Mozilla’s Do Not Track feature, which allows users to tell websites that they would like to opt-out of being tracked by third parties, is starting to gain some traction among both users and publishers. According to new data shared by Mozilla today, 8.6% of Firefox desktop users and 19% of mobile users now turn this opt-in feature on. The latest company to announce that it will honor Do Not Track is Twitter.

As Do Not Track isn’t so much a technical solution that just blocks tracking cookies and more like a gentlemen’s agreement between sites and their users, its success completely depends on being supported by publishers and developers.

As for the major browser developers, Microsoft and Apple are already on board (and IE9, it is worth noting, already offers a somewhat more aggressive “tracking protection” tool). Google, too, plans to support Do Not Track later this year and Opera is building it into its upcoming Opera 12 release.

A number of major online companies, including our parent company AOL, as well as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have already pledged support for Do Not Track. For Twitter, which doesn’t rely on tracking and third-party advertising as much as other sites, pledging support for Do Not Track was probably not a very hard decision.

The Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, just mentioned Twitter now supports Do Not Track. We applaud the FTC’s leadership on DNT.

— Twitter (@twitter) May 17, 2012

A new version of Firefox used to be a big deal, but since Mozilla switched to a rapid release schedule, these updates are becoming pretty routine. Today, Mozilla launched Firefox 12. For most users, this is likely one of the least interesting Firefox updates in recent history, as it only introduces a few minor changes. For developers, however, this update is a bit more interesting. In total, this new version of Firefox includes 85 improvements to the browser’s built-in developer tools.

For most users, the only major change in this release (besides the usual bug fixes) is that Firefox will now only ask Windows users to click on the infamous “user account control dialog” (UAC) when they first install Firefox. Once that’s done, Firefox can then update itself in the background (you can also turn this feature off, though, if you prefer to stay in control of when you update your browser). This silent updates project for Firefox has been in the works for a long time (at one point it was promised to arrive with version 10). For now, this feature is Windows-only. Mac and Linux users will likely get silent updates in the next version.

For developers, this new version brings a number of improvements. Most of these aren’t major changes, but they do include some things that will make your life a bit easier if you are a web developer who uses Firefox. Thanks to these changes, “developers no longer need to reload the page to see messages in the Web Console, and Scratchpad adds Find and Jump to Line commands to the editor.”

This morning, Amazon announced that Kindle Cloud Reader, the nifty HTML5-based Web app that lets customers read Kindle books in their browser (online or offline), is now available for Mozilla Firefox 6 and above, in addition to Google Chrome and Safari (on iPad and desktop).

Not much else to report in terms of news, but Chris Blizzard, Director of Platform Product Management for Mozilla’s Web browser, says there are now more than 450 million Firefox users worldwide.

If you’re on a website that uses accounts, the sign in button can be anywhere. Sure, there are some common best practices, but I can think of dozens of sites that put them all over the place. Mozilla is looking to fix that, by bringing the sign in to the browser level.

A new experimental extension that Mozilla has released for Firefox does exactly this. When it’s installed, you’ll see a new “Sign In” button just to the left of the URL box. Clicking this, pops open a window that prompts you for a username and password for the site you’re on. It then shows you when you’re signed into a site, and gives you one-click ability to sign out. Easy. Simple. Nice.

Of course, the site you’re on has to support this functionality. But Mozilla has made it easy to do so, as they outline in their post on the subject. And the best part is that this can be used with any type of log in — it can be a broad one like OpenID, or specific ones like a blog or even Facebook, Twitter, etc — again, if those sites were to implement something like this.

One important note:

It’s worth noting that this feature doesn’t communicate with any server-side components, and doesn’t capture, store or transfer any personal information. The button is semantically the same as clicking “sign in” on a page: it just tells the page you want to sign in (or sign out) right now.

Essentially, Mozilla is just creating a common place for the sign in button to reside within the browser chrome itself. Though they also note that it will support cookies if the site turns that functionality on as well.

While this is open for any site/service to use, it is also an extension of another Mozilla project: BrowserID. As they announced here last month, their idea for this new web identification system is similar to something like OpenID, which has never quite caught on (Mozilla also says it’s more secure and seamless). Mozilla is trying to re-think identification on the web from a high level.

