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.

And that spare time is apparently enough, as not only is Camino 2 here, but it’s being released ahead of even a beta version of Chrome for Mac (which should be coming in a few weeks).

Camino uses the same Gekko 1.9 rendering engine that Firefox 3 uses, which ensures that the majority of the web looks great in it. But the Camino browser maintains more of a Mac-style since it was built as Mac-only from the ground up, whereas Firefox was not. One great looking feature is the Tab Overview page, which shows a nice visual representation of the tabs you have open (pic below). Camino also has a built-in option to block web ads.

One downside of the browser is that Firefox plug-in lovers are out of luck with Camino. But I don’t consider that to be a big downside, since it keeps the browsing experience very fast. Download Camino 2 here.

So what’s new in Camino 2? Here’s a rundown:

Improved tabbed browsing

The Tab Overview feature displays a grid of thumbnails of the tabs in the current window.

Tabs can be rearranged by dragging and dropping.

Command-click now defaults to opening links in new tabs instead of new windows.

New security features

Camino now supports the Google Safe Browsing service to provide warnings about many potentially malicious websites.

Camino now displays error pages for secure web pages using invalid or untrusted certificates.

Full content zoom

Camino now has support for making the entire contents of a web page bigger or smaller.

Download notifications

If Growl is installed, Camino will generate notifications when downloads begin and finish.

On Mac OS X 10.5 and higher, Camino will bounce the downloads folder in the Dock when a download finishes.

Recently closed pages

The History menu now contains a sub-menu listing the last 20 closed web pages.

Improved support for Full Keyboard Access

When Full Keyboard Access is enabled, tabbing now moves correctly through the entire browser window.

Enhanced annoyance blocking

Camino now includes an exceptions list to allow disabling “Block Flash animations” on a per-site basis and an “Allow Flash From This Site” contextual menu item to ease adding sites to the exceptions list.

New AppleScript capabilities

AppleScripts can now obtain the HTML source or text of an entire web page or of a selection.

Added AppleScript support for setting the active tab in each browser window.

Web content support

Camino now uses version 1.9.0 of Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine, which contains thousands of bug fixes, better web plug-in compatibility and performance, enhanced support for web standards, and new technologies like JavaScript 1.8.

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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.

Last night, Chung posted about some very initial ideas for how Raindrop could function as a mobile application, which GigaOm correctly identified as one of the most fertile grounds for this type of platform to thrive.

Note that these are early concepts, so it’s just a way for Mozilla Labs to throw something out there and then iterate based on feedback from the designer and developer community. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to see how Raindrop could potentially look like on mobile screens.

What you see (from Flickr): a homepage with a summary and menu, what the ‘inflow’ of messages would look like on mobile, a rudimentary Twitter client, a mailing list messages inbox and finally a screen featuring notifications from around the web.

(Thanks for the tip, Orli)

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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.

We’ve been beta testing Camino 2 for several months now, and it’s solid. It offers several improvements over the first iterations of Camino, notably in speed and the way it looks. Mozilla notes that this Release Candidate 1 could become the final, first official build of Camino 2 if there are no critical issue found.

So it looks like despite Pinkerton’s Chrome time commitments, Camino 2 will beat Chrome for Mac even reaching beta status.

The anticipation for Chrome for Mac continues to build. Even Google co-founder Sergey Brin admits that he’s disappointed with how long it has taken to develop. But, as we noted the other day, Chrome for Mac — not Chromium, the open source browser on which Chrome is based — looks like it’s getting closer to a beta release.

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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.

I briefly spoke with one of Raindrop’s lead engineer’s and the CEO of Mozilla Messaging, David Ascher, who told me that in the future iterations the platform should include all types of messaging, including IM, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube and basically, any communication with an open API. And according to the site, content with in communications, such as links from YouTube or Flickr should be shown near or as part of the message, rather than in a separate tab. Ascher said that Raindrop doesn’t really aim to replace your Gmail account but add to it with an intelligent way to understand your communications. The application works on Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

Mozilla also wants to developers to build applications off of Raindrop and is releasing its API to help users customize their communications experiences. The back-end of the platform is a non-relational database (CouchDB) which was optimized for massive web interactions. The front-end, says Ascher, uses high-powered JavaScript libraries, modern CSS to give your best browser with the platform. Ascher told me that Raindrop is still very, very early stage but the platform will continue to evolve with time.

