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Mozilla has announced that it had “negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement” with Google for the next three years.Some people had wondered whether Google would back out of the deal as it tries to grow the market share of its own Chrome browser.

Mozilla relies heavily on the income generated by search partnerships.

“Under this multi-year agreement, Google Search will continue to be the default search provider for hundreds of millions of Firefox users around the world,” said Gary Kovacs, Mozilla’s chief executive.

Alan Eustace, Google’s senior vice-president of search, said: “Mozilla has been a valuable partner to Google over the years and we look forward to continuing this great partnership in the years to come.”

The foundation said the exact terms of the deal would not be disclosed.

In its accounts for 2010, the Mozilla Foundation said it earned £77 million ($121.1 million) from agreements with Google, Microsoft and others. The Google agreement was thought to make up about 85% of that amount.

The previous deal, which ran out in November, was signed before Google’s Chrome browser had gained a presence in the so-called “browser war”.

Some internet monitoring organisations suggest Chrome has overtaken Firefox to become the world’s second most widely used browser, behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Many put this down to lavish advertising campaigns undertaken by the search company across the world.

Chrome’s launch and subsequent growth has now put it in direct competition with Firefox, yet Google remains financially responsible for Mozilla’s survival.

Firefox 9, the Mozilla browser’s latest incarnation, was launched last month.

Mozilla said it was “30% faster” than previous versions – a problem that has been cited by many users switching to Chrome.

Google’s Chrome has overtaken Mozilla’s Firefox as the world’s number two browser behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer last month, according StatCounter. The findings quote Chrome’s worldwide market share at 25.69% and Firefox’s at 25.23%. Internet Explorer, according to the same findings, dominates worldwide market share at 40.63%.

In the U.S., meanwhile, Chrome is still number three with 17.3%, a 6.41% jump compared to last November. Internet Explorer held the top spot with 50.66% and grew by 0.42%. Firefox was second with 20.09%.

Internet Explorer’s commanding lead has been challenged by the browser’s near absence from smartphones and tablets.

Last month, another researcher, Netmarketshare, reported that Internet Explorer’s share dipped below 50% for the first time.

Safari, Apple’s default browser on the iPhone and the iPad, claimed 62.17% of mobile traffic. Internet Explorer, meanwhile, had 52.63% of desktop traffic, according to the researcher.

Chrome may be coming to Google’s mobile Android platform soon, according to reports. The 3-year-old browser’s growth, which benefits from being promoted on Google.com, hit 200 million users in October.

Chrome also became the most popular browser for accessing Mashable in August.

Some porn and financial services websites are among the top users of a browser bug that reveals all the places people go online.
Carried out by computer science researchers at UC San Diego the study found 485 sites exploiting the bug.

The flaw gives sites access to all the other sites that user has visited. Many use it to target ads or see if users are patronising rivals.

The researchers documented JavaScript code secretly collecting browsing histories of Web users through “history sniffing” and sending that information across the network.

While history sniffing and its potential implications for privacy violation have been discussed and demonstrated, the new work provides the first empirical analysis of history sniffing on the real Web.

“Nobody knew if anyone on the Internet was using history sniffing to get at users’ private browsing history. What we were able to show is that the answer is yes,” said UC San Diego computer science professor Hovav Shacham.

The researchers said their work showed a need for better defences against history tracking.

The bug exploits the way that many browsers handle links people have visited. Many change the colour of the text to reflect that earlier visit.

This can be abused with a specially written chunk of code sitting on a website that interrogates a visitors browser to see what it does to a given list of websites. Any displayed in a different colour are judged to be those a user has already seen.

A survey of 50,000 of the web’s most visited websites by the team from UC San Diego found 485 sites using this method to get at browser histories, 63 were copying the data it reveals and 46 were found to be “hijacking” a user’s history.

The most popular site that uses the technique is adult site YouPorn. Many other porn sites use it too as well as sports, news, movies and finance websites.

The researchers also looked at other popular techniques that sites use to map and monitor what visitors do.

Some, such as YouTube, run scripts that track the trail a user’s mouse pointer takes on and across pages.

“Our study shows that popular Web 2.0 applications like mashups, aggregators, and sophisticated ad targeting are rife with different kinds of privacy-violating flows,” wrote the researchers.

