iOS and Android aren’t leaving much room for Firefox to burrow into mobile. “We knew there was going to be a transition from desktop being primary to mobile and tablet being primary” said Greylock partner / Mozilla’s former CEO and current board member John Lilly today at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC. “What I worry about, the scary part is that for the first time the platforms and distribution are tightly controlled before innovation has really started”

Lilly explained that Internet Explorer once dominated web browsing and people said “How the hell do you break that?” But Firefox and Chrome came along and now the market is almost evenly split. But Lilly says “mobile’s not like that. Mobile is these tied-down vertical stacks that are controlled by Google and Apple, so we have a new impossible problem to become relevant on mobile.”

As the world spends more and more of its time on mobile, Mozilla will have to figure out how to inject itself there. Firefox for Android is a good start, but tests against Chrome in February saw Mozilla’s version loading pages much slower. There just might not be enough value for Firefox to add in order to pull Android users from their default browser. And thanks to Apple’s Draconian SDK agreement, Mozilla isn’t even allowed to release a full-version of Firefox for iOS.

Greylock Partners has been actively investing in mobile, with it taking stakes in Instagram, Cardspring, and 100Plus since Lilly joined as a partner. 

Lilly is optimistic about Mozilla’s desktop browser, though. “I think Firefox is about as good as it’s ever been right now.” But unfortunately, the Google juggernaut is there too. ”I know a lot of people probably moved to Chrome” Lilly said.

Twitter does a lot of things right, but it still hasn’t solved the problem of turning its noise into signal. After joining Twitter, it can take a lot of following and unfollowing scores of accounts before you’ve curated a stream that makes sense for you. With its platform growing fast, Twitter is looking to make the onboarding process a little easier (and more personalized) for new users, which is why it announced today via its blog that it will begin serving users tailored suggestions of who they should follow.

Twitter is calling its new personalization features “experiments,” (in other words, they’re in beta), which will manifest for users in several ways. The first being that it will show new users a list of recommended accounts, which will be accompanied by a timeline that features tweets from those recommended accounts. New users (who are part of the beta testing) will see the list as soon as they sign up, but will not be required to follow their suggestions.

For those of us already using The Twitters, if you’re a lucky winner, you’ll begin to see Twitter’s suggestions in the “Who To Follow” box on the left side of your homescreen. From what we can tell, the box won’t be altered from its current placement/design, but will instead just start showing more relevant suggestions. To see who Twitter will recommend for you, check out their preview page here.

So, how exactly is Twitter going about serving you these recommendations? The suggestions are “based on accounts followed by other Twitter users and visits to websites in the Twitter ecosystem,” meaning that Twitter is culling the data that it receives from other websites that are utilizing its buttons/widgets, identifying the accounts that are most followed by people who visit those sites, and recommending it to you based on similarities with those users in your own Twitter activity.

Twitter will be offering the ability to turn this functionality off. This comes with the context of the announcement earlier today that Twitter will be supporting Mozilla’s “Do Not Track” feature, which allows users to opt-out of those pesky third-party cookies, including … wait for it … those used in advertising.

This morning, that seemed just a symbolic gesture on Twitter’s part, because they weren’t really tracking you anyway. With the addition of their follow recommendation engine, now this move makes perfect sense, and is obviously timed perfectly. Now Twitter can just say that, hey, if you don’t like it tracking your activity, turn on Do Not Track. As to who’s supporting: Firefox, Safari and IE9 already have some form of Do Not Track features built-in, but it seems that only Firefox is really evangelizing. However, all three browsers should be compatible with DNT, and allow for opt-outs.

There is more information about Twitter’s integration with Do Not Track reflected in its privacy policy, so, as mentioned, if you’ve got it enabled in one of those browsers, you won’t see any tailored suggestions. With the heightened interest and concern over the way social networks (and beyond) are using our personal data, this is a smart move on Twitter’s part to ensure users that it’s taking transparency (and privacy) seriously.

The other important piece of this is that people who are new to Twitter will see an option to tailor their feeds based on the sites they’re visiting from twitter, accompanied by a “learn more” link, whereas current users will find a “personalization” section added to their account settings.

