| > most people use touchscreens (phones / tablets) but there is still a group of people who have bigger screens and would love to see more data than empty space. They do/might but adding all that empty space in the desktop version of Firefox is quite pointless, considering that it has a mobile version. I get that there are people with Surfaces and whatever. There are also people with 30" screens. A mobile UI that fits a phone's screen but not a tablet's is considered poorly-designed. It's high time we acknowledge the same thing is true on non-mobile systems. That being said, things are not as easy to fix as they seem. Paddings have been getting bigger as the use of contrast in UI designs has decreased, and as UI elements have gone increasingly fatter. Without either of these visual cues, the only way to "isolate" pieces of information is by keeping it apart from other pieces of information -- i.e. by whitespace. If you just took one of these interfaces and reduced all padding values by 50%, you would get sane spacing, but the whole thing would be a jumbled, unreadable mess. (Edit: obviously, adding some visual cues like borders, if not full-on 3D frames, or at least using colours that people over 30 can differentiate on a cheap monitor in a well-lit room, does fix the readability issues, but it also gets you burnt at the design stake for being a heretic so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) |