Don't worry if you just installed Firefox 10.0 cause there's a new Foxxy browser craving your attention, the Firefox 11.0 beta. This fresh build comes with an updated migration tool that can also import Chrome bookmarks, history, and cookies, and features add-on syncing capabilities, redesigned media controls for HTML5 video, and support for the CSS text-size-adjust property and the outerHTML property.

Firefox 11.0 also brings some goodies for devs like the Page Inspector 3D View, the new Style Editor tool, SPDY Support and more.

To download the Firefox 11.0 beta (for Windows, Mac OS or Linux) see this page.

Mozilla has today let loose the 10.0 version of the Firefox browser for Windows, Mac OS and Linux. This release includes several fixes, brings a hidden forward button (which appears when the user navigates back), Full Screen APIs, and features support for WebGL Anti-Aliasing, CSS3 3D-Transforms, and for the < bdi > element for bi-directional text isolation.

To download Firefox 10.0 (for any of three platforms mentioned above) visit this page.

The draconian internet censorship bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) being lobbied for by wealthy big media corporations (mostly fronted by the RIAA/MPAA, News Corporation and the like) and currently being debated in Congress is still losing support wherever one turns. A week ago, we reported that GoDaddy initially supported it, but soon changed its mind as it immediately began to haemorrhage customers. Now, it turns out that many video games companies are also coming out against it and with no pressure against them required.

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) is the game industry's trade association and stands firmly behind the much-despised bill, which means that the gaming industry as a whole is deemed to support SOPA. However, while some members openly support it, others just won't say so publically and some of its members actively do not support it, having made official statements to this effect. Here are just three of them:

After overtaking Mozilla Firefox in terms of web-browser market-share in December 2011, Google Chrome has its eyes trained on Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE), still the most popular web-browser in use today. According to the most recent StatCounter figures, at the rate at which Google Chrome's market-share is growing, it will overtake that of MSIE in 2012. It will do that as early as in June-July. Interestingly, Google Chrome is the youngest web-browser among its competitors, launched in Q4 2008, but has surpassed the market shares of much older competitors in a matter of months. Apart from stats, Google's web-advertising prowess makes Chrome's MSIE overtake in June-July seem realistic.

In what could be a sign of improving ties between Google and Mozilla, Peter Kasting, engineer in the Google Chrome web-browser development team referred to Mozilla as a partner, and not a competitor. The statement came in context of the recently-renewed search engine deal between the two, where Google pays Mozilla for setting Google as its primary search engine, both on its browser search bar, and its Firefox start page. Kasting also went to the extant of stating that Chrome isn't necessarily a profit-seeking operation by Google.

Kasting stated: "People never seem to understand why Google builds Chrome no matter how many times I try to pound it into their heads. It's very simple: the primary goal of Chrome is to make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible. It's completely irrelevant to this goal whether Chrome actually gains tons of users or whether instead the web advances because the other browser vendors step up their game and produce far better browsers. Either way the web gets better. Job done."

Since it already got its holiday present, the new three-year search agreement with Google, Mozilla has went into a gift-giving mode and served up the first public beta build of the next Firefox release, version 10.0.

According to the developers, Firefox 10 comes with Full Screen APIs (so web apps can run in full screen mode), with support for CSS3 3D-Transforms and WebGL Anti-Aliasing, and an added HTML5 treat, the < bdi > element for bi-directional text isolation.

The beta also includes a forward button which stays hidden until you navigate back, an Inspect tool with content highlighting, IndexedDB APIs, and a few fixes. Just like its predecessors, the Firefox 10.0 beta is available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux. The download links can be found here.

Open source software supporter Mozilla has today announced two things, the launch of the 9.0 version of Firefox, and the signing of a new search deal with Google. Firefox 9.0 features the Type Inference which boosts JavaScript performance, it brings better theme integration on Mac OS X Lion, and also includes goodies like:

- two finger swipe navigation for Mac OS X Lion
- support for querying Do Not Track status via JavaScript
- support for font-stretch
- improved support for text-overflow
- improved standards support for HTML5, MathML, and CSS
- fixes for several stability and security issues

Google Chrome is a fast and functional web browser. Let's get that out of the way first. But one of the main reasons a largely successful corporation put resources into developing a web-browser into a market that isn't very profitable, is cost-cutting. Since it's inception, the search bar Mozilla Firefox came with, has Google as its default search provider. Every time people search using that search bar in Firefox, Mozilla Foundation makes money. It is estimated that these Google searches amount to a majority of Mozilla's revenue, as Google pays it as much as 50 million dollars an year. Google Chrome, despite its genuine merits, is a cost-cutting operation. The more people use it over Firefox, the less Google has to pay Mozilla.

