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Mozilla is adding tab grouping, vertical tabs, profile management, and local AI features to Firefox
(connect.mozilla.org)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I showed the other two since they're popular, and what others would be comparing against. Firefox (on my machines) is more compact than them. So it's not like Firefox is especially wasteful here. One has worse floating tabs, and the other has worse non-floating tabs. So it could be way worse.
Removing all the space would make it super cramped, and I don't think it's worth it for 10-20px. On a typical 1080p screen, that's like 1-2% of the vertical resolution.
That said, it should be configurable. You can probably get what you want with the userChrome.css or whatever it's called.
"Others do it just as bad / even worse" is just not a good argument for making your own software worse imo.
They have other things to consider as well, such as accessibility. You can't just eliminate all whitespace without consequences.
I do agree it should be easily configurable, but my point is that they're better than pretty much every competitor, so I'm satisfied.
How did floating tabs improve accessibility over the previous design?
If they go back to non-floating tabs, you'd save like 2-3px per my screenshots. You seem to want more than that, and that's where the accessibility issues come up.
I love how you didn't answer the question and instead went on a hypothetical scenario with an outcome that is a flat out lie.