It takes page from social media messaging aggregation services like FriendFeed but with a strong focus in filtering. It will be interesting to see what two-way interactions the platform will feature and what content it eventually will bring in. Because its a modern communication system, it could compete with open communications platform Google Wave.

If you’re confused, take a look at the video. It explains the purpose of Raindrop pretty well.

Raindrop UX Design and Demo from Mozilla Messaging on Vimeo.

Full disclosure: My husband works for the Mozilla Corp.

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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.

The web site consists of five parts: An area telling you what browser you are currently using, a place to show you the one-minute video, an area to show you a bit more about browsers and their performance benchmarks, an area to let you pick a new browser to try, and an area with tips and tricks for using a browser.

The video is much more subversive. While the first part is spent explaining what a web browser is not (not a computer, etc), by the end, Google throws out there that “the web browser is the most important piece of software on your computer.” And they continue, “so a faster web browser means that you’ll save time on every web page you open.” The hope there is that of course, people will look into what web browser is the fastest, and figure out its Chrome, and install it, since it is free to do so.

Of course, Google doesn’t bother to say that if you look up the fastest browser, find it to be Chrome, then try to install it on a Mac, you’ll be out of luck. Good luck trying to explain what Chromium builds are to these people, Google.

I all of a sudden don’t feel so bad having difficulty trying to explain to people what Google Wave is. And maybe now we know why Google actually is making Chrome OS: To stop having to explain to people what a damn browser is.

[photo: flickr/marshall astor]

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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.

Most savvy Internet users will know this is a con as soon as visiting the site, but a all those middle-America Yahoo users may not know any better, particularly since they were just told it was the Firefox official site. It just goes to show that not even the stuff Google publishes can always be completely trusted.

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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:

• Phishing and Malware Protection: Camino 2.0 Beta 4 includes phishing and malware protection based on Google Safe Browsing.
• Full Content Zoom: The scale increment used by full content zoom has been reduced to provide smoother zooming. There is also a new Zoom Text Only item in the View menu to toggle the zoom keyboard shortcuts between full content zoom and larger or smaller text.
• Software Update: When quitting for an automatic update, Camino will now save and restore pages that were open before quitting regardless of whether the “Load the pages that were open before quitting” preference is enabled.
• Updated Appearance: The tab bar, Bookmark Bar, and folder icons now better match the appearance of Mac OS X 10.5 and newer.

The key feature for many users will be the last one. Mozilla has finally updated Camino to blend in a little bit better with OS X. While the changes in the look and feel definitely aren’t huge, they are subtle and nice.

But here’s the real interesting thing about Camino, its project lead, Mike Pinkerton, also happens to be the guy leading the development of the Mac version of Chrome for Google. It seems likely that most of his time is now spent on Chrome (and his Twitter updates indicate as much), but he has always maintained that work would continue on Camino for Mozilla.

Of course, it has been almost a year since Camino 2 first went into beta testing (last December) and it’s still not done yet. Meanwhile, in that time, there have been three official releases of Chrome (though, again, none for the Mac). Still, it’s nice to get even little updates to Camino. It remains a great browser.

On the Chrome end, Google has publicly stated that it will be available before the end of the year. Judging from the Chromium builds, it seems very close. No word on when Camino 2 will be finalized, but that too, seems pretty stable.

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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.

Firefox has made a major dent in Internet Explorer’s marketshare over the past few years. The latest numbers put IE’s share just over 54%, while Firefox approaches 30%. That’s pretty incredible when you consider that just a few years ago, IE had over 90% marketshare.

This one billion number is obviously for all the versions of Firefox, since it was launched in 2002 (though the Firefox name officially took hold in 2004). The most recent version, 3.5, launched exactly a month ago. It zoomed past a million downloads very quickly, and had 5 million downloads after day one — a huge number, though not quite as huge as the Firefox 3.0 launch.

Update: Mozilla has just sent a note confirming that it will hit the milestone tomorrow:

It’s looking like Firefox will reach 1 billion downloads tomorrow (around 3:45 a.m. PT)! You can find out more here: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/fxbillion.

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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:

We went with a “space” theme to emphasize the sheer size of the tool ecosystem (though at the moment we only have a small fraction of the tools available listed). And, frankly, we just couldn’t do another table-based master/detail database application; we wanted a directory that would be fun to use (and perhaps a bit of fun to create as well).