Beyond BrowserID (which is an open technology anyway), Mozilla doesn’t have any real skin in this game. But some of their competitors could. For example, Google is in the process of implementing a signed in experience for their Chrome browser. This already works with Sync, but Google is working on profiles for Chrome as well. Being signed in on the browser level also allows you to be signed in to Google sites, which is key for something like Chrome OS.

Meanwhile, Facebook has been working with RockMelt on a Facebook signed-in experience for that browser (which, coincidentally is also based on Chromium).

And on a broader level, both Google and Facebook have been thinking about this always-signed-in experience quite a bit. This is especially important in mobile, where it can be more annoying to type in usernames and passwords over and over again. This, along with the focus on being a central identity for the web has led to projects like Facebook’s Single Sign On.

So while Mozilla may have mostly noble intentions here, I still suspect we’re going to see more along these lines from their competitors that aren’t quite as noble. That’s not to say they’re meant to be evil, just done for more selfish reasons. Google already has their browser. I’d bet that Facebook will have one sooner or later. This could help Mozilla, as they could end up as the truly open alternative.

A month just ended, which means new stats. In the world of web browsers, there are two particularly interesting ones of significance. One points to “open” web browsers now in the majority amongst those that surf the web. Another points to WebKit browsers passing Firefox, to claim the number two position amongst web surfers.

As first noticed by Google’s Peter Beverloo this morning, StatCounter’s July numbers show that Firefox and Chrome, when combined, now account for over 50 percent of web browsing. Technically, Firefox now has a 27.95 percent share, while Chrome has 22.14 percent. Combined, their 50.09 percent easily beat IE’s 42.45 percent.

“According to StatCounter, open-source browsers now serve the majority of the Web!,” Beverloo wrote this morning. Technically, that’s sort of inaccurate since it’s Chromium and not Chrome itself that is open-source, but we’ll let it slide. Any way you slice it, the milestone is pretty amazing. Especially when you consider that as late as 2006 by some counts, IE still had over 90 percent market share.

StatCounter’s numbers also show something else: Chrome is rising so fast that it should surpass Firefox in the next few months. As the numbers above indicate, the two are now just under 6 percent apart — the closest they’ve ever been. And while Chrome continues to rise, Firefox has been falling for the past year. If that trend continues, Chrome should surpass Firefox before the end of this year.

Of course, that’s just one measurement tool. There are many out there. And another shows something else interesting for the month of July: WebKit browsers are now second to only IE, as AppleInsider pointed out earlier today.

NetMarketShare’s numbers point to this milestone. They have Chrome at 13.49 percent and Safari at 8.10 percent. Combined, that puts the WebKit-based browsers at 21.59 percent, just ahead of Firefox’s 21.47 percent. IE still has 52.71 percent share, by their count.

Why the discrepancy between the two sets of stats? One reason is that NetMarketShare’s numbers include all browsers on all platforms, while StatCounter’s numbers focus on computer-based browsing. In other words, mobile browsing is included in one, but not the other. That’s why Safari is much higher in NetMarketShare’s numbers (StatCounter has Safari at 5.17 percent — still an all-time high there).

Another reason for the differences are is that the two services rely on different ways of getting their numbers. Regardless, the trends are clear when you look at both sets of stats: IE continues to fall, Firefox continues to dwindle, Safari continues to rise slowly, while Chrome continues to skyrocket. This means good things for both “open” web browsers (Chrome + Firefox) and WebKit browsers (Chrome + Safari).

For what it’s worth, TechCrunch’s own numbers show the same basic trends: Chrome and Safari have been on the rise for some time now, while Firefox and IE have been falling. The difference is that Chrome is already the dominant browser on TechCrunch (and has been for some time) — in fact, it’s now nearly a full 10 percent past number two, (and long-time champ) Firefox. Chrome had a 32.64 percent browser share amongst TechCrunch readers in July, while Firefox had 23.59 percent.

