> Decades of UI/UX knowledge, down the drain. Usability is gone.
Exactly the opposite; this is an evolution that has been taking place over the past decade.
Firefox has had tabs-on-top as the default since Firefox v4.0[1]. Chrome has had tabs-on-top for its entire existence (starting in Sept 2008); Opera had them before Chrome.
The merits can be argued either way, but don't act like this is sudden or arbitrary; it's neither.
Consider that maybe--just maybe--the dev teams at Mozilla, Google, et al. have done some usability studies in the past decade that informed these decisions.
I get that you may prefer tabs below the URL bar, but your claims about the greater state of UX are baseless and absurd.
The idea that someone else can know what another wants better than the other person is absurd. Your arguments might be valid for defaults, but they must be configurable defaults, because taste is subjective, arbitrary, and, despite what some believe, never in error.
I know what UX I want better than anyone else. Nobody can gainsay my personal taste.
I used the light theme and density = compact and enabled the title bar. And then I followed the instructions on this reddit thread to put the tabs on the bottom and the bookmarks above the tabs.
> And it's impossible to put the tabs beneath the address bar
I do not understand the significance of having the address bar above tabs from the UX perspective.
If anything, I feel that it should be below so that it can appear as a part of the tab's content - because it's contextual (each tab has it's own "instance" of the address bar)
Toolbars are better than almost any alternative as long as they were honestly designed for completing a task. They got a bad rap because of all the spyware that average users were accumulating.
Decades of UI/UX knowledge, down the drain. Usability is gone.