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Ending a month of speculation, Google has renewed its search exclusivity deal with Mozilla, who has long featured Google as the default browser on its Firefox Web browser.

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.

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.

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.

For most of its existence, Firebug has been the de facto JavaScript developers' console for Firefox; and for several years, most Web development in general involved Firebug to at least some extent. Now with HTML5 developers expecting to see more workbench functionality built into the browser, Firefox finds itself in yet another chase, this time not only with Google Chrome but with Opera and Microsoft Internet Explorer, in a race to incorporate functionality that Firebug users had always thought they had.

Mozilla's latest nightly build of Aurora, the development channel for Firefox, reveals the incorporation of at least one new feature in its growing built-in dev toolkit that, while welcomed, will already look familiar to some who've sneaked into the Chrome camp: a "bread crumbs" toolbar that represents the relationships between page divisions in the active DOM model, and lets you click on a division name to see it isolated in the browser.

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.

Good news for Twitter, for Firefox & for Firefox users.

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.

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?

Microsoft's search engine Bing today announced something it probably should have made available a long time ago: a new version of Firefox with Bing as the default search option in the search box and the Awesome Bar. Of course the download is optional and just for all you Bing lovers who sought an easy way to switch to Bing inside your Firefox instead of Google.

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.

Microsoft launched a website today designed to give users a detailed look at how secure their browser is. The site, called Your Browser Matters, automatically detects the visitor's browser and returns a browser security score on a scale of four points.

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.