Users can disable personalization at any time, which prevents Twitter from collecting information on your activity, and as the blog post adds, “You can even choose to turn off tailored suggestions from the preview page (which shows some suggestions we’d make for you).”

What’s really interesting here is that this is the first sign of Twitter getting serious about building its own interest graph, as if you’d ever get tired of all this “graph” talk, right? But this is the social network’s first big move that shows it following in the footsteps of Facebook, as the more personal info they collect on your interests and activity on their platform, the more info there is to feed targeted advertising and tweets.

For more, check out Twitter’s blog post here, and current users can test out preview here. Do Not Track info here. Do Not Track info here.

Additional reporting from Frederic Lardinois

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.”

Mozilla and Spain-based Telefonica officially announced their intentions to work together on an open web device at this year’s Mobile World Congress, but I’m not sure anyone expected the launch market Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs just announced.

According to the Brazilian blog ZTop (Google Translated here), Kovacs just recently revealed the the world’s first consumer-ready Boot to Gecko devices are expected to launch in Brazil either at the end of the year or in early 2013.

Sadly, Kovacs made no mention of the juiciest tidbit: what kind of hardware we’ll get to see Boot To Gecko running on. Way back in February, Mozilla was demoing an early build of the operating system running on a Samsung Galaxy S II, and lucky developers at a JavaScript conference got their hands on free Nexus Ss running a slightly more modern build not long ago.

I doubt that Samsung connection will count for too much once it comes time to Telefonica, on the other hand, went with some slightly less recognizable Qualcomm-sourced hardware for their own demo, and I imagine we’ll see some similar white-label hardware we’ll see once we get closer to an official launch.

Really though, since most of the heavy lifting — think telephony, messaging, etc — are handled with HTML5 and web APIs, the hardware itself doesn’t need to be the most spectacular. As of last August, smartphones only accounted for roughly 9% of the Brazilian mobile market, but the country’s rapidly growing economy means that we can expect to see similarly-connected devices grow to greater prominence in the months and years to come.

The confluence of an open-source, web-based OS along with some purely adequate hardware means that costs can stay low, and Telefonica’s Pablo Larrieux confirmed that would be the case. According to him, Boot to Gecko devices will be priced competitively with existing feature phones, a trend that I’m hoping continues once Boot to Gecko starts its world tour.

[via Engadget, image courtesy of Telefonica Brazil]

For a while now, Mozilla has been looking beyond the core browser features to expand Firefox’s capabilities. Last week, the Firefox team showed an interesting new demo at the IETF 83 meeting in Paris. In this demo, the Firefox team shows a new browser-based video chat feature for Firefox that is completely based on JavaScript and other open standards. The most important of these standards for this demo is WebRTC. With WebRTC – which is part of the developing HTML5 standard – developers can enable real-time services, including file sharing, voice calls and video calls right in the browser.

This demo also makes use of the organization’s experimental Social API, which sits on top of Mozilla’s Persona browser-based identity service.

A partial implementation of WebRTC will only come to Firefox’s experimental nightly builds later this quarter, so it will be a while before you will be able to use these features yourself (though there are, of course, already plenty of Flash-based video chat tools out there).

Just like HTML5, the WebRTC standard is still under heavy development. It’s worth noting, though, that all the major browser vendors (Mozilla, Microsoft, Google and Opera) have voiced support for this technology and the Chrome Dev channel, for example, already offers a WebRTC API.

For now, this is obviously just a demo and it’s not clear if Mozilla will actually bake this feature directly into Firefox. Given that Mozilla has shown interest in adding all the underlying technologies to the browser, though, it wouldn’t come as a major surprise if it would at least offer its own video chat feature as part of the Persona initiative.

Giving free devices away is something of a time-honored tradition when it comes to getting people interested into your platform. We’ve seen Google do it, we’ve seen Microsoft do it, and now at a conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., we’ve seen Mozilla do it. In an apparent effort to drive awareness and developer interest around their web-based mobile platform, Mozilla has been handing out Boot to Gecko-powered GSM Nexus Ss to lucky JSConf attendees.

