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Mozilla is working on technology that will allow PDF documents to be rendered within the browser, rather than utilizing a browser plug-in or an external app to open them. On his blog, Mozilla researcher Andreas Gal has described the project to build a PDF reader in HTML5 and JavaScript.

Typically, PDFs are rendered in a browser with a plugin - either with Adobe's own PDF reader or with another provider's renderer. These plugins often cannot take full advantage of PDF features. Furthermore, as Gal points out, there is quite a large trusted code base, something that's forced the Google Chrome browser to have sandbox the PDF renderer in order to avoid code injection attacks. An HTML5 version would be make this more secure, as would the open source nature of the project.

Mozilla is always experimenting with how content is searched and discovered in Firefox. Mozilla Labs has released a new experimental feature today in its Prospector series. Called Predictive NewTab it supplements the fixed list of top sites presented to users when they open a new browser tab in Firefox.

The idea is to use the semantic data of browser history and tagged bookmarks to give users recommendations of places to visit on the Web when they open a new tab. It should make the "speed dial" list of sites users frequently visit faster and more relevant.

Twitter has just announced some photo news, as rumors circulating over the Memorial Day holiday weekend hinted it would. The big reveal isn't exactly a new photo-sharing or photo-storage service - Twitter will not be hosting the photos you Tweet now. But that doesn't mean that today's announcement is irrelevant or unimportant.

Today's announcement actually has two part: one dealing with search and one dealing with photos. It also involves two new partners for the company: Firefox and Photobucket.

Firefox 4 is gaining in the global browser wars. It has eclipsed version 3.6 for the first time and now is the third most-used browser in the world, behind Internet Explorer 8 and Google Chrome 11, according to StatCounter Global.

If you put add all versions of all the browsers together, IE is still the global leader with 43.9%, of which 4.6% is IE 9. Firefox is second with 29.3%. Chrome has experienced the most growth, going from 8.6% in 2010 to 19.4% in 2011. Yet, given the different stats you see from different sources, the precise numbers in the browser market are hard to determine. See the charts below.

The latest pre-release of Firefox 6, Aurora 6, brings back support for WebSockets. WebSockets is a protocol for providing two-way communications between the browser and the server. Mozilla dropped support for WebSockets last year due to security issues.

Other notable features in Aurora 6 include the progress element, window.matchMedia API, better APIs for binary data and Server-Sent Events. You can download it here.

First, 3D came to the movie theater. Then companies like Samsung started to make 3D televisions to bring the experience home. Tablets and phones like the Motorola Xoom and some Android devices from LG took 3D mobile.

Now, YouTube, Firefox and Nvidia are trying to bring 3D to the Web. Firefox 4 is using HTML5 and WebM to bring thousands of 3D YouTube videos to the Web while wearing Nvidia 3D Vision Hardware. The Web has been lacking 3D because it is a fundamentally different platform than the others, which are either distribution channels or specific devices. It is worth it to go get some Nvidia glasses to cruise YouTube in 3D?

A common complaint about Firefox is that it's just too slow, particularly upon launching. And after touting the speed and enhanced performance in the browser's most recent release, Mozilla wants to make it clear to users: if Firefox is slow, it's probably your add-ons.

Of course, the wide variety of add-ons and the ability to customize your browser to your liking is one of the things that has long made Firefox an appealing choice. But in a post on its blog, Mozilla reveals some stats from performance-testing. It found that for every add-on you install, you're adding about 10% to the amount of time it takes for Firefox to start-up.

With over 7 million downloads since its release yesterday, Firefox 4 is out of the gate with some strong momentum, it seems.

That number certainly trounces the statistics from the first day of Internet Explorer 9's recent release, which hit a little over 2 million downloads.

Unlike the launch of IE9, yesterday's "download day" for Firefox 4 didn't have a lot of media publicity pushing users to download the latest browser. That hasn't seemed to stop users from upgrading.

This morning, as Firefox 4 was officially released to the world, Mozilla Developer Evangelist Christian Heilmann tweeted "So IE9 was downloaded 2.3m times in a day - let's see if that record gets broken today." As I write this, Firefox 4 has been downloaded over 4.1 million times according to the Firefox Download Stats page. By the time I'm done with this post, I'm sure it will hit 4.2 million.

Does breaking Internet Explorer 9's download record mean a comeback for Firefox? It's still the second most popular browser after IE, and certainly has a better reputation than Microsoft's much-maligned browser. But Firefox has lost market share to WebKit-based browsers like Google Chrome, which have a reputation for being faster and faired better in Acid tests.

What do you think of the latest version of Firefox?

Yesterday, Google released a Chrome browser extension that lets users block certain websites from showing up in their Google search results. That way, if you never want to see an eHow article again, you don't have to. Kynetx, a company that offers developers a single platform for building extensions for multiple browsers, saw the announcement and immediately offered $500 to the first person that could create an extension "with the same functionality for all 3 browsers and all 3 major search engines."

Less than a day later, the company has announced a winner and released the extensions.