Some of the more significant enhancements include a full-screen API for Web apps, support for CSS 3D transforms and an improved handling of plugins and how they're updated.

This release also marks the start of Firefox's new Extended Support Release version, which it announced in response to longstanding concerns within the IT community about the browser's rapid release cycle, which can be a challenge for IT managers to keep up with.

This update also includes some enhancements to the mobile version of Firefox, which includes many of the same upgrades as the desktop version, plus improvements to Firefox Sync, which lets users sync their browser across devices. So far, Firefox's mobile footprint isn't anything close to the market share it commands on the desktop. It currently has a browser for Android, but has yet to make a serious foray into iOS, which has tighter restrictions on third party browsers.

As frequent and aggressive as Firefox's updates have become, the open source browser still has some catching up to do with Google Chrome and even less popular browsers like Safari and Opera when it comes to implementing certain features.

Some of Mozilla's initiatives for this year include an HTML5 Web app store, a mobile operating system and perhaps most intensive of all, a decentralized system for user identification and authentication at the browser level. In other words, a browser-based replacement for usernames and passwords.

Secure as it may be, application-level encryption won't be practical for some of the things Mozilla is working on, a few of which will naturally require that more data points about users are collected. This is a big deal to consumers and legislators alike, as issues like user tracking and online privacy receive more attention in the press and the halls of the U.S. Congress.

A Five-Point Plan For Data Security & Privacy

So how will Mozilla secure your data in the future? They've proposed a five-point set of guidelines to govern their development moving forward. Data should be collected only when doing so presents an obvious benefit to the user, and the vendor (in this case, Mozilla) should always be aware of what data is being stored, as well as how, where and why.

Mozilla also promises to do its best to minimize how long any given data point is stored on its own servers. If data is not needed for an extended period of time, it shouldn't be stored for long, if at all. That data should also be invisible to the server whenever possible. "If we can implement a given feature by never sending data to the server, or by using application-level encryption, then we will," Mozilla said.

Finally, if it's possible to use anonymized, aggregate data rather than individually identifiable information, Mozilla's engineering team will strive to do it.

Before SOPA exploded as one of the biggest tech news stories in recent memory, there was a growing amount of focus being put on online privacy and related issues. User data tracking and retention have caught the attention of U.S. legislators, who have demanded answers from Amazon over the user privacy afforded by its Silk browser and expressed concern about online user tracking in general. This level of transparency on Mozilla's part is probably no coincidence in light of these issues and the microscope they will continue to be placed under in the near future.

Mozilla has heard the pained cries of IT managers everywhere and today announced that they're going to put out an Extended Support Release version of Firefox to help organizations better manage and support the software.

The ESR version of Firefox will be developed as a separate product from the Firefox consumers are used to using, and thus utilizing the ESR won't be without its drawbacks. For one, there's an increased likelihood of bugs being introduced and persisting, since the ESR won't have the same massive beta testing group that Firefox proper has. Over time, the ESR runs the risk of becoming less secure than Firefox itself, and might even confuse some users if they're accustomed to using the standard version at home.

The move represents a bit of a change of heart for Mozilla, who previously brushed off concerns about providing proper enterprise support. By contrast, Google Chrome has made an effort to ease the pain of IT departments. Late last year, Google's three-year-old browser surpassed Firefox as the second most widely-used browser, according to one firm's statistics. By taking the enterprise a little more seriously, perhaps Mozilla can manage to minimize the competitive threat posed by Chrome.

The new ESR will not cover Firefox Mobile or the Thunderbird email client. Mozilla says it will publish implementation details sometime in the next week.

MG Siegler wondered why Google would bear this expense, "paying all that money to a competitor." He considered whether antitrust concerns played into the decision, or whether it was about mobile dominance. But Chrome engineer Peter Kasting offered a simpler answer today: "Google is funding a partner," not a competitor.

"One thing is certain: Google is not paying Mozilla a billion dollars out of the kindness of their hearts," Siegler wrote. "Doing so would be irresponsible to their shareholders. Again, they're paying all that money to a competitor." But Kasting contends that this is a misconstruction.

