We’re pleased to announce that we have negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Google. This new agreement extends our long term search relationship with Google for at least three additional years.

“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, CEO, Mozilla.

The money that funds Firefox comes principally from all the clicks by Firefox users who use Google in the browser. Until this renewal deal was signed, people wondered about a disastrous scenario in which the Firefox product was essentially defunded. Now we know that won’t happen.

In its 2010 fiscal year, by the way, Mozilla made $123 million, mostly from search revenues from Google and other partners. That makes it a rather well-funded non-profit. Fodder for further discussion: How well is it translating that money into a better Firefox (and other products), better Web technologies, and a better Web, period?

If the trends established thus far this year continue, Chrome will come close to matching Firefox’s usage share in November, then pass its rival in December, when Chrome will account for approximately 26.6% of all browsers and Firefox will have a 25.3% share.

Those numbers are eerily close to the stats at Technologizer for the past month: 26.05 percent of you have used Chrome to visit us, and 25.06 percent have used Firefox. Chrome is already the top browser amongst youse guys: Safari is #3 at 20.31 percent, and IE is #4 at 19.07 percent. (We’re small enough that there’s plenty of flux in the rankings; things could be different next month.)

As Gregg points out, StatCounter isn’t the only company that tracks browser usage, and NetApplications, another big player, shows Chrome further behind Firefox. But no matter which numbers you look at, you’ll probably come to the conclusion that Chrome will pass Firefox at some point, absent some major change in market dynamics.

When it happens–if it happens–Chrome will have earned the honor: Overall, it’s a really neat browser, and the one I use most often. But I’ll still feel a twinge of sadness. The story of how Firefox reignited browser competition is one of the most delightful, inspiring ones in all of PC history, and it’s more fun to root for Mozilla’s army of volunteers than for Google. The good news is that competition in the browser market is so vibrant that anything could happen–and an outstanding version of Firefox could steal market share back from Chrome.

Three years ago, when Google’s Chrome browser was brand new, I wrote about the fact that there was no Google Toolbar for it. Then as now, you could have made the case that the toolbar was superflous, but that didn’t stop people from really, really wanting a Google Toolbar for Chrome. The post got a ton of readers, and I followed up with one on my not-very-serious project to build a Google Fakebar.

People like doing things the way they’re comfortable doing them. (That’s the only plausible explanation for why it’s still possible to pay for AOL service.) And Google Toolbar was so useful for so long that here are probably millions of people out there who use it every single day on Firefox.

Shankland says that Google isn’t saying anything about the future of the toolbar for Internet Explorer. I wonder if there are people so wedded to the toolbar that they’d switch from Firefox to IE to keep it?

PC users, on the other hand, seem to be proud of their computing annoyances. Online bragging matches are common, with each participant trying to top all the other PC disaster stories.

You think I’m kidding about Mac and PC users? Try this on for size: Mac people vs. PC people: Top 5 differences. (Thanks to TechBite subscriber Gil.)

This week’s story is a collection (okay, a hodgepodge) of ways my PC annoys me, with, of course, work-arounds.

Get the Volume Under Control

The Annoyance My wife’s office is close enough that our chatting tool is a shout down the hall. I can also hear when she plays a YouTube video–and frantically grabs the mouse and dives for the volume control icon in the Notifications tray.

The problem is that mi esposa keeps changing the volume from different locations. –Steve Bass

The Fix Here’s what usually happens: Judy opens a YouTube video, discovers the volume’s too loud (as do I), and she moves the YouTube slider to lower the volume.

The next day, she can’t hear a YouTube vid, but this time, she uses the Windows’ volume controller to increase the sound.

Everything’s cool, until a Windows’ system alert blasts her out of her chair or she plays an MP3 and Windows Media Player, with its slider set to high, and the music crinkles the wallpaper.

The goal is to get the volume consistent. Try this: Adjust every app that plays sounds–get it the way you like–and then leave it alone. Once you’re happy with the sound levels, adjust the sound from only one spot, the Windows volume controller.

I don’t have a fancy keyboard with volume and mute buttons, and I’ve never liked the volume controller in Windows–even in Win7, it takes two clicks to use.

Instead, I use Volumouse, a clever little freebie that controls my PC’s volume. I’ve configured Volumouse to mute the volume with one wheel turn on any menu bar, change the volume by turning the wheel anywhere on the Taskbar, and, in combination with a keyboard key, make a window transparent.

Volumouse controls your system's volume.

If you don’t like Volumouse, try 3RVX. It has fewer features, uses a wheel combo with the WIN key, and is easier to setup than Volumouse.

Hide and Seek the Status Bar in Firefox 4

The Annoyance I had five extensions I relied on that appeared in the status bar at the bottom of Firefox 3. I upgraded to 4.0 and the stat bar is gone. –Jim Murray, via e-mail

The Fix Yeah, I miss the status bar and the way it provided useful information. But that’s nothing new with upgrades: Developers take two steps forward with a few neat features–and then a step back by removing things we like.