Web security researchers have historically rated Google Chrome has having the worst security and privacy compared to Firefox, and Internet Explorer (read this, and here), but the most recent research by Denver-based security consultancy Accuvant claimed that Google Chrome has the best security and privacy features, while Mozilla Firefox has the worst. Want to hear the kicker? That research by Accuvant was funded by Google. Want to hear another one? A similar research firm that has historically done vendor-funded research, NSS Labs, voiced strong objections to Accuvant's research, calling it an all-out attempt to malign Mozilla Firefox.

According to the latest data sourced by StatCounter for the month of November 2011, Google Chrome has overtaken Mozilla Firefox in terms of web-browser software market-share. The GlobalStats data provides a worldwide picture, and not just specific to a region. According to the data, Chrome took 25.69% of the worldwide market (up from 4.66% in November 2009) compared to Firefox's 25.23%.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer still maintains a strong lead globally with 40.63%. Google Chrome began in mid-2008 as an experimental minimalist UI web-browser based on the Chromium project, it is a multi-process tabbed web browser based on Apple Webkit and several other pieces of free, licensed, and open-source technologies. Its market share is on the rise. The stats can be accessed here.

You know what, we won't even go through the drill of expressing surprise that a new major version of Firefox is released on a nearly-monthly basis. Mozilla released Firefox 8.0, about 7 months after it released Firefox 4.0. And they look similar, except that the new one looks more polished. Granted, drastic UI changes can hit users' learning curve and preferences. The new UI sports essentially the same layout as its predecessors since version 4.0, but the elements look designed better, fused into the theme. It's the under-the-hood changes that are counting. Mozilla would never pack so many background changes to the monthly updates of Firefox 3.DOWNLOAD: Mozilla Firefox 8.0

With this release, Mozilla Firefox has the following changes over the previous generation:

Guru3D reports on a post from NVIDIA tech support on NVIDIA's forums regarding TDR issues (Timeout Detection & Recovery problem (display stopped responding but has successfully recovered)). These problems centre around Battlefield 3 and Windows Media Centre, which NVIDIA can't reproduce, so it looks like the problems may be with specific card models. NVIDIA rep ManuelG posted:

Hot on the heels of our previous story of Apple Macs falling prey to a DDoS trojan, we now have another Mac trojan come on the market, as explained by Sophos. Yes, the Apple platform must indeed be becoming more popular to get this one. It's an unfortunate fact of life that the popularity of any computing platform, including smartphones, can be judged by the number of criminals who will attack it. This little nasty, called OSX/Miner-D or 'DevilRobber', hijacks Mac OS X to perform various tricks, which include minting Bitcoins (the virtual and now virtually worthless currency) stealing usernames and passwords (of course) taking screenshots and stealing the victim's Bitcoin wallet while it's at it, if there is one. And for good measure:

it runs a script that copies information to a file called dump.txt regarding truecrypt data, Vidalia (TOR plugin for Firefox), your Safari browsing history, and .bash_history.

So, now the criminals also know about all the sites one has visited, eroding user privacy even more. It looks like this malware has covered all the bases, but wait, there's more.

Mozilla are developing a full-on 3D game engine for their Firefox browser. It looks like having a viable high performance game engine built right into the browser could allow first person shooter type games to reach a much wider audience and possibly even raise the bar for integrated graphics - we're already seeing this with the upcoming Sandy Bridge E processors. The project is called Paladin, which is developing the Gladius 3D gaming engine. To help test it, a basic 3D game, RescueFox has been prototyped, although that's not going to be developed further, but forking is welcomed. We'll let the Mozilla development blog take it away from here.

A little over a month after releasing Firefox 6.0, and quickly following it up with two minor updates (6.0.1 and 6.0.2), Mozilla released its next "major" version, Firefox 7.0 into the release channel. It is now clear that Mozilla Firefox is playing catch-up with other popular web-browsers in some sort of a version number game. The three year old Google Chrome is already into version 14, with version 16 already in the dev channel.

While Firefox users will not be in for a different user interface (it's bad to drastically change it from time to time), Firefox 7 does seem to come with several under-the-hood changes. To begin with, the Windows version features a brand-new rendering back-end that speeds up Canvas, a tweaked Sync system that instantly syncs changes to bookmarks and saved passwords, support for text-overflow: ellipsis, compliance with the Web Timing specification, WebSocket protocol updated from version 7 to 8, and improved support for MathML. The only UI change is that the protocol of the page loaded is hidden. The full URL will be copied when you copy the address in the bar. Firefox 7 is launched for all platforms it's available in: Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.DOWNLOAD: Mozilla Firefox 7

Mozilla's Firefox version number inflation drive continues as it plays catch up with Google Chrome 13 and Internet Explorer 9. Released today, Firefox 6 packs small number of new features, improved font rendering, along with the usual load of security and bug fixes. To begin with, the navigation toolbar got a couple of updates: the address bar now highlights the domain name of the loaded webpage. The site identity box (which displays the favicon, and security status of the loaded webpage), is now "streamlined" with the rest of the address bar.