"People never seem to understand why Google builds Chrome no matter how many times I try to pound it into their heads," Kasting says. "It's very simple: the primary goal of Chrome is to make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible."

According to Kasting, "It's completely irrelevant to this goal whether Chrome actually gains tons of users or whether instead the web advances because the other browser vendors step up their game and produce far better browsers. Either way the web gets better. Job done."

Chrome and Firefox Can and Do Coexist

"It's not hard to understand the roots of this strategy," Kasting says. "Google succeeds (and makes money) when the web succeeds and people use it more to do everything they need to do. Because of this Chrome doesn't need to be a Microsoft Office, a direct money-maker, nor does it even need to directly feed users to Google. Just making the web more capable is enough."

By funding Firefox, Kasting explains, Google is not concerned about competition with Chrome. It's keeping another important browser alive. "Firefox is an important product because it can be a different product with different design decisions and serve different users well," he says. Kasting says that Google supported Firefox before work on Chrome even began, and it only built Chrome because it thought it would drive the Web to improve even faster.

The Teams Are Committed to Working Together

There's plenty of past evidence to support this interpretation. For example, even though Web apps are one of Chrome's most important revenue streams, Chromium and Firefox engineers have been working together to build open standards for Web apps to communicate.

On its own, Chrome has pushed the envelope for Web technologies, but as Kasting points out, "Mozilla is clearly committed to the betterment of the web, and they're spending their resources to make a great, open-source web browser." A better Web, according to Kasting, will serve Google's goals no matter what.

We've wondered this year whether Firefox was doomed, but if Google is committed to it, for the sake of the Web itself, the answer is certainly not.

The browser was knocked from its #2 slot behind Internet Explorer, though, at least according to one company's stats. The culprit? Google's Chrome, a browser half Firefox's age.

When the deal expired in November, it gave rise to speculation that Google might not renew it, which would deprive Firefox of about 84% of its annual revenue. That possibility seemed bolstered by the fact that Google's Chrome was said to have recently ousted Firefox as the number two browser on the market. An end to the deal could have put the future of Firefox in jeopardy, although some thought the ominous predictions were overblown.

When the original deal was signed in 2008, Google was only getting started with Chrome, which then grew to be a significant player in the browser market.

Still, Firefox is used by millions of people and Google still wants a piece of that action. If the Google deal were to expire, it's conceivable that Microsoft could swoop in and replace it with Bing, handing a significant chunk of the browser market share over to one of Google's chief competitors.

Whatever Google would gain by pulling the financial rug out from beneath Firefox would be overshadowed by it losing even a few points in the search market, which is where most of Google's revenue comes from.

Google has marketed Chrome as a speedier, more secure browser and capitalized on the familiarity people already have with the Google brand and its products. In the beginning of the month, at least one firm who's counting said Chrome had eclipsed Firefox as the #2 browser behind Internet Explorer for the first time ever. These numbers vary from source to source, but there's no denying that Chrome is growing fast. Even so, the company behind it evidently sees no reason to try and bury Firefox even further at this stage of the game.

Basically, we're looking to highlight tools that are innovative, widely used and/or wildly useful for Web developers.

jQuery and jQuery Mobile

No list of Web developer tools would be complete without jQuery, the ever-popular JavaScript library that we've covered extensively on ReadWriteHack.

Even Microsoft has made the case for jQuery and technology surveys show jQuery well in the lead for 2011, moving from 27% of sites surveyed in December 2010, to 42% in December 2011.

Mobile developers got a boost this year with the introduction of jQuery Mobile 1.0. jQuery mobile is meant to work on "every popular mobile, tablet, e-reader and even desktop" platform. That's a tall order, but the response so far to jQuery Mobile seems to be overwhelmingly positive.

That's not to say that jQuery is free of critics. Some believe that jQuery is in need of a little slimming down. Of course, this is not atypical for any project reaching maturity. I'm not taking a position either way, but I would note that you rarely see a successful project that doesn't generate a backlash of some sort.