According to StatCounter, open-source browsers now serve the majority of the Web! goo.gl/DPcBq #Firefox #Chrome—
Peter Beverloo (@beverloo) August 01, 2011

But before you start rolling your eyes, Mozilla adds-on, “This number doesn’t include Personas, and even excludes popular add-ons bundled with other software that the user hasn’t actively agreed to install”. So apparently these aren’t force-installed add-ons then. I think. The company then went on to say it had expected the percentage of add-ons downloaded on Firefox 4 (which was released on March 22nd) to drop as time went on, but the figure “has stayed between 89% and 85% since launch”. (I’m surprised that this little self-congratulatory admission didn’t come with 5 exclamation points.)

Mozilla has also found that, on average, users download 5 add-ons, and that Firefox has racked up 2.5 billion total downloads and that 580 million add-ons are in use every day on Firefox 4. (Which does seem to be slightly higher than Mozilla’s add-on data available here.)

Back in April, Mozilla announced that it was moving to a rapid-fire release cycle, as well as introducing another channel called “Aurora”, which as my colleague MG Siegler pointed out, is the equivalent of Chrome’s “Dev Build”. Aurora falls in between Mozilla’s “Nightly” build and their “Beta” build, because users had come to expect that “Nightly” (which they had even renamed “Minefield”) would be closer to a beta or ready-to-release build — which it often wasn’t. Aurora is intended to be the version in which users and developers can play a greater role in participating in the building of new Firefox releases.

This announcement also came on the heels of Google’s announcement that it would be releasing a new version of Chrome every six weeks. Now, it seems that Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla have all sped up their release cycles to get new versions of their browsers into the market faster.

Thus, staying true to their promise, Mozilla also announced today that Firefox 5 is available for download on Windows, Mac, Linux and Android.

According to the company’s statement, Firefox 5 “includes more than 1,000 improvements and performance enhancements that make it easier to discover and use all of the innovative features in Firefox”. The release includes added support for “more modern Web technologies” that will enhance developers’ ability to create “Firefox add-ons, Web applications, and websites”.

Firefox 5 also adds its “Do Not Track” privacy feature to Android, “making Firefox the first browser to support Do Not Track on multiple platforms”, the company said. The “Do Not Track” feature was designed to give Firefox users greater control over how their browser footprints are tracked and used across the Web. The feature essentially tells websites that users have chosen to opt-out of tracking — and is now “easier to find in Firefox Preferences”.

However, while Mozilla boasts improved standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL, and canvas, as part of its new support for “more modern Web technologies”, according to PCMag, Firefox 5 is still scoring the same as version 4 on HTML5test.com, which measures the overall level of HTML5 support and performance. Firefox 5 scored 240 out of a possible 400, compared to Chrome, which comes in at 291.

So, Firefox 5 may not knock your socks off. After all, the IE Team decided to send Mozilla a celebratory cupcake for the Firefox 5 release. (More like a sarcastic cupcake, methinks. Though still delicious, no doubt.) But this release is, at the very least, good to see Mozilla living up to its promise to keep its release cycle quick and cunning — like some sort of fox. Because when it comes to the Web — and mobile, and most things these days — quicker is better.

Twitter has just announced on their blog two new key bits of functionality: improved search and photos. The latter, we’ve obviously been all over in recent days, as we first broke the news a couple days ago. The former, we mentioned was likely coming as well. But there are a few details we didn’t know.

First of all, today brings a completely new version of Twitter Search that promises “more relevant” tweets, but also shows you related pictures and videos in the right-side pane. Even more interesting is that Twitter has partnered with Mozilla for a new version of the Firefox browser with Twitter built into the search bar. (There is also an add-on for current Firefox users.)

Notes Twitter:

And if you use this new version of Firefox with Twitter, you can type a #hashtag or @username directly into the address bar to go right to a search results page (try #idol) or someone’s profile page (like @nba). Simple.

And then there are photos. While this feature isn’t live just yet, in the “next several weeks” you’ll be able to upload a photo attached to a tweet right from twitter.com. This will work on the mobile clients as well, obviously.

Yesterday, we speculated that Twitter would be using Amazon to host these photos rather than putting them on their own servers. Instead, they’re partnering with Photobucket to host these photos. Interesting.

Twitter also says that they’re working with mobile carriers around the world to add MMS capabilities for simple picture attachment as well.