Luckily, there’s a search box at the bottom that allows you to browser for applications based on its name and category (Design, Code, Debug, Test, Deploy and Docs) which seems to do a decent job at weeding out the right applications from the directory.

Note that you need the most recent browser versions (Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Chrome 2, or Opera 9) to explore the site, but I take it our readers will probably have at least one of those installed already anyway.

According to Mozilla, this is just the first step, and for now it’s inviting developers to submit tools for inclusion in the database themselves. The Mozilla team will review incoming entries and put them up asap. On the roadmap: social features and fresh display options.

(Hat tip to MoMB)

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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. That is the combined market share of IE8, IE7, and IE6. Certainly IE8 (the light blue line) has been growing strong since its release last March, capturing 16.7 percent of the market as of July 4. Those strong gains make up for most of the drop in IE7’s market share from 49.1 percent in March to 30.1 percent yesterday, indicating that Microsoft is doing a good job of getting existing IE7 users to upgrade at a steady pace. And in mid-June, IE8 finally surpassed IE6, which still stubbornly holds a 7.6 percent share. Add those three up, (IE6+IE7+IE8), however, and IE all together holds only a 54.4 percent market share versus the 65.8 percent combined share in March, 2009.

In just over three months, Internet Explorer has seen its overall market share erode by 11.4 percent. Where did that go? It went to Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. Nearly 5 percent of that, or about half, went to Firefox 3.0, which currently has 27.6 percent market share. That doesn’t count last week’s upgrade. See the dotted line just below the light blue IE8 line? That is a combined set of “other” browsers and appears to include Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, and Chrome 2.0.

If you look at a 30-day version of that same chart, it shows Safari 4 with 4 percent market share and Chrome with 3 percent market share. It doesn’t yet break out Firefox 3.5, but if you assume that makes up the bulk of the remaining dotted line which jumped to nearly pass IE6 in the past week, you can figure out more or less which browsers are taking share from Microsoft. (I’ve used data from the most recent daily chart in this post, but embedded the monthly chart below which has data as of June 30).

As I said, this is early data from one source. Net Applications, another commonly cited source for browser market share, is currently reviewing its June numbers, but I have a feeling they will show similar trends. (This Wikipedia page shows other browser market share sources, most of them haven’t been updated since March). It is difficult to make any firm conclusions at this point, since market share is shifting so rapidly as every major (and minor) browser tries to convince users to upgrade.

But we are in the midst of a major upgrade cycle simultaneously across IE, FireFox, and Safari (with the Chrome wild card thrown in). When all is said and done, we might see a major shake-up in market share and almost definitely will see leadership pass from IE7 to another browser. The question is will that be IE8 or Firefox? Whichever one wins, the good news is that IE6 is finally dying.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Version Market Share

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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.

Who’s.among.us has some live usage stats from about 800,000 Internet surfers it is tracking. According to its data, it estimates that Firefox 3.5 already has gained about a 2.4 percent browser market share. Overall, it puts all versions of Firefox at 29 percent. That suggests close to 10 percent of Firefox users have already upgraded. It also puts Safari’s market share at only 2.5 percent, which seems low. (Other stats put it closer to 8 percent).

Looking at our own Google Analytics for TechCrunch, 28 percent of Firefox visitors are already on 3.5, but our readers are big Firefox fans—nearly half of all visitors use some version of Firefox, which is a much higher percentage than for most sites.

I’ve been playing around with the 3.5 release candidate for about a week. It is much zippier than 3.0, and I’m already addicted to the plus-sign feature on the tab bar which makes it easier to add tabs. And I love where it’s going with open video standards. It is also a bit crashy when I have too many tabs open, but that’s getting better. Some add-ons don’t yet work, but nothing crucial. Overall, it’s a much better product.

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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.

Not surprisingly, the emphasis on speed in this version of Firefox is on its JavaScript performance. Both Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari have been making headlines recently claiming to be the fastest browsers in this regard. As you can see in the SunSpider test chart below, it appears that Firefox has made huge strides since the slow days of Firefox 2, and has now more than doubled performance over even Firefox 3. As Apple recently touted in a press release: “Safari quickly loads HTML web pages more than three times faster than IE 8 and three times faster than Firefox 3.”