Firefox 6 supports the latest draft version of WebSockets with a prefixed API. It adds support for EventSource / server-sent events, window.matchMedia. There's an improved web-console to help developers. The browser has better discoverability with Firefox Sync. It starts faster when using Panorama. Again, there's the a load of security and stability fixes.DOWNLOAD: Mozilla Firefox 6

One of the biggest promoters of open source software, and the group behind one of the most popular web-browsers, Mozilla Foundation, has undertaken a project of developing a mobile operating system referred to as "B2G" or Boot to Gecko, with the catchphrase "booting to the web". We expect it to be functionally modeled somewhere between Google's Android and Chrome operating systems. Essentially it is an operating system that boots to the web-browser that can get you browsing the web directly, or use cloud-based application software.

B2G might target a variety of devices ranging from smartphones to tablets and netbooks. Smartphone essentials such as telephony, SMS, camera, Bluetooth, NFC (near-field communication) and USB, will work with the browser via new web APIs. Applications can be cloud-based widgets, or software that uses open developer environments. Basic applications will be functionally identical to many of the apps that ship with Android or even Apple iOS. What's more, B2G's kernel and booting substrate will be designed to be 100% compatible with today's Android-compatible devices such as phones and tablets, so manufacturers don't have to redesign anything on their side. At this stage the project is still in its infancy, and is seeking community participation, the same participation that made Firefox and Thunderbird applications with the quality of proprietary software.

Mozilla is so frantically inflating Firefox version numbers, that its latest alpha (Aurora) build is already at version 7, less than a month after Firefox 5 final was released. Mozilla is playing catch-up with Google Chrome and Internet Explorer in the version number game. While informed users might find this silly, perhaps there is some data motivating Mozilla to inflate its version numbers, other than the fact that Google Chrome has already grabbed 20% of the browser market share, discretely updates itself, doesn't brag too much about version numbers; and the fact that Internet Explorer is back in the race with version 9 that greatly improved performance and features.

In any case, Firefox 7 is said to bring with it some new features, including faster startup time, better rendering performance, and more importantly, lower memory footprint. It also features better font rendering when GPU acceleration is enabled. An improved Sync manager syncs bookmarks and passwords instantly with your other devices. Firefox 7 Aurora (alpha, 7.0a2) can be downloaded in a wide range of languages, and for Windows, Mac, and Linux, from this page. Aurora builds can be unstable and buggy.

There must be some latent value in version number. Close to 3 years old, Google Chrome is already at version 14 in its developer channel. The grand old man of web-browsers, Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE), which has a much slower release cycle, is at version 9. The second oldest browser in production, Opera, is at version 11. That leaves Mozilla Firefox, which is relatively newer to the market, but crawled its way past generations by versions 1.0x or 0.5x, with 0.0.1x in near-monthly minor updates. With the browser-wars hotting up as Google Chrome maintains its breakneck development cycle and MSIE regained competitiveness with version 9, Mozilla Firefox is ceding market-share. Perhaps this is pushing Mozilla to speed up its update cycle.

In Mozilla's case, this seems more like an version number inflation, because Firefox 4 was released just this March, and has only had one minor update since (4.0.1). The group is already looking to release the next "big release", Firefox 5, on 21 June, 2011. Its file locations on Mozilla's FTP are already leaked. Unlike with older major releases where each comes with a changed user interface, layout, or at least new icons; Firefox 5 user interface is identical to that of Firefox 4. The changes here are a faster webpage rendering engine, improved HTML5 support, the ability to pin bookmarked webpages to the Windows Taskbar a-là MSIE 9, and a built-in Adobe PDF reader a-là Chrome.

DOWNLOAD: Mozilla Firefox 5 (Win32)

Released to the web, Mozilla Firefox 4 has been downloaded over 6 million times in 24 hours since its launch. The figure is three times greater than that of Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, which clocked about 2 million downloads in its first 24 hours since launch. Firefox 4 is the latest version of the popular open-source web-browser software, it introduced radical design changes to its user interface, and embraced a faster GPU-accelerated rendering engine. Firefox 4 can be downloaded from here.