No word on the planned iOS 5 integration for Twitter, but that was to be expected. No way Twitter is allowed to announce that before Apple does at WWDC next week.

Mozilla’s Do Not Track allows users to have more control over how their browsing behavior is tracked and used online. When the feature is enabled, Firefox will tell advertising networks and other websites and applications that you want to opt-out of third-party tracking for purposes like behavioral advertising. Basically, Mozilla implements an HTTP header that Firefox users can elect to send that tells ad networks they don’t want to be tracked.

To turn Do Not Track on in Firefox for Android, you tap on Browser Tools within the app. From the Preferences pane, you tap on the box next to “Tell sites not to track me” to turn this option on or off, where you can also choose to save passwords and allow cookies. The same feature was also launched for Firefox’s web browser in February.

This week the FTC called for ‘Do No Track’ technology to be added to mobile browsers, as more consumers use their smartphone’s browser to surf the web. Now that Firefox has added this feature to its mobile browser, it’s expected that others will follow suit.

In a post yesterday on their Chromium, it’s pretty clear that Google feels their V8 benchmark suite is the best. In fact, they directly call our their rivals’ suites, noting bugs and saying that they must evolve. And then they go one step further: providing links to versions of the rivals’ suites supposedly perfected by Google!

Wow. In the extremely nerdy (and fairly incestuous) browser world, this is hardcore.

Specifically, Google says that SunSpider, first developed by Apple in 2007, contains tests that are “less relevant to the web in 2011″. Here’s the best part:

Even for the more relevant tests, JavaScript has gotten so fast that many finish in only a few milliseconds. This just isn’t long enough to figure out which engine is faster–a golf cart and a Tesla will finish a 10-foot race in nearly the same time.

Ouch.

To fix this issue, Google made its own modified version of SunSpider which essentially runs tests 50 times consecutively to better gauge speed. When the tests are run this way, Google says that “the results begin to reflect Chrome’s true performance.” Naturally. According to Google, Chrome is more than 30 percent faster (in the test results) when measured this way.

Meanwhile, they say that Kraken, the new benchmark suite Mozilla just created, is “in better shape” — but buggy. “As a result, the benchmark is less useful and has even (mis)led us to spend time making some irrelevant optimizations in Chrome,” they note.

Again, ouch!

To get around this, Google is now hosting a new version of Kraken “built directly from Mozilla’s source code repository”.

Are these claims about rivals’ suites legit? It’s hard to say for sure, but I have a feeling that the rivals themselves would dispute that. It is a bit odd that Google is reworking the suites, and that the end result is Chrome performing much better in the tests.

Of course, my eyes don’t lie. I’m a Chrome guy all the way because in daily usage I find it to be much faster than either Safari or Firefox (on a Mac, at least). Until that changes, I’m trusting Google on this one.

BT:Engage is “an evolutionary leap in browser add-ons that help online publishers connect with their communities in an easy-to-use browser theme wizard.” From their about page:

The Internet browser is the most frequently used application on the computer. It should never again be a passive vehicle for seeing the web.

BT:Engage gives you the power to transform the drab, and kind of boring, browser into a beautiful engagement tool for your business or community. In moments, you can build your own custom browser theme with images that you upload and buttons you choose. It’s even easier if select from our vast library of images.

Built on the Lithium PHP framework, with Mongodb and a lot of Javascript, the core functionality of BT:Engage is usable right now. Obviously I have zero theme designing chops, so don’t take my paltry themes above as an indictment of BT:Engage.

The first 99 readers to sign up for an account with the invite code TECHCRUNCH can take it for a spin. You’re asked to provide feedback to help make the site better, so don’t expect a perfect experience right out of the gate.

Mozilla released its new Firefox 4 exactly a month ago today and within a day it had more than twice as many downloads as Internet Explorer 9 after its launch. Some where around midnight tonight the browser build will hit 100 million downloads after one month in existence, according to the Firefox download stats ticker.

What’s more impressive is that the browser has now taken over 7.94% of the worldwide browser market according to StatCounter, with Internet Explorer 8.0 at 29.99%, Firefox 3.6 at 24.43% and Chrome 10 at 15.35%.