The researchers pointed out that some modern browsers, such as Chrome and Safari, are not vulnerable to history hijacking and that the most recent version of Mozilla has closed the loophole.

Users of Internet Explorer can defeat the bug by turning on “private browsing”.

Users can also check how much information they are leaking by visiting a webpage set up by security researchers that tries to grab their history.

Despite these safeguards, the researchers said there was a “pressing need to devise flexible, precise and efficient defenses” against the history hijacking technique.

The research team is now planning more in-depth work that it hopes will result in tools that will more comprehensively defend against attempts to exploit the bug.

Microsoft’s once dominant Internet Explorer browser now accounts for less than half the web browser market, according to recent figures from StatCounter.
Microsoft’s share of the browser market has dipped below 50 per cent for the first time, according to the latest figures from StatCounter

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer now has a 49.87 per cent share of the global browser market, the first time it has fallen below 50 per cent.

Although Microsoft’s browser remains the dominant browsing platform, rivals such as Google and Mozilla are snapping at it heels.

According to the latest figures from StatCounter, Mozilla’s Firefox web browser now has a 31.5 per cent market share, while Google’s Chrome browser accounts for 11.54 per cent of the market, up from 3.69 per cent in September last year.

The decline of Internet Explorer in Europe – where Microsoft’s browser now accounts for 40.26 per cent of the market, compared to 46.44 per cent last year – could be due in part to the browser “ballot box” Microsoft is compelled to offer computer users in the wake of a European Commission ruling.

The Commission order Microsoft to roll out the ballot box after deciding that the company’s practice of pre-installing Internet Explorer on Windows machines could be viewed as anti-competitive.

The ballot allows computer users to choose from a list of 12 web browsers, and is pre-installed on new computers running Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system, and is pushed to computers running Vista or Windows XP via a software update.

Microsoft is bound to observe the Commission’s ruling for the next five years. The ballot system is available in all EU member countries.

Following on from our review yesterday on the current changes in the browser market, Dr Search reviews the top 5 browsers.

To download any or all of the browsers, please click on the links or the logos themselves.

Mozilla Firefox

Firefox was the phoenix that rose from the ashes of Netscape (in fact, it was originally to be named Phoenix), after the non-profit Mozilla Foundation decided to create a new browser as a rival to the potential Microsoft monopoly. Launched in November 2004 with additional funding from Google (which remains the browser’s default search engine), it is still the world’s second-most-popular browser. The “streamlined” Firefox 4 will be released next year.

RECOMMENDED- It’s quick to download, is security conscious and frequently introduces new features ahead of the competition- as being freeware has masses of free addons/plugins that really will improve your online experience.

Opera Opera was first released by the Norwegian company of the same name in 1996. Opera is the only browser of European origin to appear in the top five browsers of the browser ballot box. It was also Opera’s creators that initiated the anti-trust suit against Microsoft which led to the browser ballot. Though it has the smallest market share of the big five browsers on desktops, Opera’s mobile version is much more successful and available on most smartphones. We are still waiting to hear whether its iPhone app would be approved for release by Apple.

Safari Safari- Apple’s native web browser is more highly regarded since the launch of Safari 4 last year – though it’s still much better in its original Mac version than on Windows. Thanks to the iPhone, for which it remains the default browser (and so far, the only browser worth the name for the device), it has also surged somewhat in popularity. Despite being overtaken by Chrome, its market share continues to increase at the expense of Internet Explorer.

Google Chrome

Chrome- released in Autumn 2008, Google’s browser was explicitly designed for life in the digital cloud. By stripping away the browser furniture to the very edges of the screen, Chrome makes it possible to conceive of a desktop that operates solely online – not least because Google recently launched Chrome OS, its suite of online applications designed to replace desktop software and data storage.

In December, Chrome overtook Safari to become the world’s third-most-popular browser. However since Google launched Buzz in February there has been a storm about data privacy issues.

Internet Explorer

First included on Windows operating systems in 1995, the ugly Internet Explorer triumphed in the first “browser war” with Netscape Navigator, emerging as the world’s most widely used web browser in 1999, a position it has retained ever since.

After reaching a peak 95 per cent market share in the early 2000s, it now enjoys a more modest 60 per cent or thereabouts. Internet Explorer 8 – an improvement on clunky past efforts – was released last year.