What does the future hold for Firefox?

and I hate the way Mozilla have decided they must mimic Google Chrome.

Thankfully you can change Firefox back to the old Firefox by simply opening the View Menu -> Toolbars and selecting or deselecting the option "Tabs on Top". I've spoken to a number of people who held off upgrading to FF 4 because of the Tabs on Top thing, who have now upgraded, and will continue to do so.

> Thankfully you can change Firefox back to the old Firefox by simply opening the View Menu -> Toolbars and selecting or deselecting the option "Tabs on Top".

Thanks for the tip, tracyanne.

Quoting:and I hate the way Mozilla have decided they must mimic Google Chrome.

OTOH, one could also argue that the first Mozilla browsers -- and the 20th Century Netscape Navigator versions that these Mozilla browsers were based upon -- were themselves mimicking parts of the ubiquitous Microsoft Internet Explorer versions from that era.

And one could argue that IE's very existence was but a pale imitation of Netscape's, and Mosaic's before it. Remember, BillG thought the Internet was a fad that would pass, but realized between the first and second editions of his book that he had grossly mis-calculated. That's why TCP/IP support in Win95 was an add-on.

> And one could argue that IE's very existence was but a pale imitation of Netscape's, and Mosaic's before it.

IE was actually based on an attempt to commercialize Mosaic (Spyglass, from memory). Hmm, checking Wikipedia reveals that my memory is working better than usual today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_explorer

Chrome is cool? Is it cool to have a browser that sends your browsing habits back to Google? Is it cool to have no privacy? I am decidedly uncool if that is so.

Like other paranoids, I have too much privacy concerns to be using Chrome, but Chromium with additional measures might suffice. Chromium lacks API that Firefox has though, so less features and less advance addons. They still haven't had integrated RSS support, that's embarrassing. The version numbers are approaching quick, but I was hoping the technology to advance as much as well.

This might sound like a crockpot theory, but Google might not want some features to implement as well if it deter their ads profit. They constantly does things to screw up privacy work around to their search engine: Scroogle, 1984.za.net, GoogleSharing, CyanongenMod cease and desist.