When compared to the percentages two days after its launch it looks like Firefox 4 has taken a solid chunk out of Firefox 3.6 usage: On March 22 IE had 45% of the global market, followed by Firefox 3.6 with 30% and Chrome with 17%. Firefox 4 was at 1.95% then.

Like Erick I too had stopped using Firefox because it was so excruciatingly slow, and was pleasantly surprised at how much faster 4 was compared to 3.6 and even compared to Chrome when loading Flash-heavy sites.

But maybe being speedier isn’t enough to win the high stakes browser wars? On the Firefox 4 launch day, Chrome came out with its Chrome 11 beta, including support for an HTML5 speech input API (which essentially means that you’ll be able to talk to your computer).

Jeez.

Screencap: AlnAndr

While Google Chrome may still only have about 10 percent market share in the web browser world, it’s effect on the space has been much greater. For example, remember when Google said that Chrome would begin releasing new versions every six weeks? Well now we’re seeing both Mozilla and Microsoft move towards that type of rapid iteration. In fact, Mozilla has moved so much in that direction that they’ve decided to alter their standard release model.

In a post today on their blog, Mozilla has formally introduced the new channel structure for Firefox builds. And this means the creation of a new type of Firefox build that neither a nightly (read: highly unstable) or beta (read: fairly polished) — they’re calling it Aurora. In Chrome parlance, it’s essentially their “Dev” build.

Previously, Mozilla had a Nightly -> Beta -> Release cycle, but it wasn’t utilized ideally. As they note here, they tried calling the nightly builds “Minefield” to imply they were risky, but that lead beta users to believe their builds should be highly stable (which they weren’t always). So Mozilla is sticking this new Aurora build in between the Nightly build and the Beta build. (They’re also killing off Minefield and replacing it with a build simply called “Nightly” — complete with a new icon.)

Mozilla hopes that this better sets expectations in terms of what users can expect from the various builds. In turn, they hope this will allow them to cycle faster through new builds (for example, Aurora is already technically Firefox 5, even though Firefox 4 was just released).

Again, you can likely thank Google for all of this. Not only have they pushed for rapid iteration with Chrome, but their Dev -> Beta -> Stable channels have becomes pretty well known amongst users. In effect what Mozilla is doing here is making Aurora their “Dev” build, Beta their “Beta” build, and Final Release their “Stable” build. Meanwhile, Firefox Nightly is now more like the builds of Chromium that Chrome developers often try out and develop on, but aren’t meant for regular users.

One thing Mozilla definitely does better here is the icons. If you’re using Aurora, you’ll have a different icon than if you’re using Nightly. (Though Beta and Release are the same standard Firefox icons.) Compare that to Chrome where aside from Chromium’s blue icon, I have no idea what build of Chrome I’m using (without hitting the About area in the menu) as all the icons look the same.

You can find and try out the new channels here.

Social media dashboard company HootSuite this morning announced that it has acquired an add-on for the Firefox 4 browser called TwitterBar, which has been downloaded nearly 2 million times to date and enables users to post to a variety of social networks straight from the web address bar.

HootSuite has renamed the add-on HootBar.

In two years, HootSuite says it has grown to over 1.5 million users worldwide.

The company added that it has recently turned cash-flow positive, after introducing paid plans just four months ago. The company currently employs 48 people.

HootBar, initially created as TwitterBar by Tony Farndon and developer Christopher Finke, is software licensed under the GPL v2. It is now part of HootSuite’s suite of extensions.

Terms of the purchase were not disclosed.

The HootBar basically lets users post messages to Twitter and other social networks, directly from the Firefox browser’s address bar and from multiple accounts, using simple commands.

If you’re so inclined, you can get it here.

A week after launching the official release of Firefox 4, Mozilla is following up today with Mobile Firefox for Android and Maemo phones (for all twelve of you Maemo fans out there). For Android, the browser is now available on the Android Market,.