Modernize IE with CSS3 PIE

Everbody loves pie, especially frustrated Web developers who need to cope with the shortcomings of older versions of Internet Explorer. You can't fix the market and convince millions of people to upgrade to a more modern browser, but you can try to fix the browser.

CSS3 PIE ("Progressive Internet Explorer") is meant to bring some of the spiffy CSS3 features to Internet Explorer. Want to see how it works? There's a full list of demos and plenty of documentation for getting started. Naturally, the project is on GitHub, and it's available under the GPLv2 and Apache 2 licenses.

PIE is not quite 1.0, but it's getting very close. Jason Johnston announced the fifth beta of 1.0 in September, which added IE9 support and fixed a number of minor issues in IE6 through IE8.

Bootstrap

Twitter released its Bootstrap toolkit for rapid development of Web applications in August, and it's remained one of the trending repos on GitHub ever since.

Bootstrap is pretty simple, it's just CSS that provides a standard set of solutions for things developers need for Web sites and Web apps. Developers can use Bootstrap for prototyping, or organizations can standardize on Bootstrap (as Twitter has) to provide a uniform design across a set of sites/applications.

Bootstrap is easy to use, just drop in the pre-compiled CSS into your project, or use LESS to compile a modified version.

LESS

Speaking of LESS, here's a little more on it. Ahem, sorry about that. Anyway, LESS is a dynamic stylesheet language that extends CSS to be much more expressive and easy to use.

Standard CSS doesn't support variables, functions, operators, and so on. LESS gives you the ability to do things that CSS ought to let you do. For example, LESS lets you define a color once and then use it through your stylesheet with a single variable (like @color instead of #4D6F92). The advantage, of course, is you make changes much more quickly and efficiently.

But LESS also provides the ability to define and re-use classes easily, and even use operators for proportional elements of your page with operators. If you want to check out LESS, the site has plenty of examples and source is available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 License.

Chrome Developer Tools

Firefox's demise is has been greatly exaggerated, but it's probably no exaggeration to say that Chrome has been gobbling market share because Web developers love Google Chrome. (Or at least they hate Google Chrome less than the other Web browsers.) One of the clear reasons developers dig Chrome is the Chrome Developer Tools.

Chrome's Developer Tools are based on WebKit's Web Inspector but include a number of enhancements. The developer tools in Chrome are just a click or keystroke away, and give you the ability to do everything from edit HTML to view breakpoints in your script, perform remote debugging, and much more. The devtools also have an experimental API for those who'd like to extend the developer tools even farther.

Next page: The rest of the best Web developer tools of 2011

Andi Smith has a fantastic post on 25 secrets of the browser development tools you should look over if you spend any time at all with Chrome's developer tools, or any of the browser development tools. This post from Paul Irish is also worth checking out, and the video from Google I/O 2011: Chrome Dev Tools Reloaded.

You might also want to check out this cheat sheet from Boris Smus.

SourceKit and Ace: Top-Notch Browser-Based IDEs

Which text editor is the best for Web developers? (Or anybody editing a lot of text, for that matter.) I'd argue for Vim, hands down.

But what if you're looking for a browser-based IDE for development? Well, when we surveyed ReadWriteHack readers, they voted for Ace and Ace-based SourceKit. Ace is a standalone editor, formerly known as "Bespin" and "Skywriter." SourceKit takes Ace and turns it into a Chrome extension that taps into your Dropbox account.

Though Ace is more flexible, in that it will emulate keybindings for several popular editors (including vi), I like having SourceKit right at my fingertips in Chrome. Plus, the Dropbox connectivity is handy as well, though I do wish it was possible to limit SourceKit to one directory under my Dropbox directory. For one thing, I'd prefer not to give any application more access than strictly necessary. For another, I store a lot of stuff in Dropbox that I won't be editing and don't want to have to sort through.