We’re both in luck. The Status-4-Evar extension brings back the status bar, with the unobtrusive Progress Meter and Download Status, as well as letting me see my ever-faithful Lazarus, the tool that resuscitates Web forms I’ve  filled and lost.

Get Firefox's status bar back!

I Need a New Multi-Function Printer

The Annoyance Our old HP printer quit working and we want a used printer/scanner. We didn’t really like the HP; the ink is expensive and it was very touchy.  We just want to occasionally print coupons and documents and need to scan some photos and documents to the computer.–pdxcatlovers, via Broad_band.

The Fix I’ve used and reviewed over a million multi-function printers and I say: get a Lexmark. I’ve had the Prestige Pro 805 for about 14 months and I ride it hard. It’s behaved perfectly for all that time.

Last week, much to my dismay, the print head stopped working. But with a five year warranty on the printer, here was the test.

I called tech support–outsourced, but smart and accommodating. His first comment: If I can’t help you fix the problem, don’t worry–we’ll ship you a new print head.

We went through a couple of things –firmware upgrade and cleaning the print head. No luck.

In two days I had a new print head–as well as a set of cartridges for the inconvenience. It was an easy, 10 second job: The print head lifts out just like one of the print cartridges. First take out the print cartridges and then lift a lever.

And to answer next your question: He didn’t know I was the exalted CEO of TechBite and czar at Bass International.

[This post is excerpted from Steve's TechBite newsletter. If you liked it, head here to sign up--it's delivered right to your inbox, and it's free.]

For all the rapid improvement that both Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android have seen, one thing about both mobile operating systems hasn’t changed much at all: their browsers. True, their technical underpinnings have been refined. But featurewise, they haven’t evolved at anywhere near the pace of their counterparts on PCs, where the competition among browsers is never-ending.

That’s one reason why I’m in favor of browser competition being as healthy on smartphones and tablets as it is on computers. On iOS, that’s not going to happen anytime soon–Apple doesn’t permit full-blown browsers with their own rendering engines in the App Store. (Ones that use the Safari engine, such as the excellent Atomic Web Browser, are permissible; so is Opera Mini, which does most of its work on Opera’s servers, not on your phone.) On Android, however, there’s nothing stopping other companies from competing with the OS’s built-in browser. Opera announced new versions of both Opera Mini and Opera Mobile for Android a couple of weeks ago. And now Mozilla has released the final version of Firefox 4 for Android.

I first wrote about the Android incarnation of Firefox last April, when it was known as Fennec and was a very rough draft. (In the interim, Mozilla decided to call it Firefox 4; that’s more straightforward but should not be interpreted as evidence that the mobile browser is a carbon copy of its recently-released PC cousin.) It’s come a long way–this finished version has a decidedly Firefoxy feel and is among the most feature-rich mobile browsers to date.

Some highlights:

• It has a clever interface that lets you swipe to the right to see thumbnails of tabls, and swipe to the left to get navigational tools and settings, thereby letting you bypass your phone’s menu button (always a plus in my book);
• It has a mobilized version of Firefox’s Awesome Bar that lets you type into the address bar to search your history, Google, Amazon, and other sources;
• It has Add-ons! Just as with the browser I know think of as Traditional Firefox, this one lets third-party developers build extensions that add new features and change stuff around. Among the ones already available: one that lets you change the browser user agent screen to fool sites into thinking you’re using another browser, a mobile version of Adblock Plus, a text-zooming utility, and one that lets you tweet from the address bar;
• You can sync your history, bookmarks, tabs, and other settings with other copies of Firefox on other devices;
• It sports a rendering engine which Mozilla touts as being much faster than the one used by Google’s browser. It did feel pretty darn snappy to me, although the browser launched slowly on an HTC Evo 4G, with a splash screen and a “please wait” message;
• You can save any page as a PDF, which is useful for salting away information you’ll want to refer to later.

Firefox for Android doesn’t render Google’s standard browser obsolete overnight. For me, the biggest catch is that so many mobile Web sites are designed to work best on the Webkit-based browsers used by iOS and Android. If you go to Google Docs in Firefox and try to edit a file, for instance, you get a warning that your browser isn’t supported. (I tried changing Firefox’s agent string to claim that the browser was iOS, but that only made maters worse.)

The browser runs on Android 2.0 and above, but it’s a phone app, not a tablet one; it’ll work on tablets, but just scales up the interface to fit the larger screen. Mozilla says it might build a tablet-specific Firefox eventually.

Oh, and Firefox for Android doesn’t support Flash, even when it’s on a phone that has Flash installed. This doesn’t strike me as a major downside, but you might feel differently; Mozilla says it might enable Flash later, but it’s mostly focusing on making HTML5 work as well as possible.

I like Firefox for Android. I like the fact that it gives Google some incentive to add more features to Android’s default browser. And maybe I’m a nutty optimist, but I think that the better browsing gets on Android phones, the more likely it is that Apple will beef up iOS’s Safari. (I’m not so optimistic that I believe Apple will permit other full-fledged browsers such as Firefox onto iOS anytime soon, but you never know.)