So how does 1.3 million downloads in a few hours stack up against its rivals? Well, the most recent browser to offer a major upgrade was Safari, which claimed 11 million downloads in 3 days. But those numbers are tricky because Apple includes Safari updates in its regular OS X software updates, so pretty much all OS X users were at least asked to upgrade after its launch. Still, Apple claimed that of the 11 million, some 6 million were users on Windows machines. And Firefox also pings users to do auto-updates when a new version is available.

Despite its launch hiccups, Firefox 3 set the Guinness World Record for software downloads last summer. In just 24 hours, over 8 million people downloaded the browser around the world. We’ll see how this version stacks up.

You can watch the live-updating chart and map for Firefox 3.5 downloads here.

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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.

[thanks Alan]

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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).

Included with this release the Mozilla team is also introducing a jetpack.future function, which allows developers to make use of APIs that aren’t yet stable (sidebars are included as part of these future-looking APIs). From the Mozilla blog:

Jetpack is two things at once: it is a platform for experimentation and it is also a solid set of APIs that anyone to easily build new Firefox features. To enable Jetpack to be both stable and — at the same time — to experiment with not-quite-yet-ready features we’ve added the ability to import new features from the “future”.

Finally, the new version adds support for persistent data storage between browser restarts, which will be key for creating advanced extensions.

Jetpack is still in early stages and for the time being is probably more interesting for developers than your average Firefox user. But it’s a very compelling project because it could make life much easier for some startups, depending on how robust the technology eventually becomes. We’ve covered plenty of companies building very impressive browser plugins that have fizzled out largely because they couldn’t get users to actually install their plugin — easy as it may seem, that browser reboot can be a real turn-off, especially when you’ve got multiple windows open. By removing this barrier to entry, Jetpack could become a boon for developers.

If you’d like to check out some of the other 40+ available Jetpacks, check out the list here, which includes an instant dictionary lookup and a Gmail notifier.

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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.

In the video above, Beltzner demos some of the new video and graphics capabilities of Firefox 3.5. Built into the browser is a video player based on the open-source video formats Ogg Vorbis and Theora. The video player supports HTML5, which means that links and other interactive elements can easily be placed inside videos. The demo page Beltzner shows in the video can be found here (but the effects only work if you are looking at it in Firefox 3.5). Being able to treat the content inside videos like Web pages opens up a whole new world of possibilities for Web video. Already, DailyMotion offers all of its videos in the Ogg Theora format. If this takes off, Flash video could be come history.

Look closely at what Beltzner is showing off in the video, because you can’t do any of that with Flash.

Update: There is a lot of great debate in the comments about whether or not you can do this stuff in Flash. Technically, you can, but the only examples I’ve seen are where the entire page is done in Flash or a proprietary overlay is being used. The videos in the demo all sit within regular Web pages and are written in HTML5. What is interesting in my mind about the Ogg Vorbis format is that it makes videos programmable. Videos today are still for the most part siloed off from the rest of the Web in their Flash players as a separate experience. It is time to break down those walls.

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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.

Jetpack is being described as “an exploration in using Web technologies to enhance the browser (e.g. HTML, CSS and Javascript), with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play.” In other words, if you know how to develop for the web, you should be able to build a Jetpack app. Developers can write code using Mozilla’s web-based Bespin environment and the popular Firebug extension. For an idea of how easy it is to build these applications, check out the video below.

At this point there aren’t many demo apps available, but you can try them out for yourself by going to the Jetpack homepage and installing the Jetpack 0.1 extension (you’ll have to reboot your browser to get it working). From there you can find demos here and here, with available applications including a weather forecaster, Delicious Notifier, and an Ad blocker (there’s also an app that will mix up the images seen in your open browser tabs, if you’re looking for something truly useless).

Because Jetpack is still in very early stages it’s tough to tell just how powerful it will eventually become, and if it could ever replace the current extension model. Looking beyond traditional extensions, the new project could potentially allow trusted websites to customize the browser experience on a site-by-site basis, which could prove quite useful (or annoying, depending how it works out).

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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.

Location based services take a lot of flack for their privacy issues, but so far the biggest obstacle in their acceptance has been that they’re a huge pain to use, typically requiring extra browser plugins and annoying sign-up processes. The new version of Firefox is probably going to change that, at least for desktop browsers, because it will have location detection baked in. Up until now it seemed like Mozilla was going to be using Geode, a plugin it first annouced back in October, as its default location provider.