This is a rapidly growing area, though, so I'd be very curious to hear what IDE or editor ReadWriteHack readers prefer.

PhoneGap

Want to write HTML5 applications, but provide similar features to native applications on mobile devices? PhoneGap seems to be far and away the most popular solution.

PhoneGap lets developers build an app once, then deploy to multiple platforms. PhoneGap supports iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and others. This includes webOS, but I'm not sure how much demand there's going to be for that platform in 2012.

Now we're not just talking about a mobile site that displays nice on your mobile device. PhoneGap actually provides access to hardware and native features on your phone, like the camera, accelerometer, network, geolocation, contacts and notifications. If you're targeting iOS and Android, you're not far behind native applications.

The company behind PhoneGap, Nitobi, was acquired by Adobe earlier this year. But that should be no cause for alarm. PhoneGap has been contributed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and is currently in the Apache Incubator. If you haven't looked at PhoneGap yet, check out the Getting Started Guide and the video tutorial.

Popcorn and Popcorn.js

New, but noteworthy, there's Popcorn.js. Part of the Mozilla Popcorn project, it's a JavaScript library that gives you time-based, interactive media via the Web.

It's not just a way to show video without Flash, Popcorn.js actually lets you create timeline-based Web presentations. This includes HTML5 audio and video, but also rich content presentations that make use of audio, video and other Web elements.

Popcorn.js promises to integrate content from Web services like Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Google Maps. Early demos show things like integrating time-based overlays into videos, with links to content. So, for example, you could develop a video presentation that has links to more information at certain times in the video.

Right now, it's in early development and watching some of the demos in Firefox and Chrome is laggy at best. Expect it to be a while before the Web explodes with Popcorn presentations – but the future of Web media looks good.

The Future? Waterbear

No I don't think anybody is going to be putting this into production, but Waterbear is worth looking at because it's a good entry to programming for kids. The idea is that kids can start with a system of "draggable, snappable blocks" built with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.

Developer Dethe Elza says that it's in pre-alpha and in "constant flux" right now, but here's hoping the project continues to move forward and turns into a popular system to start kids on programming. It's free software (under the Apache License 2.0) and anybody can head over to GitHub and dig in.

Your Picks?

Of course, this is a highly subjective list based on my observations from the last year. I'd love to hear from Web developers about the tools that you find most productive, exciting, useful, etc. Feel free to share your favorites in the comments, and if you see something trending that needs writing about in 2012 drop me a note.

In 2008, Mozilla entered into a three-year partnership with Google. In exchange for remaining the default search engine on Firefox, Google hands over about 84% of Firefox's total revenue. Well, it's 2011 now and, as ZDNet's Ed Bott points out, the status of that partnership is unclear.

Not only does the search giant have its own hugely popular Web browser, but it now has the Android mobile operating system, which is also growing fast. The value once inherent in being the default search engine in Firefox has declined as Google's tentacles have extended into the browser and mobile spaces and Firefox's growth has slowed. Google doesn't need Firefox anywhere near as much as Firefox needs Google.

The Mobile Revolution Isn't Helping Firefox

Making matters worse is the explosive success of Apple's mobile devices. Naturally, the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad come with Safari as the default browser and any third party iOS browser has to be built on WebKit, rather than the Gecko engine Firefox uses. The only presence Firefox has on the iPhone and other iOS devices is an app that ports one's bookmarks and other browser data to the device.

At the moment, Firefox's mobile focus is on Fennec, a browser that's available on Android and as an alpha on Windows Phone 7. The rapid growth of smartphones and tablets over the last few years, which is only just getting underway, have not been much of a boon for Firefox.

Now the majority of its revenue is in jeopardy, potentially putting its position on the desktop browser market at risk. Still, Google isn't the only search engine. If they pull out of the partnership, that leaves an attractive opening for Microsoft, who is always looking for ways to challenge Google with Bing. Users of Microsoft's browser already have the option to download a version of Firefox with Bing as its default search engine.

