ReadWriteWeb

Mozilla, the non-profit organization behind the popular Firefox browser, just published its first quarterly State of the Internet report. With over 350 million users worldwide, Mozilla collects a lot of interesting data and the organization decided to start sharing more of this data in these quarterly reports. Firefox's worldwide market share is now hovering near 30%, with Europe (39%) and South America (31%) leading the pack and North America coming in last (26%), even though it has the highest total number of Firefox users.

Fennec, the mobile version of the Firefox web browser, is now available in an early build designed for Android handsets thanks to a fan-compiled download posted on an Android developers forum. And by early, we mean unofficial, pre-alpha, device-specific and downright buggy. But for anyone interested in mobile browser developments, this port is an interesting sneak peek into the future of Firefox's mobile plans.

In what seems like a bit of round about pressure on Apple to let Opera Mini into the App Store for the iPhone, Opera is announcing today that "Opera Mini is money".

The company said in its blog this morning that its mobile browser, Opera Mini, has generated more than $1.2 billion per year for mobile operators.

At the time of this writing, it's been just over two hours, 21 minutes and 14 seconds since Opera submitted Opera Mini to Apple for inclusion in the iTunes App Store.

How do we know this? Opera is putting Apple's notoriously slow response time and browser monopoly on center stage today as part of its announcement that it is coming to the iPhone.

Opera Software, developers of web browser technology for PC, Mac, Linux and mobile, have just announced that their Opera "widgets" will now work on nearly any mobile phone. The widgets in question are small mini-applications that can run in Opera's web browser itself, on the desktop as standalone apps and now, as standalone apps on mobile phones, too.

Built with standards like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, the widgets are easy for web developers to create since they don't require knowing a vendor-specific technology in order to do so.

Currently, your contacts live in address books that are distributed all over the Internet and your desktop. Because of this, chances are that you have numerous address books on the web that are often "inconsistent and disjointed." Contacts, a new Mozilla Labs project, wants to put an end to this. The Contacts addon creates a local database for all your email and Twitter contacts that can then be used by your browser and any website that supports Contacts' API.

Google just launched a new stable version of Google Chrome, the company's increasingly popular browser, which introduces a number of new features and more advanced privacy controls. Chrome will now automatically detect the language of any site you surf to and offer you to translate the text for you. In addition, Google also added granular privacy controls to Chrome that allow you to turn off cookies and JavaScript on a site-by-site basis. For now, these new features are only available in the Windows version of Chrome.

Google Chrome is probably the best browser available, if speed and extensions are both important to you, and one major problem experienced by Mac users was just solved. The developer version of Chrome for Mac just released an update that allows users to manage bookmarks better than ever before. (If you're reading this, you should use the developer version.)

Before today, bookmarks in Chrome for Mac were unbearable. Now they are a joy to click, drag around, delete and rename. The only remaining problem I see? Major issues with Adobe Flash. Is there anything else you wish was fixed in Chrome?

Microsoft just announced the launch of the first developer preview version of Internet Explorer 9. This release is clearly geared towards developers and only features a very stripped down user interface. The developer preview does, however, include Chakra, Microsoft's new JavaScript engine, as well as a new hardware accelerated graphics subsystem and additional developer tools.

Firefox Personas, the designer skins that let web surfers dress up their browser, are now being rebranded "Personas Plus" and are being moved over to Mozilla's add-on gallery to join the other plugins. With the move, Mozilla has also announced that development work on this popular personalization program is continuing with the addition of new features that will transform Personas from static background images to dynamically updating themes that could even include ambient information.