The switch to Google is obviously a big win for Google Latitude, and it will also likely give Google access to volumes of local data that will allow it to offer hyper-targeted advertising to businesses (or maybe not, at least for now – see below). As with Google’s search deal with Mozilla, which was recently extended through 2011, I suspect Google is paying a pretty penny for the right to be the browser’s default provider. In 2006, that search deal alone reportedly accounted for $57 million, or around 85% of Mozilla’s total revenue.

Update: Mozilla says that there is no money changing hands in this case, and that it is totally unrelated to the search deal. Mozilla wanted to break the ‘chicken and the egg’ problem of location, and decided to go with Google because they saw eye-to-eye on privacy issues.
Update 2: Google says that the data isn’t currently being used for advertising purposes (at least for now), and that this is really about getting location-based functionality deployed to the web. But even without the advertising dollars, there is one very major upside: Google is going to be able to perfect its location database, with millions of users tapping into it on a daily basis. And that database is going to be extremely valuable going forward.

Google’s plans extend well beyond the Firefox browser, too. Internet Explorer is still the dominant browser on the web, and Google recently released an update to its Toolbar which includes the same location detection service as Firefox will. Of course, users will still have to download the plugin, which makes the barrier to entry significantly higher than it will be on Firefox.

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1. Atari: The first ever software Easter egg is speculated to have occurred in 1979 in an Atari game. Apparently, programmer identities were kept behind locked doors in the easly days of software development, with companies not wanting staff to gain more celebrity status than their brands. Warren Robinett, a programmer for Atari sneaked his name into the Atari 2600 game Adventure.

Here’s the YouTube video showing the egg:

2. Google’s Picasa Teddy Bears: Image editing software Picasa has an entertaining teddy bear Easter egg. If you open Picasa and press Ctrl-Shift-Y, a teddy bear will pop up.

3. The Book of Mozilla: If you type “about:mozilla” in the address bar of any version of Firefox, you will be led to a page with a quote from the “Book of Mozilla” about the birth of Firefox.

4. Google Earth Flight Simulator: If you open Google Earth, version 4.2, and press Ctrl-Alt-A (”Command” “Option” “A” on a Mac), Google inserted a flight simulator that lets you simulate being in the cockpit of a F16 fighter jet ot a lightweight SR22 propeller plane.

5. The Dark Castle on the iPhone/iPod Touch: According to this report, a teenager in the UK managed to discover this egg, the classic Mac game “Dark Castle”, in its entirety, available on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Activating this game is a bit complicated but, here are the directions.

6. Google’s Mobile App: Google unveiled a surprise Easter egg for its Mobile App for the iPhone earlier this year. If you click on the settings tab, scroll to the bottom and keep swiping upwards until a secret option dubbed ‘Bells and Whistles’ appears (this also works in the foreign language versions of the app). The hidden menu lets you change the theme color of the app and its default sounds to chicken or monkey noises.

7. Microsoft’s Volcano: Microsoft inserted a volcano Easter egg in all Windows Operating Systems prior to XP. If you go to control panel display, click on the screen savers tab, select “3D Text,” then click on settings and in the graphics text box type “volcano.” The screen saver then shows names of all the volcanoes in the U.S.

8. Google’s holiday Easter eggs: Last holiday season, Google put Easter Eggs next to the sponsored link search results for terms like Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa Gifts, Christmas Sweaters, Hanukkah Sweaters, etc.

9. Mac OS X “Here’s to the Crazy Ones”: If you open Finder and go to Applications, look for TextEdit. If you enlarge the icon in CoverFlow, you’ll see a letter from John Appleseed quoting the text from Apple’s “Think Different” advertising campaign.

10. Goldeneye Breakdance: This egg was recently discovered. Apparently when playing Goldeneye 007, if the user tilts the cartridge during gameplay, this causes the characters to breakdance. It’s pretty funny-see the YouTube video of the dance below:

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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.

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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.

We’ve seen what competition has done for browsers on the PC. Today, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and IE are all trying to leapfrog one another (well, at least the first three are). Efforts like Fennec, mobile Safari for the iPhone, the Android Web browser, Opera Mini, Skyfire, and others are injecting the same healthy competition into mobile browsers. I can’t wait to be able to try out Fennec on my mobile phone (if Apple or Google let me).

