The tab could have some other useful things... If Mozilla allowed some form of customization or extensibility. Big clock, weather, and the stuff they have right now (icons) are pretty useful too.
There's a reason UI/UX people design these things, and one day I'll figure out what it is.
I find it super distracting. The only reason I ever open a new tab is to search or enter a URL, so all I need is it to focus in the URL bar. Or I guess seeing open tabs on other devices, the new pinned tab thing they added solves that.
I'm okay with it existing, as long as there's an easy way to turn it all off. I use Brave for testing, and I dislike the new tab page there. My OS has a clock, and I can get OS widgets for everything else, I just want my browser to browse...
Why not just type the first few letters in the URL bar? For my lemmy instance, I just type "sh" and it completes. For everything else, I use Duckduckgo bangs ("!a" for Amazon, "!w" for Wikipedia, etc).
It should totally be an option, but I don't remember the last time I ever clicked on anything in the new tab page.
I mean I get that and I think many people on the Fediverse agrees, but I showed my girlfriend this picture with the red panda background and she's excited about this feature (and hence Firefox) because of a red panda.
Don't underestimate or undervalue catering to non-technical people. If we want Firefox to be adopted more widely, we need those people to enjoy the experience.