Aaaand we have started to get some early screenshots of Firefox 4.0!
http://mashable.com/2009/07/27/firefox-40/
Seems like they are making it more like Chrome. Here's an official response to common opinions.
Quote:
Hi, Alexander Limi from the Firefox User Experience team here.
Let me try to clear up some common questions that are raised here — and feel free to ask more questions, I'll try to keep an eye on replies to this comment. Some of these are taken from the Reddit thread, since it hit there a little bit earlier, I hope you don't mind me re-using my answers. 
"I really like this, but hope that all the interface customization ability stays in place" — That is indeed one of our goals with this. You should be able to go back to something very, very close to what you're using right now, regardless of what that is.
"I love tabs on top! / I hate tabs on top!" — Fortunately, we want to support both. What we ship with as the default isn't decided yet, but it's pretty clear that there are compelling reasons to have both available as options.
"It looks just like Chrome! Where's the innovation?" — Chrome was not the first browser to have tabs on top, not the first browser to have glyphs instead of icons for the buttons, etc. If you read the proposal, there's a lot of new interesting things hidden here (home tab, progress bar, the stop/reload/go combination), but it's not all expanded on at once. Just because another browser has something, doesn't mean we *have* to do it differently. There's a lot of cool things in all the major browsers these days.
"Why are they doing this instead of focusing on speed and memory usage optimizations?" — Because they are done by different people, and once does not preclude the other. We can do both, and there's a lot of effort invested in stuff like this as we speak — vastly improved startup time for Firefox 3.6, etc. Follow the Mozilla blogs at planet.mozilla.org if you want the inside scoop.
"Whoever thought it was a good idea to remove the menu bar?" — Quite a number of other browsers. But to give you a proper answer, the amount of functionality you use in day-to-day use of the browser really isn't that large, so having a dedicated bar for the menu makes less sense. On the Mac side, things work differently, and the menu bar will probably stay in place, as the OS X user interface has a different approach to menus.
Also, we have some cool s—t lined up for this that isn't in these mock-ups yet. 
"I think tabs on the side or having no tabs at all is a better approach" — We want to support this too. See the article on this here: http://limi.net/articles/reinventing-tabs-for-the- ...
Let me know if you have other questions! I'll keep an eye out and try to answer as many as I can.
— Alexander Limi · Firefox User Experience
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