ReadWriteWeb

A post on the Mozilla blog yesterday has the company, makers of the Firefox Web browser, pondering the creation of an "open" Web application store and imagining what such a store should look like. Although the musings come across as a bit "me-too"-ish considering that Google just announced its own Chrome Web Store earlier this week, it's hard to argue with the principles Mozilla sets forth. An open Web app store should "exclusively host web applications based upon...other widely implemented open standards in modern web browsers," reads the post. It should "be open and accessible" and "set forth...guidelines and processes that are transparent."

Of course it should. But the subtext here is that Mozilla is proposing a Web App Store that's open, as if Google is not doing the same. But is that the truth?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published results from a study of nearly half a million website visitors' browsers and concluded that the settings configurations exposed to sites we visit are close enough to unique to identify repeat visitors with a high degree of accuracy even if cookies are deleted.

Highly granular version numbers of installed plug-ins and seemingly random orders in lists of installed fonts were the primary offenders. The EFF has concluded that the most viable remedy may be consumer pressure applied to software vendors to change these practices. Even if you're not particularly concerned about privacy on this level, the findings are quite interesting.

Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox web browser, introduced a "plugin checker" page last fall that analyzed whether the plugins you had installed in your web browser were up to date. Now that tool has been updated to check plugins installed in other web browsers too, including Safari, Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer.

According to the Director of Firefox Development, Johnathan Nightingale, plugin safety is an issue across the web. "Outdated plugins are a major source of security and stability risk for web users," he wrote in a recent company blog post.

Mozilla Contacts, the experimental project from the organization behind the Firefox web browser, has released a new version of their Contacts add-on which introduces Facebook integration. Previously, Mozilla Contacts allowed you to import your various address books spread out across the Web (think: multiple email accounts, Twitter friends, LinkedIn colleagues, Plaxo contacts, Mac OS X address book, etc.) into the Web browser itself - in this case, obviously, Firefox. Once there, the combined address book information could be used in form autocompletion everywhere across the Web and more.

Now, an updated version of Mozilla Contacts (download link) introduces a number of new features, most notably integration with Facebook Contacts and something called a "person URL."

Google's developer version of the Chrome browser has made a significant change. In the URL the traditional first step, "http://" has been done away with.

Thom Holwerda, of OSNews, had an idea why.

"(T)he URL scheme bears little meaning to most people using a browser - they know it's there and how to type it, but it doesn't indicate anything to them. Since computing has been about abstracting away complexity for a while now, it was only a matter of time before browser makers started removing this piece of web history."

We wrote on Monday that Apple had accepted Opera's mobile browser into its app store. A day after it debuted it has topped the list of free apps in all of Apple's online stores.

Opera is now #1 from Australia to the United States.

Norway-based browser company Opera has announced it will be available at the iTunes app store for download into Apple products.

"Opera Mini has been approved for iPhone and iPod touch on the App Store," the company announced. "Opera Mini will be available as a free download within 24 hours, depending on market."

While everybody was talking about the iPhone OS 4 event yesterday, Apple also quietly announced WebKit2, a major contribution to the open source WebKit project that forms the basis of Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome browsers. One of the reasons that Google Chrome doesn't crash very often is that Google uses a split process model. Every tab in Chrome runs in a different process and a crashing plugin or bug only takes down this tab and not the whole browser. While Google had to develop this code from the ground up for Chrome, Apple is now making this technology a core part of the WebKit2 framework.

SublimeVideo, an HTML5-based video player from Switzerland-based development and design firm Jilion now includes a "fall back to Flash mode." This means that when a web surfer using a browser that doesn't support HTML5 visits a page that uses the player, it will automatically switch over (aka "fall back") to Adobe Flash, the plugin-based technology that older, non-HTML5 web browsers use.

Why is this important? In addition to providing a path to move from one technology to the next, a transition that will take years at best, SublimeVideo could ease the workload for developers tasked with creating web pages that the entire web audience can access.

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.