ReadWriteWeb

Google's Chrome Web browser could become the second most popular browser on the market before the end of the year, according to data from StatCounter, a Web analytics company. The three-year-old browser would knock Firefox from the second place slot behind Internet Explorer.

The coup would be quite an achievement for Chrome, which was just released in 2008 and has been growing rapidly ever since. By comparison, Firefox was first launched in 2004 and took much longer to attract significant market share.

The accelerated Firefox release cycle may be great for many users, but enterprise IT folks were not thrilled. To their credit, the folks at Mozilla eventually took the complaints seriously and founded a working group to address enterprise desktop needs. However, it seems clear that the Extended Support Releases (ESRs) will be second-class citizens.

The working group has made progress and come up with a proposal that would provide an ESR for Firefox. If it's accepted, ESR's will have life cycle of nearly one year, and a 12 week overlap between the ESR releases.

Exactly what will end up being the very final, last word on the subject of Mozilla Firefox's expedited release system, may yet be seen. Yesterday, however, the Mozilla Foundation's chairperson, Mitchell Baker, weighed in with what appears to be an attempt at finality, albeit a dualistic one. On the one hand, Baker wrote, Firefox should be less like software and more like the Internet.

On the other hand, enterprises do count in determining how software like Firefox should continue to improve.

It became a very heated debate over a very small thing: whether accelerated releases of Mozilla Firefox going forward will contain version numbers in its About dialog box. The opposition to Mozilla's plan to remove version numbers, and perhaps omit referring to them in consumer-focused marketing, centered around the difficulties IT departments face in managing end-users browsers, and that developers face in creating support products for them, such as add-ons.

Late Tuesday, the organization reversed course, saying the About box will remain as it has been. But in making that statement, Alex Faaborg, a contributor to the User Interface (UX) team of the open source project, told other contributors in Mozilla's public newsgroup that his team never actually made a final decision to remove version numbers in the first place, and that the vehement defense of UX's decision by Firefox product manager Asa Dotzler was, through no fault of his own, wrong.

In organizations of all types around the world, executive decisions are met with objections from subordinates. For open source software projects, those objections often take on the tone of philosophical treatises. Such has been the case the past two weeks with the Mozilla organization's decision (which had been in the works for several months) to reduce the amount of data that its Firefox browser presents the user about its version number to near-zero.

The decision had been made as part of the group's transition last year to an expedited release system, with the goal of finalizing new major or feature releases of Firefox every six weeks, following a staggered 24-week development cycle. At that rate, we could be at Firefox 10 by the beginning of the year. Does that fact really matter? Perhaps not, say Mozilla contributors such as community manager and Firefox product manager Asa Dotzler, who supports discontinuing the hype over version numbers as any big deal that real-world users care about.

It might not be long before the phrase "new version of Firefox" ends up being not very thrilling at all. On schedule, just six weeks after the organization gave the final go-ahead to release Firefox 5 (the "dot-oh" is oh, so 2010), this afternoon installed versions of version 5 were buzzing their users that Firefox 6 was available.

It's part of an ambitious new scheduling plan by the Mozilla organization to expedite new features as rapidly as possible, in the wake of increased competition from Google Chrome, whose latest stable release is version 13, and whose dev channel release is on the tail end of 14. But the plan has met resistance recently from developers and IT personnel who claim six weeks is not enough turn-around time to test a new release before distributing it to users in their enterprise.

The developers of two of the most influential open-source Web browsers are working together on a feature that should make Web apps play together much more nicely. As we covered on ReadWriteHack yesterday, Google's Chromium engineers announced that they're working with Mozilla on a framework called Web Intents, the brainchild of Google developer Paul Kinlan. Firefox announced its project last month.

Web Intents, based on an existing capability in Google's Android mobile OS, will let Web apps express a simple call for an action, like 'share' or 'edit,' which receiving apps will be designed to use, without either app needing to have specific knowledge of the APIs of the other. This way, instead of having to code for each specific Web app one might want to access, developers can just use these simple requests, which will be built into the browser. The Chrome and Firefox teams are each building this functionality for their own browser, but they're combining their proposals to use a single API for Web app developers to reach both platforms.

This week, Mozilla re-established its Mozilla Enterprise User Working Group, following last month's controversy over Firefox product manager Asa Dotzler's comment that, "Enterprise has never been (and I'll argue, shouldn't be) a focus."

At issue is Mozilla's lack of support for previous versions of Firefox, even as it releases new versions at a feverish pace. Mozilla released Firefox 5 only three months after Firefox 4, and announced it was end-of-lifeing Firefox 4. The organization will repeat the cycle in another three months when it releases Firefox 6. The problem for enterprises is that it can take at least 3 months to test required sites and applications against a new version of the browser.

According to a post on the Mozilla Add-Ons Blog, 85% of Firefox 4 users have at least one add-on installed. The average user has five add-ons installed. The figure doesn't include the Personas feature and excludes add-ons bundled with other software that users haven't actively chosen to install.

"We previously estimated that at least a third of Firefox users had chosen to install an add-on, but knew the number was higher than that," wrote Justin Scott, the product manager for add-ons at Mozilla.

Just three months after the hugely successful release of Firefox 4, Mozilla has released the newest version of its browser, Firefox 5. There's little fanfare today, unlike with the previous releases of Mozilla's browser. That's because much like the rapid release cycle of Google's Chrome browser, Mozilla has moved to a faster development cycle for Firefox.

This latest version boasts over one thousand improvements to the browser's security and performance, but the changes - at least to most users - probably won't be that noticeable. It also includes a number of updates to make it easier for developers to build Firefox add-ons and Web apps.