The Android browser fairly rocks. It almost makes me want to switch to Android. The mobile browser syncs all of your bookmarks, browsing history, passwords, and even open tabs with your Firefox browser on your desktop. So you can pick up browsing where you left off when you leave your desk. This syncing is huge. The browser won’t be availabl for the iPhoen anytime soon because of restrictions Apple places on browsing apps—for one thing, it doesn’t use Webkit. (But Mozilla does offer an iPhone app that syncs mobile Safari with your Firefox desktop browser).

One thing Firefox mobile doesn’t have is support for Flash, even though Android has a big partnership with Adobe to make Flash work on mobile. I spoke with some folks from Mozilla yesterday about this topic. Eventually, Firefox mobile will support Flash, but it is just not there yet in terms of responsiveness. The focus right now is on HTML5 and CSS. It is amazing some of the 3D effects, animations, video, and other in-browser graphics you can now get with HTML5. Check out some of the demos here after you download Firefox to your phone.

Some other features I really like in the browser is the way it handles tabbed browsing, its snapping zoom, and the Awesome Screen. Your tabs are always available in a thin column on the left which can be accessed with a simple swipe. If you are on a webpage that is not optimized for a mobile device, you can snap the zoom with a double tap to align with a column or box on the page and then scroll up and down normally. The Awesome Screen is the mobile version of the Awesome Bar on FireFox desktop. As you type, it makes suggestions based on your previous browsing history, bookmarks, and open tabs.

How many of the more than 7 million Firefox 4.0 downloads do you account for? Mozilla has a running counter that’s keeping track of how many people, and from where, have downloaded the latest version of its Firefox browser, which was officially released yesterday. The browsers wars are hotting up all over again.

You’ll recall that Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9 only a few weeks ago, but that would (obviously) only be of interest to Windows users.

Google, too, recently updated its Chrome browser.

Hardware acceleration has popped up in these browsers, meaning that those of you with any sort of discrete graphics card can experience a smoother ride, as it were. There’s also increased support for HTML5.

TweakGuides has a handy article that details some of the more power user things you can do with the Firefox 4.

The Beeb kindly points out that there seems to be less heat this time around. Back in 2008, Firefox 3 was downloaded by more than 8 million people in 24 hours. A little more than 5 million people downloaded Firefox 4 within 24 hours of its release.

Part of the decline in interest (if you can call it that) would have to be attributed to the quick adoption of Google Chrome since its introduction in September, 2008. Why download Firefox 4 if you’ve already moved onto Chrome?

Mozilla has just released Firefox 4, and in less than a day clocked more than twice the downloads Microsoft boasted about after the release of Internet Explorer 9.

Now website analytics company StatCounter says Mozilla’s new browser has already taken 1.95 percent of the worldwide Internet browser market.

In contrast, StatCounter adds, Internet Explorer 9 has taken only 0.87 percent of the worldwide browser market a week after its debut.

And as you can tell from the screenshot above, not only Firefox 4 but also the recently released Opera 11 browser has a steady lead over IE9 at this point.

Worth noting: Internet Explorer 9 isn’t compatible with Windows XP, ageing operating system that was released ten years ago but still has an enormous user base around the world.

When all versions of each browser are taken into account, IE still leads the global market with 45 percent, followed by Firefox with 30 percent and Chrome with 17 percent, StatCounter says. The web analytics company recently reported that Firefox overtook IE to become the number one browser in Europe for the first time in December 2010.

In the US, IE (all versions combined) leads the market with an even bigger margin: 48 percent, followed by Firefox at 26 percent and Chrome at 14 percent.

StatCounter says its Global Stats numbers are based on aggregate data collected on a sample exceeding 15 billion page views per month from a network of more than three million websites.

As you’re aware by now, earlier today Mozilla officially unveiled Firefox 4 to the world. At first glance, it’s a great update with massive speed improvements. And that’s good, because that’s exactly what they need to combat the fast-rising Chrome browser from Google. But Google isn’t sitting still either.

This afternoon, Google pushed Chrome 11 into beta. On the surface, users might see this as little more than the version which brings the new Chrome icon. But underneath, there are a couple awesome new things going on as well.

One of the new features is added support for the HTML5 speech input API. This means that you’ll be able to talk to your computer and Chrome can interpret it. Those who have become accustomed to doing this on Android and other mobile devices will love this. More importantly, it’s an HTML5 spec that any developer will be able to take advantage of, not just Google.

