It's still a tad unsettling that Mozilla's main competitor controls their fate, but for the next three years, at least, Mozilla is financially safe. Definitely good news.

The press release from Mozilla:

We’re pleased to announce that we have negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Google. This new agreement extends our long term search relationship with Google for at least three additional years.

“Under this multi-year agreement, Google Search will continue to be the default search provider for hundreds of millions of Firefox users around the world,” said Gary Kovacs, CEO, Mozilla.

“Mozilla has been a valuable partner to Google over the years and we look forward to continuing this great partnership in the years to come,” said Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President of Search, Google.

The specific terms of this commercial agreement are subject to traditional confidentiality requirements, and we’re not at liberty to disclose them.

via Mozilla

Update: Some details of the new agreement have been released, and it seems Mozilla was able to secure a payment three times greater than the previous contract. Google will now pay Mozilla $300 million per year to remain the default search provider in Firefox. It seems the thought of Microsoft hijacking one quarter of the web's search traffic was enough to scare Google into paying more than ever. It's a win for both companies—Google has enough money that the price increase won't matter, and Mozilla will now have almost triple the annual budget. The new deal lasts, like the one before it, for three years.

> Implying that Firefox doesn't have better standards support than both of those browsers.

At least give the user an option to go to the site anyway.

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that Mozilla is in trouble. According to their financial report, the vast majority of Mozilla’s revenue comes directly from Google, in a deal to keep Google as the default search provider in Firefox. In 2010, that contract constituted 84% of Mozilla’s revenue. This is no secret. This has been the case for a while, but only now are people starting to notice.

The thing is, that contract expired last month. As of right now, no plans have been announced to extend the deal. After all, why would Google choose to renew it? Firefox is their second biggest competitor in the browser market, and their biggest among more knowledgeable users. It doesn’t make sense for Google to continue supporting them. This, of course, puts Mozilla in a tight spot. Despite being non-profit, there is no way Mozilla can continue to operate without 84% of their revenue stream—approximately $100 million.

Read the rest of this post »

There's a reason I still use Firefox instead of Chrome. Actually, there are a lot. But one sticks out. It's not a massive problem most of the time, but in some cases it is.

It's the way browsers render text.

This is incredibly important. Everything on a webpage—at least, all of the actual information on a webpage—is usually text. A browser's job is basically rendering and positioning text. They do it in different ways.

On Mac OS, we don't have this problem. All text is rendered the same way through the operating system, which literally blurs each letter a bit to make its edges look smooth. It's very easy on the eyes at large sizes, but has been shown to be less legible when read for long periods of time. Not to mention, it isn't exactly true to the font designer's intentions, since it makes the edges of each letter fuzzy. Safari on Windows overrides the system rendering and renders text like it would be on Mac OS.

Chrome uses Windows default rendering with ClearType always (unless the system doesn't have ClearType—e.g. unpatched XP). It's better than no anti-aliasing, which just looks horrible. But it begins to struggle in some areas.

Firefox 4+ and Internet Explorer 9+ use the latest tech, DirectWrite. This is a new technology in Windows 7 that uses the graphics card to accelerate drawing of text on the screen, and provides exceptionally smooth and crisp letterforms. It looks great at large and small sizes, and doesn't blur the text.

Here's what that "Stop Censorship" banner looks like in Firefox 11.0a (nightly build) with DirectWrite enabled. (note: It should look the same in IE 9, but since IE 9 doesn't support rotating objects with CSS, I can't test it).

Look closely at the letters. It's obvious that something's messed up here. This isn't the only example (rotation), where Chrome's text rendering looks bad. If you look closely, Chrome's text just doesn't look as good as Firefox's. It forces the lines of each letter into a one-pixel wide line, despite the original shape. It just looks weird. Most people won't notice, but it drives me crazy. It also has serious trouble rendering eastern language characters.

There's a great gallery here showing some fonts (in Google's own font gallery, no less) displayed side-by-side in Firefox and Chrome. This Quora thread also addresses the problem, which has yet to be fixed by the Chrome team, which—it's worth mentioning—has vastly more people and resources than Mozilla's team.

What prompted me to post this was my friend's comment after he used the same code to put an anti-SOPA/PROTECTIP banner over his site. He said:

"I reduced the rotation to -5 [degrees]. -10 was just killing the font, at least on Chrome."

This just seems wrong to me. A browser shouldn't dictate a developer's actions. It should be the other way around. A browser that forces users to compensate for its deficiencies shouldn't exist. That was the point of Chrome in the first place. But Google's Mac-centric teams just don't seem to care about Windows anymore. That's a mistake, plain and simple. You don't ignore the needs of your largest user base. But, I guess Google can do whatever it wants. It is Google, after all.

The first beta of Firefox 5 was released a few days ago, a product of Mozilla’s newly reinvigorated release schedule. Following in the footsteps of Chrome, new Firefox versions will be released much more rapidly.

The benefits of this change are obvious. The rapid release cycle will ensure that new features make it to users much faster than they had in the old days, when major releases like Firefox 4 took more than a year to reach completion. Instead of bundling a whole host of new features into each version, additions will ship to users as soon as they are ready.

There are sentimental and marketing downsides to this approach as well. New versions of Firefox will contain far fewer features at a time than in previous years. The result? Never again will we have the traditionally monumental releases that Firefox has so often enjoyed. Who could forget the Download Day release of Firefox 3, which shattered the world record for downloads in a single day. Almost as impactful was the recent release of Firefox 4, which brought a veritable ton of new features to users, but after more than a year of beta releases. As the new releases’ feature lists are shortened, Mozilla will likely have a tougher time marketing Firefox to new users. The arrival of new versions will no longer be an “event,” meaning less hype and less coverage on the tech blogs. This may end up hurting Firefox’s already declining market share.

Nevertheless, it is clear that Mozilla has made the right in speeding up Firefox’s release cycle. Bringing new features to users as they become available, rather than in oft-delayed, mammoth releases, will help to improve the web as a whole. And while Mozilla won’t enjoy the hyped-up release events of the past, it will be contributing to making the web a better place, which has been, after all, Mozilla’s goal all along. Alexander Limi, head of the UX design team for Firefox, put it best:

“People are often surprised when we tell them that we’re not trying to ‘win the marketshare game,’ but instead make sure that there is a thriving, diverse ecosystem on the web, with no single dominant player — which at this point, Mozilla has succeeded spectacularly at compared to a few years ago, when the browser market was stagnant, and one browser dominated the web.”

You can download and help test the Firefox 5 beta from here, and don’t forget to check out the new dev channels if you want to keep getting new Firefox features before everyone else.