The globe icon is the menubar as a single menu (Compact Menu 2), I used a userChrome.css hack to merge the Stop and Reload buttons Safari-style, and everything else is either in the context menu or the bookmarks toolbar. (Toggled by the star-and-boxes button)

as for the UI upgrade, it looks good but im starting to get scared that OSX/winXP/vista/gnome are all going to get special attention leaving the rest of us stuck with ths same old UI :(

bob: while i agree with you on the extentions. your other two requirements aren’t possible.

why do you want lots of memory free? using up avalible memory (its there for a reason) allows firefox to run smoother and faster than if it decided to ignore your memory.

faster boot times: as i understand it firefox takes agers to boot because it setsup all the extentions and stuff and checks the system before it starts. to boot faster firefox could assume everything(or atleast somethings) are OK and leave parts of the system setup ready for a fasterboot, however this would increase instability and not be worth it for the average user. instead an extention should offer this.

extentions: should remain as extensions and Firefox should come with useful 1st party ones by default IMO, however somebody has choosen to make firefox 1 huge as program and i cant see this changing anytime soon :(

perhaps there could be a firefox derivative that back-ports important upgrades to the 1.5 branch (i didn’t feel too much feature bloat back then) its alot of work but would produce a faster browser that alot of people would prefer (i think this linux kernels and 2.4 is still maintained to have most of 2.6 (its larger brother)’s featuers)

bram i think they get money for the bookmarks toolbar

- Smaller memory footprint
- Faster start time
- Full standards compliance (for approved standards at least)

Simple, yet hard. I understand they’re even working on these, but until they stop adding popular extensions into the base code these will continue to be an issue.