Mozilla Corporation unveiled the "latest and greatest" version of its popular web-browser, Mozilla Firefox 4. With this release, the open-source browser achieves all essential features common with the latest generation of web-browsers that include Google Chrome 10+ and Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, which are: HTML5 support, and GPU-accelerated webpage drawing. Apart from being a lot faster than Firefox 3.6, the new browser sports a completely new user interface that shifts tabs to the titlebar, shifts menus to a "Firefox" button, and consolidates the address bar, search bar, and navigation buttons into a single line, which it refers to as the "Awesome Bar". Apart from a new bookmark manager, Firefox lets you group tabs to streamline multitasking on the browser. Mozilla Firefox 4 will be available to a variety of platforms.DOWNLOAD: Mozilla Firefox 4

After the much hyped Internet Explorer 9 launch, it's time for the open-source Firefox to get its facelift. Mozilla has decided to launch the stable version of Mozilla Firefox 4 on the 22nd of March. Firefox 4 is a single-process web-browser that runs plugins in separate container processes. It will be up to date with the latest in web standards, including HTML5, will feature a much faster Javascript engine, and will use GPU hardware acceleration to speed up rendering. March 22 is turning out to be quite a day for the tech sphere, with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 590 graphics accelerator, and EA/Crytek's self-proclaimed blockbuster game release, Crysis 2, also releasing on the same day.

After subjecting itself to the dark ages as Mozilla Firefox, and later Google Chrome started eating into its market-share, Microsoft's Internet Explorer team released version 9 of its [then] iconic browser, which actually kept up with current standards in terms of speed, features, and functionality. Internet Explorer 9 stable will be released to web on March 14, 2011.

MSIE 9 made its first public release in September 2010, in the form of a functional beta, and was fed by the occasional stability updates. It later assumed the form of the first Release Candidate in early February 2011, with a slightly tweaked user-interface. Once it achieves a stable build status, it will be updated regularly under Microsoft's cumulative security updates. Internet Explorer 9 is an "omnibox"-styled, tabbed, multi-process web-browser. Each tab and running ActiveX plugin runs in its own process. The browser is up to date in terms of standards including HTML5, packs a fast Javascript engine, and uses GPU hardware acceleration to draw web-page contents.

The most popular alternative to Internet Explorer, Firefox, may get an overhaul of its feature-set that could make its performance a lot more competitive with that of Google Chrome. Firefox may finally embrace out of process plugins, and a new rendering engine that makes use of Microsoft Direct2D, with which it can offload a big chunk of rendering to the GPU. While this may not speed up page load times for the bandwidth-constrained, it will certainly make the browser more responsive, especially as web-page complexity grows with new technologies such as HTML5.

As of now, the inclusion of GPU-accelerated rendering is only slated to be in the form of an alpha release, which could make it to a stable release around an year's time, and not part of Gecko's next release, version 1.9.3. A stable Firefox based on Gecko 1.9.3 will be released only by October. Developers hope that the next release of Gecko will be able to include GPU-accelerated rendering. The other major feature addition is out-of-process plugins. Not to be confused with multi-process rendering, out-of-process plugins feature runs plugins such as Adobe Flash, Adobe Acrobat, Sun Java, Microsoft Silverlight, etc., in processes separate from the browser's main process. So in case there is an erratic page element, it could be ended without crashing the entire browser. Developers aim to have a stable release with this feature by the end of this quarter on both Windows and Linux, with a Mac release a little later.

Everyone who is more than familiar with the term 'the Internet', may have come across, or has even been affected by Mozilla Firefox, one of the most popular web-browser software. The cross-platform, open-source web-browser was born out of the Mozilla project, after practical, and minimalist simplification of the user interface. This, coupled with good performance for the stature of an Internet Explorer alternative, being safer against spyware, popups, and malicious addon software, quickly became popular, and part of the web-centric pop-culture.

Firefox has also helped shape several things in the connected IT industry. It replenished the credibility of open-source model of software development, and forced content providers to adhere to open-standards. Firefox today turns five years old, which is 'a long time on the Internet', as its team puts it. The SpreadFirefox community have rolled out a portal celebrating the event, it can be found here.

Mozilla today announced the newest stable version of Firefox, version 3.5, which has been available in various developer preview forms for months. The new version is a milestone release, unlike timely updates that Firefox receives on a near-monthly basis, and boasts of better performance. For instance, Firefox 3.5 outperforms its previous version (Firefox 3) by over 100% in the SunSpider benchmark.

Under the hood, this new version extends support for HTML5 audio and video elements, including native support for open-source formats such as Ogg Theora. It uses a faster TraceMonkey Javascript engine (which is behind the performance boost in SunSpider), It supports downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, canvas-driven text, ICC profiles, and SVG transformations. The user interface remains fairly identical to its predecessor, except for a few minor changes. The browser finally supports a private browsing feature which MSIE 8 (InPrivate) and Google Chrome (Incognito mode) have. Existing users of Firefox will be prompted to upgrade to the new browser. Others can find it here.