Customization Tool to create a CSS style that resembles the old tab style. This requires creating a custom userChrome.css file.
Here is a GitHub Gist of my userChrome.css file.
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