The decision to place tabs ‘on top’ for Firefox 4 has almost been the Mozilla equivalent of Left-hand side window buttons; for some it seems nothing short of a blatant rip off of Chrome/ium & Opera. Others feel like a logical and sane progression in UI for Firefox.
Either way, Alex from the Firefox User Experience Team took some time out to explain to users why the tabs are probably heading skyward by default in Firefox 4, stating that it “isn’t about fashion” or competition with other borwser but “the evolution of the web as a platform”.
It’s a fascinating watch and should help provide some context to what can at times seem like arbitrary decisions made for seemingly aimless reasons. Alex provides 4 distinct reasons as to why ‘tabs on top’ should be the default behaviour for fresh installs of Firefox 4. It should be noted that putting tabs back ‘on bottom’ will remain no more than a menu > click away for users not happy with it.
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