Regular readers will know that my browser of choice has long been Camino. It’s that other browser built under the brand of Firefox-makers Mozilla, that runs on the Mac platform and is entirely open-source and volunteer-built. I love it because it’s much lighter and faster than Firefox is, while being extremely compatible with just about all sites on the web. And today, version 2.0 has just launched.

Version 2 has been beta testing for several months now, and a release candidate was unveiled a couple weeks ago. For a while, there was some concern that its release would get pushed indefinitely since the lead on it, Mike Pinkerton, also happens to be the guy helping Google build Chrome for Mac. But, “Mike is still involved in overseeing changes that land, planning features, and overall guidance for the project. While his day job may be Chromium, he continues to lead the Camino Project in his spare time,” Samuel Sidler, Camino’s team coordinator tells us.

A couple of weeks ago, Mozilla Labs presented a prototype of Raindrop, a new experimental open-source e-mail and digital communication platform that aimed to make your inbox personal again.

It’s been quiet at the Raindrop blog since the announcement, but people who are interested in the whole thing are advised to keep track of the Raindrop Design blog, where Canadian designer and Mozilla employee Andy Chung posts updates on concepts for layout and structure of the Raindrop project.

When it was revealed that Mike Pinkerton, the lead developer for the Mozilla’s Mac-based Camino web browser was moving over to Google to take charge of building Chrome for Mac, there was some concern that Camino would be neglected. Pinkerton assured development on Camino would continue, and sure enough it has. Today brings the first release candidate for Camino 2, the new version of the browser.

Camino, though much less prevalent than its Mozilla sibling, Firefox, has a solid following among Mac users who appreciate its speed. It has long been my browser of choice as it’s relatively lightweight and very fast compared to Firefox. And compatibility with various sites seems better than Apple’s own Safari.

Mozilla Labs, Mozilla’s innovation group, has developed a new open-source, experimental email and communication platform called Raindrop. Mozilla says that Raindrop was built to be focused on highlighting and breaking out personal conversations, making it easier for you to see all of your conversations in one client. It is designed to “bubble up” the important conversations from your messages

According to the site, Raindrop “is an effort that starts by trying to understand today’s web of conversations, and aims to design an interface that helps people get a handle on their digital world.” Still in prototype form, the platform is very young but it aims categorize messages and then separate the personal messages from bulk messages, so you know what to respond to vs. just noting a communication. So Raindrop will import all of your email, but break out your personalized email from your mailing list emails and will portray the personal emails higher on the page. Raindrop will also separate direct messages and @replies from your stream, acting like a Twitter client And you’ll be able to Tweet from the platform and pull in RSS feeds.

Google has spent a significant amount of time over the past couple of years building a very impressive web browser, Chrome. By most accounts, it’s the fastest around, and isn’t system resource heavy, and those who use it seem to love it. But there’s a tiny little problem: Being the best product doesn’t matter when general users have no idea what the product even is. And I’m not talking about just the specific product, I’m talking about the product category. And I’m not talking about some crazy new tech, I’m talking about a web browser.

We’ve actually known since Google’s hilarious video this summer that plenty of normal people have absolutely no idea what a web browser really is, even though most use one on a daily basis. But today, Google has put together what can only be described as an extremely dumbed-down one minute video (below) and rudimentary website to attempt to explain to everyone once again exactly what a web browser is. And make no mistake, the undertone is clear: You should be using Chrome.

Generally you can trust the ads on Google to at least be safe. But that’s not the case right now for the top ad being served on the query “Firefox.”

The top ad says it is linking to “Firefox ® OfficiaI Sitе” at the URL www.mozilla.com/firefox/. And that is indeed the official Mozilla Firefox site. But the link actually goes to the much more sinister firefox.mozilla-now.com, a site that dishonestly tries to get users to pay up to $2.50/month for an ongoing subscription to “24/7 Expert Customer Support” (a screenshot of the landing page is below). The credit card provider is based in the Netherlands.

Even advanced users who hover over the link won’t know what’s up before they click, due to Google’s ad redirect URL.