If you’re running Chrome 11, you can try it out here. It works very well. You speak, and the browser is able to transcribe what you say. No Flash, no plug-in. Yep. Awesome.

The Chrome 11 beta also bring an initial take on GPU-accelerated 3D CSS, Google notes. This means that developers will also be able to create websites with 3D effects using CSS shortly. Again, very cool.

As the version numbers have been rapidly increasing, Google says it doesn’t like touting new version bumps. But this one is pretty nifty. And it should go stable fairly soon as well.

If you’ve already downloaded the new Firefox 4 today, the first you probably noticed is how much zippier it is. I pretty much had stopped using Firefox altogether because of the creekiness of its previous versions compared to Chrome, Safari, and IE9. But the new Firefox 4, which Mozilla claims is 6 times as fast as before, puts it back in the same pack at least as the rest. It’s been downloaded nearly 2 million times as of this writing (check the counter for more up-to-the-second numbers).

I’m sure there are plenty of benchmark tests that show one browser is faster than the other, and vice versa, but my initial reactions after playing around with Firefox 4 today and comparing it side by side with Chrome is that it is just as fast if not faster. It depends on which website I visit. TechCrunch, for instance, loads a second or two faster by my stopwatch. Without the stopwatch, I can’t tell the difference. And that’s a good thing for Firefox, because speed is my No. 1 requirement for a Web browser. Nothing else is nearly as important. Sluggishness pushes users away. So that’s fixed.

Firefox also supports all sorts of HTML5 and other modern Web apps. If you want to check some out, go to its Web O’ Wonder page where you can test 360-degree videos, animations, in-browser games and other highly graphic apps. You can se emost of them on Chrome as well, but these are tuned especially for Firefox 4. The360-degree video, for instance, looks much better in Firefox and the panning around is much smoother. But there are plenty of HTML5 apps that look better in Chromeor Safari, so don’t let canned demos sway you.

The new Firefox also has some new security features like a Do Not Track option for online ads, lets you sync tabs and browsers across to mobile browsers, and makes it easier to group tabs and see all open tabs in a thumbnail view. I don’t know if the speed and other features are enough to make me want to come back. I’ve got everything set up on Chrome so nicely and I am a creature of habit. But if Chrome starts acting up or crashing my browsers, it’s nice to know I’ve got plenty of other options—and Firefox is once again on that list.

At great long last, Mozilla has revealed the first developer release of their Web Apps Project, which aims to build the infrastructure for an open web app ecosystem.

Back in May of 2010, Google announced plans for what would become the Chrome Web Store. Mozilla responded immediately with plans for its own web store, now known as the Web Apps Project.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Google was first to the punch; the Chrome Web Store launched in December, and we’ve been waiting for Mozilla’s “more open” rejoinder since. The initial phase of Mozilla’s project is finally here and shows that the company is making a serious attempt to take advantage of what few limitations there are in Chrome’s ecosystem. Of course, whether it can compete toe-to-toe in the long run remains to be seen.

As to what we can expect: Mozilla’s web apps will run on Firefox browsers on desktops, tablets and smartphones, just as Chrome web apps run on Chrome and (eventually) corresponding Android devices. Yet, the difference is that Mozilla wants to play nice with Chrome and others (which isn’t exactly a new trend, considering Google pays Mozilla to run their search bar in Firefox), by offering Chrome users the ability to use its web apps through the release of a plug-in.

For its part, Google has said that Chrome web apps will also run in other browsers, but we have yet to see that — or much talk of that, since the Chrome Web Store launched a few months ago.

In the spirit of the new and open web, these new Mozilla-backed applications can be built using HTML5 and Javascript, and developers can use the stable APIs, utilities, and documentation in this release to publish their app to users, or to create a web app store or directory. Users can review a gallery of user experience ideas and beta-quality versions of Firefox and Chrome add-ons that integrate the web app experience more tightly with the browser.

