alt Hacker News> they should be moved to the front of the tab bar and be protected from closing.
Firefox pinned tabs are moved to the LHS of the tab bar, they have no close button and ctrl-W doesn't close them. How much more do you want them to be protected from closing?
This is actually one thing where Firefox is clearly better than Chrome ... Chrome pinned tabs close with ctrl-W which is really easy to do accidentally.
Middle click still closes tabs which is my most frequent way to close tabs.
As I mentioned Vivaldi is my Chromium based browser of choice, and it is far better in the handling of pinned tabs. They go up to a separate section at the start of the tab list without reducing in size, and then they absolutely cannot be closed without unpinning the tab first