I remember when Firefox got the new feature to re-open the last closed tab. That was a real useful invention. Do you know what we did before that was possible? … Yes, it was exactly how you imagine it.
I also remember when web browsers didn't have tabs. I'm still not sure whether that was such a good invention after all. Why is there no popular alternative? Opera folded a long time ago with its thumbnail buttons. There are extensions to order, manage and group tabs differently. I think I'd like to try vertical tabs in a bar again for a while. Or just separate windows. Let the window manager manage them. There must be a good reason why every attempt to do that is quickly abandoned. But I'd still like to try it. There are browsers that don't have tabs. But those don't have an engine that I'd like to use for daily web browsing.
It doesn't look like there's any interesting setting to change the tab display in Fitefox.