Visual tour: Firefox 4 and Chrome -- separated at birth?

Compare the new Firefox 4 browser on Windows and decide for yourself

Fire up Firefox 4 on Windows, especially Vista or Windows 7, and the first thing you'll notice is the revamped user interface.

The second thing a lot of people will get is a sense of deja vu, as the new browser looks a lot like Chrome, thanks to Mozilla's streamlining and, most importantly, its decision to bump tabs to the top of the window.

Last year, Mozilla's Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox, and Alex Faaborg, who works on the browser's interface design team, denied that the then-under-consideration interface ideas were a way to "Chrome-ify" Firefox. But they acknowledged that cross-pollination between browsers was inevitable.

So, does Firefox look like a Chrome copy to you? Or simply similar, only better? Take a spin through these five pairs of compare-and-contrast slides, then decide.

Firefox 4 beta 1 -- tabs to the top
Tabs to the top

If the Firefox button hadn't been there, could you have sworn this was Firefox 4, not Chrome? (Compare with Chrome in the next slide.) Beta 1 puts the tabs on top automatically in Windows, but users can return to the older look with a few clicks.

Google Chrome -- tabs to the top

Mozilla didn't exactly clone Chrome's tabs on top ... the tabs on Google's browser are rounded, for instance, while Firefox 4's are nearly square-cornered. But the two browsers could be brothers.

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