So much for Firefox 4 already being feature-frozen! It now looks as though several additional changes may land before the final release of Firefox 4 lands in early 2011. Among them: tabs in the title bar.

As with Google Chrome, your tabs will only move to the topmost area of the window when maximized. The feature has yet to be delivered to the Firefox 4 nightly builds, but you can download experimental versions from developer Bill Gianopoulos. Windows and Linux versions are available at the moment. Gianopoulos states "These builds are essentially the same as the corresponding Official Trunk Nightly Builds" but notes that his builds include "not yet landed fixes for some MathML issues, and User Interface changes planned for Firefox 4, as well as bugs that I am currently working on or find particularly annoying."

No, you're right...there's nothing new in the image above. Right now, Google Chrome has two separate menu icons in its top right corner: the wrench menu for options and settings and the page menu for functions like zooming, dev tools, and copy/paste.

A while back, I'd reported that changes were likely on the way, in the form of a single, unified menu. Google pitches minimalism as a central theme in Chrome, so it certainly makes sense to use as few UI elements as possible.

Take the jump to see the unified menu, which has just landed in the Chromium snapshot builds!

Here's the latest version as it appears in the current Chromium builds. As you can see, edit and zoom functions have been combined into single lines and all developer functions slotted into the tools menu.

 

You may not use the page menu a heck of a lot in Google Chrome. Most of the functions listed there are easily accessed via a hotkey or aimed at developers, so the average user isn't likely to utilize the menu all that often. The wrench menu, on the other hand, is where all our configuration options lie -- as well as things like the history, download, and extensions pages.

In truth, I barely notice the page menu is there. Why, they might as well just figure out some way to roll it in to the wrench menu and be done with it... And that's precisely what might happen.

In the Chromium nightly source code, a command line switch has been added to enable a new iteration of the wrench menu. When turned on (on Linux only right now), the page menu disappears and the additional options are rolled into the wrench menu.

The code revision ends with "Note how long the unified menu is." It's longer, obviously, but not distractingly so -- and I think it's a good trade-off. Visually, you're only looking at a couple pixels difference -- but the subtraction makes perfect sense for Google Chrome's minimal UI.

Hey, if your browser is going to boast the simplicity and intuitiveness of a unified address and search bar, why muck about with two separate application menus?

Mac users of Google Chrome finally got a solid bookmark system in Google Chrome...but the dev team isn't stopping there, of course. In the last week or so, several updates have been made to the Chromium source code which will bring a better -- and more Chrome-y -- bookmark manager to the browser.

The new 'tabbed bookmark manager' currently looks like what you see in the screenshot. Rather than spawning a new application window as Google Chrome does, the new version opens alongside your current set of tabs (like the new tab page). Items can be dragged and dropped and you can create new folders and items via the tools menu. You can also sort and search your bookmarks.

The manager can also be accessed by typing chrome://bookmarks in your Omnibar, though I wasn't able to set it as my new tab page -- Chromium simply loaded the default one instead.

While the update is a welcome one for Windows, Mac, and Linux users of Chrome, it is an ideal feature for Google Chrome OS. Spawning additional windows isn't the best UX decision on a browser-based operating system.

Like most new additions to Google Chrome, the new bookmark manager is only currently available in the Chromium buildbot releases. Download a current snapshot build and try it for yourself, or check out a screencast after the break!