What do you think? Is Firefox screwed or will the browser find new ways to turn things around? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Whether they explicitly ask you to do it or not, chances are your parents' Web browser could use an upgrade. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal put out a humorous call to action asking that you do just that, with or without the consent of your parents. Lifehacker goes so far as to show how to trick them into thinking nothing's changed.

So, this Friday is Update Your Parents' Browser Day. As Madrigal points out, the more up-to-date everyone's Web browsers are, the easier life will be for people who design and code websites for a living. Sure, a few hundred people upgrading their parents' browser on Friday isn't going to put a noticeable dent in the current browser marketshare break-down. Yet if enough people got into the habit of performing this task, we could perhaps see older browsers phased out a little more quickly over time.

It goes without saying that the browser in most dire need of being phased out is Internet Explorer 6, the decade-old, hard-to-kill browser that now even Microsoft wishes wants to get rid of. If somebody in your family is still running IE6, do the world a favor and upgrade them to a newer version of IE or, if you can get away with it, install Chrome or Firefox.

It'll Be Faster, Mom

If your folks (or other relatives guilty of having outdated browsers) are hesitant, one way you can sell them is with a promise of increased browsing speed. Everybody seems to think their computer runs slower than it should. Chrome has an especially solid reputation for speed among the major browsers, so it's a good candidate to install. It has a different UI from IE and Firefox, but it's pretty intuitive and shouldn't be hard for newcomers to get used to.

Improve Security (and Reduce Those Year-Round IT Phone Calls)

One of the most compelling reasons for keeping any software up-to-date is of course security. This is especially true of browsers. If family members are running anything other than the latest stable release of a browser, update it. Again, if they'll let you, switch them to a browser with a better track record for security, such as Chrome. Just remember to carry over their bookmarks and browser settings.

The more you can keep malware and security threats at bay, the lighter your load will likely be the next time you come around and are asked to play Family IT Director.

Firefox 8.0 was just announced for download and one of the biggest changes that users will notice is that Twitter search has been added to the default search options in the top of the browser. Answers.com and CreativeCommons are out (ouch) and Twitter is in.

The implementation is nothing special, it just drops users off on Twitter's own search page, but for the hundreds of millions of people in the world who don't know how to navigate to Facebook other than to search for it in their browser search bar - those people will now be one step closer to seeing what Twitter can do.

Search is changing fast: the paramount need for fresh, high-quality results is now recognized by every search engine, Twitter search results are no longer available inside Google itself, Facebook is a walled garden impervious to Google and Google has its own browser.

Imagine if Facebook search was offered in the browser toolbar, ala the otherwise overly complicated Rockmelt. People would love that. They may love this new Twitter integration as well.

Firefox 8.0 is part of Mozilla's new rapid integration approach and includes a number of new different security and performance features. Also announced today was a new version of Firefox for Android.

What does it mean for Google, Google's partnership with Firefox, Firefox, Chrome and Bing? Time will tell if it means anything and that's probably largely dependent on how far and wide such a custom browser gets used. It could be a good backup though in case Firefox's biggest revenue partner, Google, decided to focus all of its support on its own browser.

Still, there's something that feels heavy about this.

Firefox, of course, was born and lived with Google's help mostly to wrestle control of the browser market away from Microsoft and IE. Even if aliens (or agents of apocalypse) came and abducted all the people who work for Mozilla right now, the world would still forever be a better place for all they've done to push the envelope for technical standards and choice.

Some studies indicate that in blind tests, Bing actually outperforms Google. (Update: Google called me on this claim and upon trying to reproduce the specifics all I could come up with was this very small test. Sorry about that, I take it back.) Its market positioning has been as a second rate option, though, something Firefox runs the risk of becoming in the eyes of people who value Google Chrome's performance above all else. Maybe the Firefoxes of the future plus Bing in the search bar will be a whole new experience for users and will win back hearts and minds for both vendors.

Maybe it's no big deal, though. Just another option.