Boot to Gecko’s big draw, if you hadn’t heard yet, is that it’s completely platform agnostic — all of the heavy lifting, from telephony to geolocation to messaging to hardware-accelerated graphics are handled with HTML5 and a slew of impressive APIs. Mozilla has been submitting those APIs (and those in the pipeline) to the W3C for standardization, and the end result in Mozilla’s words, will be a “complete standalone operating system for the open web.”

This move is a pretty bold one, considering that it will be the first time Boot to Gecko will be made available to the public running on an actual device without a Mozilla rep hovering close at hand. It should be noted that B2G itself is up for grabs on GitHub, though Mozilla only offers instructions on getting it loaded on a Galaxy S II.

The last time I saw Mozilla’s web-based Boot to Gecko operating system, it was running rather smoothly on a GS II cradled gently by Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla’s Director of Firefox Engineering. It looked remarkably polished for a project that only really came to life last July when Mozilla’s Andreas Gal proposed the project in Mozilla’s developer newsgroup, though there were still more than a few hiccups to work out. The camera had a tendency to lock the device up for example, though it was sort of a feat to see that camera work at all. Still, the nuts and bolts of the phone (think dialer, messaging, contacts, etc) worked more-or-less without a hitch, and should only get better with time and attention.

Attention for the platform, as it turns out, isn’t exactly in short supply. It’s already garnered interest from key mobile players at this year’s Mobile World Congress, not least of which is Madrid-based Telefonica, the third largest mobile network operator in the world. Together the two companies announced in February that they would work together to release the first “open web” devices sometime later this year.

Oh, and here’s the obligatory Oprah joke. You know, just because.

Hat tip to @codylindley

BrowserQuest, playable in a browser near you, is a proof of concept so ingenious that you’ll wonder why they didn’t just build a Zelda clone and be done with it. In short, the site is a multi-player RPG based entirely on HTML5 with no Flash to be found.

The source code is free and open source and it uses WebSockets to communicate with a central server in order to render the movement of the other players. Quest states are saved automatically (although the quests are pretty limited in this demo.)

Here’s the coolest thing:

The folks at LittleWorkshop built the game as a proof of concept and as a time waster. Once they get the NES version of Metal Gear ported to HTML5, though, I’m totally quitting my job.

via Hacks.Mozilla

Calling all developers: if you know your way around HTML5 and JavaSrcipt and have a great idea for an app, Mozilla wants to hear from you. The web-friendly nonprofit has just announced their intention to launch a new cross-platform app market later this year, and the submission process is slated to start next week at Mobile World Congress.

The initiative ties into Mozilla’s focus on developing the web as a platform for rich content, and they hope to do so by providing developers with the tools needed to create great things.

“By building the missing pieces, Mozilla is now unlocking the potential of the Web to be the platform for creating and consuming content everywhere,” said Mozilla Chief of Innovation Todd Simpson.

To help their burgeoning web apps platform take shape, Mozilla has proposed a number of APIs that “advance the web as a platform.” Mozilla will also aid their web apps platform with the creation of an identity system that binds apps to users rather than their devices. Though Mozilla declined to mention how the identity system would be implemented, it’s likely we’ll see their BrowserID system rear its head once more.

While Mozilla’s platform-agnostic approach means that these apps will be able to run on any HTML5-capable device, the creation of a new app store isn’t just a win for cross-platform idealogues.

Mozilla’s Boot to Gecko (B2G) team has been hard at work since last July on developing a web-oriented mobile operating system, and Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich mentioned recently intimated on Twitter that Mozilla would be revealing B2G partners at MWC.

Developer support in the form of apps is critical for the major mobile platforms. Between the development of the app store and the news of potential partnership agreements, Boot To Gecko has the potential to become a viable competitor. While the blocks slowly seem to be falling into place, Mozilla has remained mum on whether or not they’ll have a B2G handset ready to check out on the MWC show floor.

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.

Firefox may be getting a very nice facelift soon.

Mozilla designer Stephen Horlander has posted a set of screenshots showing off what may be the the future of Firefox’s interface, and it includes some major changes that give it a more modern look. My first reaction: this looks a whole lot of Chrome. And my second reaction: that isn’t a bad thing at all.  You can find the whole set right here.

To be clear, these are what Mozilla is calling “really early mockups”. They were presented internally at a company meeting last week, and the team hasn’t committed to when (or even if) they’ll be implementing the new UI.