While Mac users grow impatient for Google’s Chrome browser to come to the platform, there’s a small bit of good news today: A new beta version of the excellent Camino browser.

Camino is a browser built by Mozilla specifically for the Mac. Unlike the much more popular Firefox, Camino is extremely lean and fast. It’s so fast that it’s been my browser of choice for the past several years. And the new version, Camino 2.0 beta 4, released today, offers some nice improvements. Among them:

Mozilla’s Firefox browser is about to hit a major milestone: 1 billion total downloads. As you can see on this Twitter account set up to monitor the download numbers, it just crossed the 999,000,000 threshold earlier today. Judging by the rate at which it’s increasing, it could hit the milestone as early as tomorrow.

And Mozilla is preparing for the big day with a new site (not live yet), called www.onebillionplusyou.com, which will go live on Monday. There, you’ll find information about the one billion downloads Firefox has seen, we’re told. When the browser hits the milestone, more information should also be available here.

Mozilla says there’s no central index for tools built to help web developers do their jobs (and/or hobby projects) better, so it set out to build one of its own. Located at tools.mozilla.com and dubbed the Open Web Tools Directory, the organization is taking a swing at building the most extensive and comprehensible index of tools that modern-day web developers can use.

The first thing you’ll notice when you visit the website is the unorthodox – and relatively confusing – design, as you can tell from the screenshot above.

Explains Ben Galbraith on behalf of the Developer Tools team on the Mozilla Labs blog: (after the jump)

The new browser wars on on. More than a decade after Microsoft killed off Netscape with Internet Explorer, competition in the browser market has never been stronger. Just last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5, which has now been downloaded nearly 14 million times. Earlier in June, Apple released Safari 4. In March, Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer 8, and Google came out with a speedier beta of its Chrome browser.

Some early data is coming in showing relative market share and how fast people are upgrading. If you look at the chart above from Statcounter, it indicates that since March Internet Explorer has lost 11.4 percent market share to other browsers.

In the first 24 hours since its release yesterday, Firefox 3.5 has been downloaded more than 5 million times. (It took only a few hours to pass a million). That is certainly respectable, but doesn’t quite measure up to the mania that Firefox 3.0 set off last summer, when it achieved a “world record” 8.3 million downloads in a single day. Maybe we’ll have to wait for Firefox 4.0 to beat that record. But Firefox 3.5 might still beat the 11 million downloads Safari 4 got over its first three days of availability.

Mozilla today released Firefox 3.5 into the wild. Not surprisingly, it’s flying off the virtual shelves. And unlike when Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 last year, its servers are staying up and reliable, so the rate of downloads is pretty incredible. This site, run by Mozilla, shows the download stats for the new browser. Overall downloads are now approaching 1.3 million worldwide, with over 350,000 of those in the U.S. But even more amazing is the number of downloads occurring each second, it’s ranging from 59 to 95 right now. Again, that’s every second.

Outside of the U.S., the browser is moving quickly in Germany, France and the UK. The claim is that it’s much faster than the previous iterations of Firefox, and based on just a quick run-through of my favorite sites, I’d say that is in fact the case. Though, to be fair, it’s hard to know if that has something to do with the fact that just about all my browser plugins are not yet working with this version.

Yesterday, we poked fun at Microsoft’s tacky $10,000 online treasure hunt to get people to use IE8, at the domain TenGrandIsBuriedHere.com. We were hardly the only ones. Today, a developer at Mozilla, makers of IE rival Firefox, weighed in with his own way of mocking Microsoft: TenGrandIsBuriedThere.com.

The site is simply a Google Map zoomed out to a certain point. If you zoom in enough, you’ll find a surprise. The developer took exception to Microsoft calling Firefox “old” on its site. That is a bit odd since IE is much older than Firefox.

Last month Mozilla introduced us to Jetpack, a new project from its Labs team that could well change the way browser extensions are installed over the next few years. The project is still in early stages — its blog describes it as primarily a technology preview — but some very cool things are already starting to emerge. Today Mozilla is releasing Jetpack .2, which introduces us to a handful of new features: the sidebar, persistent data storage, and the future.

