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.

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.

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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.

Anyone who reads this blog knows I like browsers, a lot. Features are really important for any browser, but what turns an ordinary program into a feature-filled powerhouse are its add-ons. I've always loved Firefox for this very reason.

Add-ons are something everyone should be using, so I'd like to share what I consider to be the best ones.

Here are my current add-ons for Firefox, in alphabetical order.

Adblock Plus

I know I really shouldn't be advocating the use of this add-on. By viewing websites without loading their advertisements, I'm hurting the very sites that I enjoy. But in all honesty, the practicality and convenience of this add-on outweigh any moral qualms I have about using it. It blocks almost every advertisement on every website, keeps an auto-updated list of URLs t block, and even works on YouTube ads. It's improved a lot since I first used it, and I almost never encounter an ad these days.

Delicious Bookmarks

I'm a long-time Delicious user, and now that its fate is no longer in jeopardy, you should become one. It's a public, synchronized, and social way to bookmark sites. It's a really great way to save important sites and discovering new ones. There really are hundreds of other uses for Delicious, and the Firefox add-on integrates it really well with your browser.

Download Statusbar

Annoyed that Firefox's download window opens every time you download something, interrupting you in the process? Install this add-on for a Chrome-like download experience (although this add-on predates Chrome, by years). All downloads appear in a bar on the bottom of the window, instead of in a separate window.

DownloadHelper

This neat little add-on detects all the media being linked to by a website, including, and here's the awesome part, media linked to by flash player. This means you can now download YouTube videos and even music. Before Google decided to support HTML5 video, DownloadHelper could only download YouTube's .flv videos, which you would have to convert yourself. Luckily for us, Google has converted all videos on YouTube to mp4 (h.264/AAC).

DownThemAll!

DownThemAll! is a download accelerator. It uses torrent-like techniques to speed up downloads by breaking files into multiple chunks and downloading them simultaneously. From websites that can't serve content as fast as your internet connection, it can significantly improve download time. It also works well as a download manager and can automates rapid downloading of entire directories of files on the web, like image board threads.

F1

Fresh out of Mozilla Labs, F1 is a slick sharing add-on that allows you to share links to the currently loaded page very quickly, across a variety of social networks. It's incredibly quick, efficient, and useful.

Feedly

I'm a heavy Google Reader user, but the rigid interface of Google's site is a bit lacking. The people at Feedly have stepped in to correct this problem, by creating an add-on that integrates completely with Google Reader, allowng you to read RSS feeds in a much more attractive, functional, and efficient environment. It really improves the kinds of content you're shown, based on what you've read in the past and what your friends are reading. It's really a great add-on that every Google Reader user should try.

Firebug

Firebug is arguably the best tool for web development. It allows viewing, manipulating, and editing of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and it's really an invaluable tool to anyone in web design and development. If you use Chrome, it's basically a much more powerful version of Chrome's developer tools.

Flagfox

Flagfox is a small add-on that sits in your AwesomeBar, displaying the flag of the country in which the current page is based. It uses IP addresses to pinpoint thes location, and can also help pinpoint phishing scams.

Ghostery

In the interest of privacy, Ghostery is the ultimate anti-tracking add-on. It maintains an auto-updated list of URLs that contain tracking code, and blocks all content and cookies from those sources. Through this, it prevents sites from tracking your behavior.

HTTPS-Everywhere

Created by the EFF, this is a really useful tool that makes sure Firefox uses a secure connection when connecting to any website it knows supports HTTPS. If you don't know, HTTPS represents the HTTP protocol used for websites, but encrypted with SSL. The result is a connection to websites that can't be intercepted by a third party, protecting credit card numbers, login credentials, and any other sensitive data you might send to and from a website.

LastPass

LastPass is the best password manager available, in my opinion. It's an online password manager, which makes it accessible across devices, but that also means that your passwords are stored on LastPass's servers. Luckily, it's all encrypted, so that only you can access your passwords via your LastPass password. It's a much more secure, convenient, and useful option than the built-in optons inside Firefox and other browsers.

Lab Kit from Mozilla Labs

Lab Kit is an assortment of experimental add-ons by Mozilla that help increase Firefox's functionality, by adding things like F1, auto-complete in the AwesomeBar, and other in-development features.

Nightly Tester Tools

I'm a Firefox Nightly (formerly Minefield) user, and Nightly Tester Tools provides info like build numbers, profile management, and disabling Firefox's add-on compatibility checking.

Page Speed

Developed by Google, Page Speed is another web developer's add-on that helps you see how much time it takes every part of a website to load. Like Yahoo's Yslow, it helps devs etermine what might be slowing down their pages.

Readability

I've done a post on Readability before, but simply put, it's an awesome add-on for reading. It reformats webpages to be easier on the eyes, and offers a very customizable, comfortable, and convenient reading experience.

Restartless Restart

This restartless add-on (hence the name) adds a button in the Firefox menu to restart your browser at any time. It's small, but useful.

Screenshot Pimp

Despite my lack of fondness for the name, this add-on is very useful. It does just what it's name implies, enabling the easy and quick taking of screenshots of webpages.

Stratiform

This Windows-only add-on allows very flexible customization of the Firefox 4 user interface, from the olor of the Firefox button to the height of the tab bar.

Stylish

Though I don't really use it, Stylish is an interesting and powerful add-on that allows you to customize the ways websites look to your liking. It uses simple CSS files to do the customization, and if you know what you're doing, you can make some very cool redesigns of your favorite sites. It also offers a gallery of styles created by other users that you can enjoy their work, if you wish.

Tab Badge

As a compliment to the nice blue indicators on Firefox app tabs, Tab Badge adds a number signifying the number of notifications a webpage has for you, including unread emails, Facebook notifications, and the like.

Test Pilot

Simple add-on for participating in user studies to improve new versions of Firefox. It's the same add-on that was installed in the beta releases of Firefox 4.

Web Developer Toolbar

This toolbar adds a bunch of useful tools for web development.

Web of Trust

WOT is a very popular add-on that displays a ranking for every page, based on ratings by users on criteria such as trustworthiness, quality, and child-safety.