Below is a video demo by Madhava Enros, who is in charge of designing the interface for Fennec.

Fennec Beta 1 walkthrough from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.

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Flock first launched in October 2005 and has had 6 million or so downloads. But it still has less market share than even Netscape, which was discontinued over a year ago.

In the past Flock has said all it needs is a few tens of millions of users to score big dollars from the search engines (each active user generates $5 or so in search engine revenue). But after three years of trying, Flock hasn’t been able to achieve more than a fraction of that number of users.

As to why Flock is leaving Mozilla: sources say that they’ve become frustrated with Mozilla’s lack of attention to Flock’s needs. One source says Flock felt like the “red headed step child of the Mozilla development community.” Sources are also saying that Flock feels that Google Chrome is far easier to work with than Firefox.

One problem is that Chrome isn’t yet cross-platform and works only on Windows machines. But Google is actively working on Mac and Linux versions of Chrome and should release them in the next few months. Right about the time the next version of Flock is released.

Flock hasn’t yet returned a request for comment on this story.

Update: Flock CEO Shawn Hardin responds in the comments:

Mike,

I was responding to your email from only a few hours ago when I saw your article. It’s important to clarify a couple of things. We haven’t ceased development efforts on the Mozilla platform. Our upcoming release of Flock 2.1 is built on the Mozilla platform. Having said that, the browser space is heating up, and we’ve seen a variety of exciting technologies emerge over the last several months that are appealing.

We always have and will continue to make architectural decisions that balance what’s best for our users and what’s best for Flock as a business. This has resulted in a healthy, growing user base and business for Flock, and we expect this to continue in 2009. In fact, with over seven million downloads almost entirely from word of mouth, Flock enjoys a highly satisfied user base with consistently over 92% customer satisfaction, very strong net promoter scores, and an average of four hours of usage per day.

With a continuing focus on user-centered browser innovation, our team is in active research and development on a range of exciting new enhancements to Flock. It is still far too early to comment on anything specific, but we are very excited about this design phase…

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VoIP service provider Skype has backed the EFF’s exemption request, claiming that “copyright law should not interfere with a user using his or her phone to run Skype and enjoy the benefits of low- or no-cost long-distance and international calling.”

AppleInsider correctly points out that VoIP apps are in fact allowed on the iPhone, as long as they use Wi-Fi.

Mozilla CEO John Lilly, in turn, said he doubted “Mozilla would venture into the iPhone even if the Copyright Office grants the DMCA exemption over jailbreaking”, stating that the iPhone SDK agreements clearly show its Firefox runtime is not welcome on the device in a recent interview with ComputerWorld. Note that Mozilla is developing its own mobile browser (Fennec) at the moment, which will compete against mobile browsers based on WebKit, including Apple’s Mobile Safari.

Apple’s fillings say the EFF’s exemption request is uncalled for, as the DMCA already has provisions that allow circumvention to enable interoperability (which is the EFF’s prime reason for the exemption request). It also claims the EFF is trying to use the courts to attack its unique business model, and that the EFF does not present any evidence to back up its claims that decriminalizing jailbreaking would result in increased innovation.

In response, EFF’s Fred von Lohman says Apple’s argument against the exemption are “FUD,” “corporate paternalism,” and “absurdity.”

(Image from Amit Bhawani)

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Of the top 100 sites on the Web, which ones grew the fastest in 2008? In a report it is preparing to release tomorrow, The comScore 2008 Digital Year In Review (which you can sign up for here), comScore ranks the 20 fastest-growing Web properties. These are out of the largest 100 sites overall. They are shown in the chart above, as measured by growth in unique visitors. (Interestingly, in a separate list of the ten largest sites, only eBay showed a decline from 2007).

Most of the big gains among the fastest growers came because acquisitions (CBS acquiring Cnet, Everyday Health acquiring Revolution Health, JPMorgan Chase acquiring Washington Mutual) or traffic and business partnerships (Break Media, Glam Media, and Everyday Health with Drugstore.com). [Correction: Because of a mistake in our draft copy of comScore's report, we originally characterized Drugstore.com as having been acquired by Everyday Health. Drugstore.com is simply part of Everyday Health's ad network, and thus counts towards its total audience size, but is a separate entity].

