Personally, I'm not too fussed if Mozilla goes in a crazy direction and Firefox loses popularity now. It's served its primary purpose by opening competition in

Personally, I'm not too fussed if Mozilla goes in a crazy direction and Firefox loses popularity now. It's served its primary purpose by opening competition in the browser space which was dominated by Internet Explorer and turning it into a true open platform available on multiple operating systems and encouraging the development of the web and open standards. The Webkit-based browsers (Safari, Chrome) and Opera also exist and are at least at parity with Firefox. Even Internet Explorer isn't that bad these days. As a mockup, I strongly dislike it. It's trying to be "fashionable and prominent" by imitating iTunes rather than thinking that people want a lightweight minimalistic browser that stays out of the way and doesn't interrupt your workflow. Hell, I'd argue that's what people actually want from a music player, but no-one has yet to come up with a viable user-friendly option that does that, music players are free, and too many people have had their hand forced by Apple lock-in to make innovation easy. I firmly think Firefox has been getting worse and I blame 'interaction designers'. All of FF3.5's innovations are pretty terrible: I find the fact you can't close the final tab frustrating, the moving "add tab" button is annoying and poor for usability (since it's hard to discover as it keeps moving), and Firefox's private browsing mode and tab tearing are both outright half-baked and nowhere near as pleasant to use or as intuitive as Chrome's. Their treatment of self-signed SSL certificates still leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth as it shows that those in charge of ease-of-use only care about flashy features and not core functionality that prevents startling the user with features with cryptic error messages. Even after using the combined history button in FF3 for months, I still find jumping forward to pages frustrating and unintuitive, I think it's terrible they still don't provide a UI for removing custom words accidentally added to your Firefox dictionary, their support when accessing RSS feeds in-browser is still hilariously poor compared to every other browser, and still think the Manage Search Engines dialog is unnecessary clunky. It's increasingly as though they're not trying to solve the real problems I have in Firefox but rather focusing on needless annoying flashy features directed by some self-proclaimed "usability guru". If this is implemented, I'd probably either move back to Opera, a browser I haven't used since the early versions of Firefox (then called Phoenix) was released, stick with FF3, or await the inevitable fork. That said, I don't understand their sudden obsession with innovation. Mozilla have never been innovators, least of all when it comes to their UI. They've grabbed low-hanging fruit (e.g. extensions which you basically get for free via Mozilla's design, spell checking) or reimplemented the features of other browsers, mainly Opera's, and got the credit for them (e.g. tabs, download manager, search engine integration, AwesomeBar, Private Browsing).