ReadWriteWeb

This has been a rough year for Mozilla and its Firefox team. Once the darling of the Web and the champion of the oppressed against Microsoft and Internet Explorer, Firefox is facing stiff competition from its primary benefactor and backlash from users. Chrome also seems to be the preferred browser of Web developers. Naturally, this means speculation about the future of Firefox.

Has Firefox had better years? Absolutely. Does this mean that Firefox is "doomed"? Not so fast.

While browser-based operating systems haven't taken over the world, 2011 has been a pretty good year for Web developers. It's an exciting time to be working in Web development, and there's never been a better crop of tools to work with. Web standards are eclipsing proprietary toolkits, and the development community is creating its own set of open source tools to work with. Here's a look at some of the best we've seen in 2011.

What's 338 days late between friends? Last year Hexxeh promised ChromiumOS Lime builds "within the next two weeks." Unfortunately, the schedule slipped just a little, and Lime builds didn't come out until December 2nd. Better late than never, though.

ChromiumOS, of course, is the open source release of Google's ChromeOS. Unfortunately, Google doesn't actually do anything quite so helpful as provide installable images of ChromeOS for folks who haven't picked up a Chromebook.

Just a few years ago, Mozilla's Firefox browser was rising fast as the chief challenger to Microsoft's stubbornly dominant Internet Explorer. Things change pretty fast in the world of Internet technology, however, and today Firefox's once bright future seems much less certain.

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.

Only three years after hitting the market, Google's Chrome Web browser has overtaken Firefox as the #2 most-used browser, according to new data from StatCounter.

Chrome now has 25.69% of the global browser marketshare, just a slight notch above Firefox, which holds on at 25.23%. In September, it was predicted that Chrome was on track to bump Firefox from the #2 slot by about this time, and sure enough that projection has come true. Granted, that prediction was also based on StatCounter numbers, and this data often looks different depending on who is doing the reporting.

Google has been on a killing spree the last few months, whacking projects that are non-essential to the company strategy or that haven't caught on. Even though this has angered some users, Google is still stubbornly clinging to one of its biggest dogs to date: ChromeOS and the Chromebooks.

Google announced the ChromeOS in July 2009, and finally started shipping them to consumers in June of this year. (Not counting Cr-48s, which weren't commercially available.)

In our Top Consumer Products of 2011 list, we selected the Chrome web browser as our number 1 pick. Its market share has grown over 2011 and it's on track to surpass Firefox as the 2nd most popular browser on the desktop (exactly when it passes Firefox depends on whose statistics you read). Over 2011 Google has demonstrated, in both user numbers and technical innovation, that Chrome is the most significant challenge to Microsoft's dominance of the browser market since the days of Netscape Navigator in the late 90s.

Meanwhile, in the mobile browser market, Apple's Safari has risen over 12 percentage points to have a 62% share of that market, according to leading Internet statistics provider Net Applications. However, Apple will have to continue to look over its shoulder at Android, which has also gained over 2011. Let's look more closely at how the desktop and mobile browser markets changed over 2011.

We're approaching the end of November, which for those of us in the United States who celebrate it, means it's time for Thanksgiving. It's a holiday that typically involves some combination of family, eating, drinking and/or relaxing. Despite it being a national holiday, the tech-savvy do not get the entire day off. For many, being back home with family means being casually asked to "take a look at" a loved one's computer or perform other IT duties around the house.

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.

I first saw a startup called Apture demonstrated in an off-the-record session at O'Reilly's by-invite-only FOO Camp several years ago. The room was packed and I had to stand on my toes outside the doorway to see Apture's Tristan Harris navigate around the Internet on a projected screen. He was highlighting words with his cursor and making related articles, photos, Wikipedia pages and YouTube videos pop off the surface of the page in a handsome little box with rounded corners. Everyone in the room made ooh and aah noises when they saw it. Wherever you saw a word - you could learn a whole lot more about it with a little swipe of your mouse.

What will the Internet look like in 5 or 10 years? Will it still be a series of linked pages that users browse through, one at a time? Google may be betting that it will be something very different, if the company's latest acquisition is any indication. Apture, the service you can see in action if you highlight any word on this ReadWriteWeb, has been acquired by Google, the two companies announced this morning. An addition to offering media-rich contextual search pop-ups on the pages of publishers who have installed the service, Apture also offers a browser plug-in that adds the same functionality to any page on the web. Much of that same functionality will be baked into Google's browser Chrome very soon.

Somewhere along the line, Microsoft went from being the 800-pound gorilla in the browser market to begging users to switch back to Internet Explorer. Now, Microsoft is running a "where's the love?" campaign to offer "free stuff" for users who download IE9. After all these years, hasn't Microsoft learned yet that it can't buy love? Is the company capable of competing on features at all?