That said, the mocks look solid and their reception seems to be positive so far, so don’t be surprised if you see these changes in action some time in the relatively near future — especially since Mozilla is now on a rapid-fire 18 week release schedule. So let’s take a look at what’s different.

The biggest change: no more search bar. One of Firefox’s trademark features, the dedicated search bar alongside the address bar, is gone — it’s been replaced by a field that presumably serves both functions, just like the one in Chrome. It’s also possible to enter Full Screen Mode, which merges a smaller version of this Awesome Bar and your tabs into a single line, further reducing the browser chrome and leaving more room for content.

Tabs are getting a rounder curve to them (in Firefox 5 they’re rectangular), which is very similar to the design in Chrome. But Firefox is actually improving on the design: only active tabs are presented with those rounded edges, whereas inactive tabs have very little chrome to them at all. This makes it easier to identify what you’re looking at, and it may make it easier to scan through them as well.

Other changes: there’s a new ‘functionality’ menu that includes common tasks (cut, copy, paste, new tab, etc, along with icons for app extensions. It looks good — and it also looks like it would be touch-friendly.

Straight from the heart of Mozilla’s developer newsgroup comes news of an ambitious new project: a standalone, web-based operating system. If that concept sounds familiar, I’ve also just described the core of Google’s Chrome OS which we’re beginning to see pop up on netbooks. The big twist?

It’s currently being developed for mobile devices. And it’s partially Android-based.

According to Dr. Andreas Gal, researcher at Mozilla, the impetus behind the Boot to Gecko project is to “make open web technologies a better basis for future applications on mobile and desktop alike”. A lofty goal to be sure, as the core underpinnings would ultimately extend beyond just mobile devices. Should Gal and his colleagues (and really anyone who wants to help) succeed, Boot to Gecko would have the potential to change how we interact with the web, regardless of platform.

Gal breaks the process down into actionable steps. First, the Boot to Gecko project aims to take the primary functions of a mobile device (i.e. “Telephony, SMS, Camera, USB, Bluetooth, NFC”) and create web APIs to handle them. From there, they intend to develop a way for web pages and applications to safely access those components as needed. They hope that by doing this, they (and other intrepid developers) will be able to create native-grade apps that run directly on the web instead of only being available on certain devices.

As I’ve mentioned, the open-source project is based partially off of Android — nothing terribly high-level though, just the kernel and the drivers so as to ensure that whatever progress they make can actually boot. It also doesn’t hurt that Android works (and in many case, has been made to work) on plenty of different hardware configurations, which is exactly what they need to see if the concept pans out. As it stands, development is in such a nascent stage that we have no idea what to expect visually, so no images yet folks.

Personally speaking, this idea has me on the edge of my seat. It will take a lot of work, and a lot of time, and there’s no guarantee that we’ll ever see a complete release. That’s the funny part though: I don’t think it really matters. If all they ever did was finish the API for telephony and SMS messaging, that would still signal a tremendous shift in how we use the web. Boot to Gecko will inevitably draw comparisons to ChromeOS (and I was guilty of this just a few paragraphs ago), but we stand to gain a much richer online experience if B2G comes to be. Only time will tell if these gentlemen succeed, but we’ll be certain to keep you up to date during the ride.

Today, the organization is launching a new program designed to help spur projects that focus on open web technologies. The initiative is called Web FWD (pronounced Web Forward), and invites teams to spend four weeks working in Mozilla offices, where they’ll learn from top experts in web technologies and have access to Mozilla resources.  Applications are now being accepted, and the first group of teams will begin working from Mozilla offices in August.

Pascal Finette, who heads Mozilla Labs, says that the project was inspired by the success of programs like Y Combinator — though there are plenty of differences. Unlike YC, which takes a modest equity stake in participating companies, Mozilla’s not out to make money. In fact, all code written during the four-week program must be open sourced (teams can later fork their code and continue to build their project into a business if they’d like — Mozilla will even make the VC introductions). Mozilla will also consider giving promising products that stick with the open-source model additional funding and resources.

