Of course, chrome-style versioning doesn't necessarily mean Chrome features. As I recall, at some point plans for Firefox just had way too many features and goals, so in draft at least they got split into 4 separate (and relatively rapid) releases. Is that correct? That sounds like necessity-driven decision making, rather than imitation-driven.
Firefox 4 took forever to launch, and in the meantime WebKit room over the world. A shorter tease cycle is the right thing the to do, and we can only hope that it didn't happen too late.
Also, FF needs to fix extension versioning and API compatibility stat, or else the new release cycle will manslaughter 80% of Firefox's appeal: extensions.
I guess Google is lucky/smart because Chrome extensions are juiced up user scripts with no native code (I think?), but FF needs to do something to save old extensions.