This all sounds like a good start to me, because I will tell you that while I am a fan of Chrome, when using web apps in the browser, the experience (IMHO) is almost identical to that of using a website. When I click on the app’s icon, it opens in a new tab, takes up the full page, and just opens the URL. In terms of front-end user experience, I’m left wondering why it was necessary to even download the app in the first place? (That being said, Chrome continues to add cool features like this to improve the overall usability of its web apps.) But, until the experience of a browser-based web app truly distinguishes itself (for the average non-techie) from that of visiting its sister website, it’s a zero sum game. This seems to be a big part of the reason why so many continue to prefer the experience of a native apps to that of web apps.

Web developers and designers are beholden to certain expectations when changing features of a company’s website that the designer of a company’s native app may not be. Take Facebook for example: every time the site’s profile template is changed or layout is toyed with, millions of people are up in arms, shouting for blood (myself included). With native apps, there are fewer expectations and strings attached — the canvas is essentially blank — so developers can start fresh and figure out how to optimize the best features of its website with the possibilities inherent in an app.

What’s cool about Mozilla’s conception of web apps is that they are now easier to find, launch and synchronize across mobile and desktop platforms — they can be grabbed and arranged with a single click and will hopefully keep my credit card information safe, while sharing information with other sites that is both safe and improves the experience of a web app in such a way that a traditional website could not.

The deeply integrated in-browser experience that will allow syncing of applications with mobile devices and native web browser and OS integration is still on the way (this primary release is really just aimed to familiarize developers with the platform’s capabilities). And considering Mozilla announced its final beta of Firefox 4 last week, it remains to be seen whether these features will make it into Firefox 4. Seeing as Firefox, unlike Chrome, is not the default browser on millions of Android devices, it had better make it in and it had better work well.

For developers, cross-platform fragmentation is a big problem when developing apps, requiring them to create different versions of the same app for different phones, different browsers, different OSes, and so on. Then trying to sync updates of an app across the various iterations? *Shudder*. In the case of web apps, if you have to use a specific browser to run a certain web app, then that app is by default a Chrome app or a Firefox app, etc. You’re locked in. Mozilla is resisting the Chrome web app paradigm — in which a web app is designed for a particular browser (Chrome) in a channel the proprietor controls — in the attempt to make the experience more packaged, wherein the user chooses the channel and the browser in which to run the app.

So, by giving developers the opportunity to create their own web app stores or publish apps directly to the user and, in turn, allowing users to use these apps on any device or desktop, the experience can hopefully become significantly more open. Though, knowing its many implications, I say “open” haltingly. Of course, Google has the advantage of its humungous cloud and, having created a better (speedier and less buggy, IMHO) user experience with Chrome, it will probably continue to be the more trusted source. Perhaps given time, Mozilla’s wonky idealism will prevail, but it still has a lot of ground to make up.

Check out the intro to the Web App Project below:

Why is Mozilla harshing on Internet Explorer 9 (PC Mag had a good review of it the other day)? The company’s tech evangelist, Paul Rouget, said in a recent blog post that Internet Explorer 9 isn’t a “truly modern” browser, specifically calling out its implementation of HTML5. I don’t understand why the average person couldn’t use both (along with Chrome and Opera) to browse the Web as they see fit, but let’s hear Rouget out for a bit.

Rouget takes issue with IE9′s implementation of HTML5, saying Microsoft new’s browser (which I’ve used here and there since it went beta, and it’s fine for casual browsing, although, incidentally, I’m sill a Firefox user at heart) actually doesn’t support 99 percent of the HTML5 spec. Expanding that further, Rouget illustrates that IE9 supports a whopping 61 percent of Web standards. Compare that to Firefox’s 87 percent.

Probably most damning, and probably not too far off the mark, is the claim that IE9 is some two years late, specifically with its use of the video tag and and the canvas tag, to say nothing of SVG support.

For the average end-user most of this is probably academic; I doubt many non-Web developers out there knows what the canvas tag is used for. (I had to look it up, for the record.)

Again, I don’t see why there has to be such a war of words between proponents of this browser and that. They’re all pretty decent, right? Most of the CG staff has migrated to Chrome over the past few years (I think I’m the last Firefox holdout), and I’ve been testing the waters with IE9 for the past week or so when I’m on my PC.

At the very least competition between the different browsers should result in a better browsing experience for the “just plain folks” out there, no?