Sidebars are meant to serve as light and quick side panels in your browser. This kind of feature has existed for years as traditional browser plugins and Firefox extensions, but Jetpack sidebars come with one major advantage: users don’t have to restart their browser to install them. The Mozilla team has put together a sample called the “Video Slide”, which allows you to tuck any video you’re currently watching into the left slidebar, so you can browse the web while the clip keeps playing in view (be sure to check out the video below to see it in action).

Mike Beltzner, the director of Firefox, was in New York City today and dropped by my office to talk about Firefox 3.5, which is now officially being rolled out as a “preview” version (a very stable beta) to everyone using the current 3.5 beta. Firefox 3.5 is supposedly much faster than earlier versions, which is always a good thing. Honestly, the nanosecond speed differences between most of today’s latest browsers is becoming hard to detect. Three features of Firefox 3.5 which stand out for me are: 1) its embrace of open-source video standards, 2) its geo-location capabilities, and 3) support for downloadable fonts and other graphic tricks.

Mozilla has unveiled a new project from its Labs division called Jetpack that gives us a taste of how Firefox might begin extending web functionality in years to come. While the project is still quite early in development, it seems to be taking the form of a streamlined extension system, allowing web developers to introduce new features to the Firefox browser using web-based tools and requiring only a minimal amount of effort on the user’s part.

Firefox extensions have long been one of the best parts of the browser, allowing users to add and remove features to suit their needs. But while the user experience of installing these has been relatively straightforward, it still requires a browser reboot, which can be frustrating when you’re in the middle of something. With Jetpack, this isn’t an issue – you click install and you’re done, with the new widget or application installed a few seconds later.

Many of us have been saying it for a long time: location based services are the future. But up until now they’ve been a distant, hazy future, because they’ve been so difficult to use. That’s going to change soon, and it looks like Google is going to be leading the way.

Google has just announced that it has become the default location provider service in Firefox, which means beginning in the latest Firefox Beta (available here) users will be able to update their location from their web browser without having to install an extra plugins or programs through Google. This is big.

Just as children love hunting for Easter eggs, we love finding virtual Easter eggs in software and Web apps—those intentional hidden messages, features or jokes built into the software that users in the know may stumble upon at some point during their experience with the application. We’ve compiled a list of some of our favorite software Easter eggs of all-time (in no given order) in light of today’s holiday. Of course, there are many more Easter eggs out there. Tell us us your favorites in the comments!

Mozilla Labs is debuting new personas today – extensions that add lightweight themed skins to your Firefox browser – enabling you to personalize your user experience according to your mood without interrupting your browsing sessions. The Personas for Firefox add-on was first introduced in late 2007, but has now expanded to include hundreds of artist-created designs in a variety of categories, according to a blog post announcing the new sets.

I like custom skins / themes and the fact that Mozilla is taking steps to make it easier for people to adjust the look and feel of their browser according to their mood, but somehow the announcement made me cringe a little (much like this Labs experiment did). I would rather see Mozilla focus on improving the speed and usability of its browser than offering its users ways to add eye candy, particularly now that the browser wars are heating up again. Firefox needs more innovation, not decoration. But then that’s just me. Some people love eye candy more than speed.

The mobile version of the Firefox browser, Fennec, is now officially in beta. It works only on the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet, but developers can also download it onto their computers. The Fennec browser is designed to make maximum use of the limited screen space available on mobile phones and tries to do everything possible to minimize typing.

It incorporates the Firefox “awesome bar,” which acts as both navigation and search bar. Start typing in a URL or search term and it auto-suggests web pages based on your past Web surfing habits. Various searches, including Google, YAhoo Answers, and Wikipedia, are one click away via links at the bottom. The browser also remembers all your passwords, just like Firefox. It supports Flash. And add-ons can be created for the mobile browser.

The user interface takes some zooming and panning concepts which were previously previewed by Mozilla Labs. Each Web page expands to fill the entire screen, but moving the page to the side reveals different controls, including bookmarks, back and forward buttons, tabs, and different tools.