If you strip out all of those, which denoted by asterisks, you get the sites that grew organically, including Infospace, Wordpress, Weatherbug, Answers.com Sites, Facebook, Hearst Digital Media, and Mozilla.

During 2008, comScore estimates that 4.5 trillion display ads were served in the U.S. alone. That comes out to more than 2,000 Internet ads per month per person. And, believe it or not, the number of ads served up actually declined a little during the year as publishers tried to push up CPMs (the amount they can charge per thousand ad impressions) by reducing inventory.

Above are the top ten publishers of display advertising as of November, 2008, along with how many billions of ad impressions each one served up in that month. Only two of the fastest-growing sites also made the list of top ten publishers of display advertising: Facebook (No. 4) and Glam Media (No. 9).

Now if we could only get the average CPM per site, then we could create a more interesting ranking of the sites that make the most money from their ads.

Here are the full lists of fastest growing sites by rank and annual growth rate (same as the charts above) and top ten display ad publishers:

Fastest-Growing Sites
1. Break Media* (+279%)
2. Glam Media* (+144%)
3. Infospace Network (+134%)
4. NetShelter Technology* (+131%)
5. Everyday Health* (+121%)
6. CBS Corporation* (+111%)
7. WildTangent Network* (+74%)
8. Discovery Digital Media (+68%)
9. WordPress (+64%)
10. Demand Media* (+59%)
11. Weatherbug Property (+59%)
12. Answers.com Sites (+58%)
13. Facebook (+57%)
14. Yellow Book Network* (+51%)
15. Ask Network* (+48%)
16. AT&T Interactive Network* (+47%)
17. JPMorgan Chase Property* (+45%)
18. Hearst Digital Media (+42%)
19. The Mozilla Organization (+40%)
20. Sprint Nextel (+36%)

Top-Ten Display Ad Publishers
1. Yahoo Sites (37.1 billion)
2. Fox Interactive Media (34.9 billion)
3. AOL (18.2 billion)
4. Facebook (13.7 billion)
5. Microsoft Sites (13.4 billion)
6. Google Sites (4.1 billion)
7. eBay (2.7 billion)
8. Viacom Digital (2.2 billion)
9. Glam Media (2.1 billion)
10. United Online (1.8 billion)

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The event is timely. There has never been such robust competition in the browser space. Google recently brought Chrome out of beta, and Microsoft’s GM of Internet Explorer Dean Hachamovitch told me earlier today that the Release Candidate of Internet Explorer 8 would be released in the next two weeks.

Notably absent from the panel was Apple, although their Safari browser was brought up repeatedly as an important mobile platform, and Safari’s underlying Webkit javascript engine was also praised as innovative.

Most of the panel discussion focused on the browser ecosystem, including add-ons, standards compliance and security. The panelists noted that web developers have a harder time today than a few years ago because they have to build for more than one browser. But as Firefox and others have gained market share, competition has sped feature advances, accelerating the development and evolution of javascript and other languages and standards. Krogh from Opera noted that the next big battleground is mobile.

An audience question asked each of the panelists to describe the essence of each browser. The responses were varied. Microsoft’s Hachamovitch said his team starts with looking at what the user wants and building from there (and pointed to IE 8’s impressive feature list). Krogh from Opera said they wanted to supply a standards compliant browser for literally any Internet connected device. Google’s Pichal said speed (of javascript) was their primary goal (Hachamovitch then dubbed him “Mr. Speed” in a later comment). Mozilla’s Shaver said Firefox was about “putting the web first,” and creating a standards-compliant browser in as many languages as possible to ensure that no one was left out of the Internet.

Hachmovitch also confirmed that Microsoft has no current plans to build Linux or Mac versions of Internet Explorer. Google’s Pichal confirmed that Chrome for Mac was coming “very soon.”

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Taking a page from Threadless, Mozilla is opening up its own online store featuring crowdsourced Firefox T-shirt designs. You can upload your own design, or pick from the gallery.

The store is built on Zazzle’s platform, which handles the printing, shipping, and billing. Zazzle is rolling out partner stores focused on other online communities as well, but this could turn out to be the best example.

T-shirts are always a good money-maker on the Web. But how much of those Google subsidies can be replaced by T-shirt sales?

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