I was answering the question from above "what are the differences from the current version?"
As for the differences from Chrome, those are mostly the same as they've always been: Deeper extensibility, more customization points, and made by a non-profit organization dedicated to openness.
Most customization points is the big win for me. I REALLY like to alter my browsers to fit my preferred layout and FF has done quite well at maintaining that capability for me. I get into Chrome and I find myself constantly going "Oh, there's no option for that... Oh, there's no option for that... Oh, there's no option for that... " to the point I close it in frustration yet again.
Absolutely. You would never be able to do something like http://conkeror.org in Chrome. At one point I tried to change some key bindings in Chrome, and I had to spend 2 hours recompiling the whole thing; it was an absolute nightmare.
Not quite. Mozilla is a platform with which you can build apps. Firefox is by far the most popular app running on the Mozilla platform, but there are many others, including SongBird, Thunderbird, etc. The bare executable for the Mozilla platform is Xulrunner, and that's what Conkeror uses.
Anyway, the one thing that keeps Firefox competitive is that they built a platform in a fast yet very awkward language, then they built an application on top of that using a much more pleasant, flexible language. None of the other browser vendors understand this; Chrome devs parrot the "but Javascript is too slow to build our UI in" even though they have the fastest JS engine in the world. It boggles the mind and cripples them in the long term for anything other than your standard point-n-grunt interfaces.
Exactly my experience so far, except there's _still_ no decent Firefox replacement for Chrome's Google Quick Scroll. I forget I even use that extension in Chrome until I end up constantly Ctrl + F'ing the hell out of search results pages in Firefox.
1) the Awesomebar, which I love, although some people hate, plus more advanced functionality -- like in Chrome you can't search your history and delete items in the search results, which I think is retarded as your only option is to purge your entire history
It also seems pretty clear that Chrome is built to use the Google Search Engine whenever possible. For example if you search for something in the location bar, Firefox can redirect you to the very first result on Google for that search if it has a high degree of certainty. The Awesomebar is also designed such that you'll do less searching on Google.
However, the ties of Chrome to Google can be seen by the way the browser makes you search on Google, even in cases where a local search in your history would make much more sense.
2) Firefox plugins can do pretty much anything -- Chrome plugins are basically useless. I.e. Firebug can be a Firefox plugin, while on Chrome this had to be baked in. It means Firefox can have things like proper ad-blocking and Delicious integration on the push of a button
3) a non-profit organization behind it -- when dealing with companies and organizations the concept of "trust" applies heavily, and personally I trust that Mozilla looks after my interests much more than I trust Google
> like in Chrome you can't search your history and delete items in the search results, which I think is retarded as your only option is to purge your entire history
Sure you can. Control-H or Menu->History.
> Firefox plugins can do pretty much anything -- Chrome plugins are basically useless.
It's worth noting that Firefox is working on adding Chrome-like 'useless' extensions to their browser.
Mozilla is basically funded by Google affiliate
payments
That doesn't say much or anything at all. Mozilla wasn't founded by Google and could always find other sources of revenue.
Also, Mozilla isn't a public company with shareholders, it's also not a company masked as a non-profit to evade taxes, which means Mozilla's interest isn't profit, just survival. It's a totally different ball game.
Once you do a search, the option to remove items disappears. You can delete items or you can search, but you cannot delete items in the search results.
Dude, I know natural language can be ambiguous, but I left no room for ambiguity.
So to summarize -- (1) misread what I said, (2) assumed I'm an idiot who can't find Chrome's History panel and (3) replied with "works on my machine" just to prove me wrong.
If you like Chrome, great, personally I love both browsers; but the issue here is that you should stay as far away as possible from real customers.
The primary reason to use FF is that you like a particular addon, you like FF's expose over Chrome's, or you like how FF does the location bar (which is why I use FF). There's not a ton of differentiation between the two any more.
You know what this really makes me? A huge fan of lastpass/xmarks (and 1password, but that's because neither lastpass nor 1password has successfully covered everything I want from a password manager, but they seem to complement each other well enough in my use case).
It's very clear that 4 > 3.6, the features you listed are awesome ... they just aren't very appealing to a current Chrome user.