The program is also a little less structured than YC, in that groups are admitted on a rolling basis. Finette expects teams to be around 2-3 people in size, though that’s one of the variables they’re still unsure about — it will really come down to what kind of projects get submitted. The bottom line, though, is that the teams need to be able to build what they’re setting out to build (in other words, if you’re a single engineer setting out to do an ambitious project, then you might have the odds stacked against you on getting admitted).

Finette says that the ideal applicants will be working on projects that are deeply related to open web technologies — things like online identity, social, personalization, and, more broadly, a ‘mobile first’ approach to designing web applications. “We’re not looking for the next big online game”, he says. Applicants don’t have to have a full project built when they apply, but Mozilla will be looking for some basic groundwork — things like mockups, some rough code, and a tangible demo (even if it’s far from a minimum viable product).

Mentors include both key Mozilla employees and other industry veterans (there’s a list here, and Mozilla will also regularly invite other experts for guest talks). Mozilla plans to have between five and ten teams working out of its offices at any given time — it’s starting the program in the SF office initially, but will extend the program to its international offices as well, so the number of accepted teams will increase.

Each participant will receive $2,000 for the month to cover food and living expenses. “We want them to be worry-free”, Finette says, so that the teams can really focus on their projects.

I like this idea. Mozilla’s Firefox and Labs projects has obviously introduced some innovative features and technologies over the years, but there are still aspects of the web — like identity — that simply don’t have any good, widely used open alternatives. This should help kickstart some compelling new projects.

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.

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.

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.

As the team lays out in a post on their blog, a major change is needed to keep Camino going. Why? Because throughout its existence, the browser has been built using Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine — the one built for Firefox. But now that engine will no longer be embeddable in other browsers — even other Mozilla browsers, like Camino.

This means that they either go forward continuing to support the legacy versions of Gecko — which are already out of date, by the way, with the launch of Firefox 4.0 — or they have to go in a different direction. Obviously, they’re leaning towards the latter. And if they do go that way, the best option is clear: WebKit.

WebKit is the engine that powers Google Chrome and Apple Safari (as well as their mobile browsers). It has long been considered to be the hot engine of choice, even though the two largest browsers, Firefox and IE, don’t use it. In other words, it’s a nice fall-back option for Camino to have.

And others, namely Epiphany (the native browser for Gnome) have made the same jump in the past.

But there’s still a very big problem for Camino going WebKit: implementing it.

Again, Camino has no full-time employees working on it. It’s a true open-source community effort. For a long while, the project was lead by Mike Pinkerton, but he jumped over to help build Chrome for Mac long ago (but still contributes to the Camino project). Other contributors are Mozilla employees. These people all have very busy day jobs.

Here’s how they explain the problem:

Beyond that, the future is unclear. As a purely community-based open source project, no one is employed to work on Camino; all Camino developers are volunteers, working on Camino in their spare time, as a labor of love. While maintaining embedding in a fork of Gecko is theoretically possible, we don’t have the manpower for a sustained effort of that kind. A more realistic option would be to port Camino to WebKit, but while this would be much easier to maintain in the future, it would require a large amount of initial work. While we would like to take that approach, we don’t have the manpower to do it on our own—we encourage anyone who might be interested in adapting the Camino code to a new rendering engine join our development discussion list.

In other words, web developers, mount up! Save Camino!

[thanks Jeff]

Brendan Eich, creator of the JavaScript scripting language and chief technology officer at Mozilla, has joined the advisory board of Amsterdam, The Netherlands-based Ajax.org.

We recently wrote about Ajax.org’s introduction of Cloud9 IDE, a commercial, cloud-based development platform for JavaScript that incorporates HTML5, and supporting Python, Ruby and PHP.

Eich is known for his work on Netscape, where he started work in April 1995 and invented JavaScript. He then helped found Mozilla.org in early 1998, serving as chief architect, and later helped spin out the Mozilla Foundation.

In August 2005, after serving as a member of the foundation’s Board of Directors, Brendan became CTO of the newly founded Mozilla Corporation. His primary focus is improving the company’s star product, web browser Firefox.

His appointment to the advisory board is of course a boon for Ajax.org, which intends to use his insights to move forward with the advancement and promotion of Cloud9.

The company is looking to expand into North America in 2011.

(Photo via Wikipedia)