Not suprisingly, Microsoft's own Internet Explorer 9 gets a perfect score. The latest stable releases of Firefox and Chrome, however, each score 2.5 and 2 points, respectively. Other browsers like Safari are not able to be analyzed by the site, which returns a message saying "We can't give you a score for your browser." Presumably, the domain yourbrowsermattersunlessyoureamacuser.com was too long to be marketable.

Google's Matt Cutts took to Google Plus today to defend his employer's Web browser. "It's the same 'Look, we have more checkboxes filled in' type of marketing that was more common in the boxed software era," Cutts said, adding that Chrome indeed does have the ability to block insecure content on secure pages.

The latest version of Firefox fares even worse, racking up a mere two points.

Microsoft's new site is primarily intended to encourage users of older versions of Internet Explorer to upgrade. The bane of the existence of Web developers everywhere, Internet Explorer 6, only gets one point. To its credit, Microsoft has gone to great lengths to ensure that the next version of its browser is both secure and compliant with Web standards.

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.

Every analytics firm and Web usage tracking service will have different numbers, but in general we tend to see Chrome creeping up on Firefox. Whether that happens by December or at some point next year, what's significant here is the growth Chrome has seen in its three years of existence.

Earlier this week, Mozilla released Firefox 7, which aims to use less memory than previous versions of the browser and hopefully make for a faster Web browsing experience.

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.

"If I built an image gallery application and I wanted to let users edit an image so that they can remove red-eye from a photo I either have to build an application that edits the images, or integrate with a 3rd party solution. Doing this is hard and stops you from building an awesome image gallery; and what happens if the user has a favorite service that they already use to remove red-eye? Simple, you have a frustrated user."

The goal of Web intents, says Kinlan, is "to allow developers to build applications and services that could work with each other, but not need to explicitly know about each other." The concept was inspired by Android's functionality, he says, but "the API bore no resemblance."

Android has had these same capabilities for a while, which has made life easier for mobile app developers in Google's ecosystem. With the Chrome team taking big steps to advance its browser, especially by fleshing out its Web app store, Web Intents will be a timely addition to the desktop platform.

Now that each team is working on Web Intents, some pretty interesting code examples are available to play with. Here's Mozilla's demo video of how they want the user side of the experience to work:

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.

But one of the most interesting additions to this version of Firefox is that now the Do Not Track feature is available across multiple platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux and now Android.

The Do Not Track feature was developed by Mozilla as a response to FTC inquiries about consumers' privacy online. This feature will let users set a preference, broadcasting their desire to opt out of ad-based tracking. It will be signaled via a Do Not Track HTTP header with every page view or click they make. According to Global Privacy and Public Policy Leader at Mozilla, Alex Fowler, "We believe the header-based approach has the potential to be better for the web in the long run because it is a clearer and more universal opt-out mechanism than cookies or blacklists."

Firefox isn't the only browser that's working to address consumers' concerns about their privacy, as all the major browsers are all examining how best to handle this. But Firefox says it's the first to make sure this feature works across platforms. It's also moved the opt-out button to the Preferences tab, making it easier for users to find.

Web Development Tools

Mozilla says that Firefox 5 has better support for HTML5 standards (although as PC World points out, the browser performs no better than version 5 on HTML5test.com. )

Mozilla has also released a new Firefox Add-on SDK for Windows, Mac and Linux as well as a Firefox Add-on Builder Beta - both tools aiming to help developers build Firefox add-ons that work across platforms. The new browser also supports the CSS Animations standards and addresses some of the recently security concerns about WebGL.

The Browser Battles Rage On

The browser battles continue as analysts eye whose market share is rising and whose is falling: Chrome, IE, Firefox, Safari. Although (like it or not) Internet Explorer remains the most popular browser, Firefox is at risk of losing its spot as the number two browser to Chrome.

Previous Firefox releases have been flashy events, and the recent Firefox 4 has already become the most popular version of the Firefox browser in usage (in other words, unlike IE users, Firefox folks actually update to the latest version). There's little buzz this time around, although it isn't clear if that will do much to hinder (or help) Firefox adoption.