I understand the logic of the bigger back button, but I think it is a poor choice. It's rather awkward-looking, but more importantly it causes the entire toolbar to be several pixels taller. It's an amazing waste of space.

For people who care about such things, you can customize the toolbar and enable "Small Icons".

Thanks. I don't use Firefox much anymore (I keep it setup to use the corporate proxy for the few things that need that), so I'd forgotten about that option.

It's always the first thing I do but unfortunately defaults matter.

Sure, but many like the current default -- on a netbook, I used small icons, but everywhere else I willingly sacrifice a couple of pixels for an easier target.

The other browser makers seem to disagree.