Below is a sample of what Firefox may look like by the end of the year with Firefox 17 (November 20th, 2012). Some things I have noticed is more streamline look, emphasis on app tabs, the removal of the forward button when you can not go forward. A couple big things is looks like they are dropping the separate search box which I am not too happy about (one thing I dislike about Google Chrome is everything is done from the url bar). Also MIA is the ‘Firefox Button’ introduced back in Firefox 4. I am not sure if Favicons in the address bar are being remove or that is just because the site they are using an example does not appear to have a favicon.

Still, there is an entire row of wasted space at the top (especially now that the Firefox button is MIA). Grant you, I have a couple tweaks in place that ‘fix’ the wasted space in the current Firefox versions. These include the Moveable Firefox Button add-on as well as a userChrome.css tweak to remove the title bar. For more information about these space saving tweaks, please see the Movable Firefox Button post. They could’ve moved the minimize, maximize and close buttons down, but then they would on the same row as the (already narrow) tab bar.

Tom’s Hardware also discusses some other changes planned for Firefox this coming year, including the silent updates (should be part of Firefox 13 on June 5, 2012). There also several ‘under the hood’ improvements planned throughout this year.