In short, I’m glad that Firefox has finally landed on Android in a version that’s ready for prime time. If you’ve tried it, let us know what you think…

Release Date:

Google Chrome (Beta): Beta version available; Those using Chrome will be updated soon.

Mozilla Firefox 4.0: Web and mobile browser expected mid-to-late March. [NOTE: A beta version is available.]

Point Goes To: Chrome. It’s available now, and we all know what happens with tentative dates.

Speed:

Google Chrome (Beta): The new browser is 66 percent faster than the previous version using the V8 Benchmark Suite tests.

Mozilla Firefox 4.0: Firefox counters with a six times faster browser than their previous iteration, meaning a 6oo percent faster speed using the V8 Benchmark Suite tests.

Point Goes To: Firefox. Just look at the stats.

User Interface:

Google Chrome (Beta): The browser has been revamped to help the user customize their experience and get to what they need faster. This means:

- The settings interface is a tab in the browser. This makes it look cleaner.

- A search box so you can quickly find whatever you’re trying to fix/manage. Finally, you can search for your settings instead of clicking through and reading through each option.

- Each option page has a URL so you can help others find the same setting.

Mozilla Firefox 4.0: Lots of new stuff here including:

- Top navigation buttons have disappeared, making it look very similar to Chrome. Tabs are right on top now. Bookmarks are now a button on the top right of the page.

- Introducing App Tabs: If you’re someone who uses the same websites (such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.), you might want to try this option. You have the option to make a frequently used website an app tab, which appears as a small square to the left of your normal tabs. The app tabs light up when there is updated content.

- Switch To Tab: Now when you go to type in a new URL, you will have the option to “Switch To Tab.” No more forgetting that you already have that website open in a different window.

- Panorama: Instead of having multiple windows open, each with their own purpose, you can organize your tabs into different groups. Panorama gives you the option to click on that set of tabs and hide the rest (even though they are in the same browser window). This is best for people who use a ton of tabs daily.

Point: Firefox. I like all the new features Firefox has added – especially since I’m a tab freak. Even though a lot of it is just updating to be more like Chrome, there are some added features that Chrome hasn’t implemented. However, Chrome does get props for making searching for settings easier and helping us customize.

Synchronization:

Google Chrome (Beta): You can synchronize passwords across all the internet-capable devices you use that use Google Chrome and encrypt them for added security. Search through Chrome’s now-easy-to-use settings. It should be under the heading “Personal Stuff.” You can also import data from your other browsers with ease.

Mozilla Firefox 4.0: Not only can you synchronize passwords and auto-fill data across your internet-capable devices, you can access the same website that you were looking at on any of your devices.

For example, if you open Yelp.com on your computer and need that information on the go, you can open the Firefox browser on your Android device and opt to look at the sites you were browsing on your computer and vice versa. The new Firefox browser will ship out with new Android devices when it is ready. (iOS users need to download a separate app for this functionality since separate browsers are not allowed.)

Point goes to: Firefox. I do enjoy how easy it is to upload settings into Chrome, but being able to see the same web browser across devices? Very cool.

Updates:

Google Chrome (Beta): It’s so advanced it updates itself and most of its apps (eventually). You can also force an update at any time under the “About Chrome” section.

Mozilla Firefox 4.0: You no longer need to restart Firefox when you update with a new add-on: It automatically installs it for you. This feature only works for new apps, although older add-ons have the option to upgrade to fit this new feature.

Point: Tie. I hate updating and like it when the program can figure it out for itself, but now Firefox is on an almost even playing field with the “no restart necessary” update.

Final Score: Advantage Firefox

I like what Chrome has done, but the new Firefox updates seem to take the best of what the browser can do and improve on it. Which do you prefer?

(This post is republished from our partner Techland.)

Here at Technologizer, Firefox maintains the #1 spot–in fact, Chrome is only the third-most popular browser. (Internet Explorer is #2.) But Chrome usages is increasing at a steady clip, and both Firefox and IE have lost users over the past year.

Here’s the current breakdown of browser usage among Technologizer users (this is based on the last month’s worth of visits to the site):

• Firefox: 32%
• Internet Explorer: 27%
• Chrome: 22%
• Safari: 16%
• Opera: 1%
• Other: 1%

Here’s where it stood a year ago:

• Firefox: 42%
• Internet Explorer: 31%
• Safari: 15%
• Chrome: 10%
• Opera: 1%
• Other: 1%

And a year before that, when Chrome was a few weeks old:

• Internet Explorer: 38%
• Firefox: 37%
• Safari: 16%
• Chrome: 6%
• Opera: 2%
• Other: 1%

Where will the breakdown stand a year from now, at least among Technologizer users? Chrome’s on a trajectory that could take it to the top. But predictions are dangerous, especially since the browsers that’ll be competing then will be quite different from today’s crop. Internet Explorer 9, still in beta, looks to be the first version of IE in eons that could be good enough to prompt some folks who abandoned IE ages ago to at least flirt with returning. And I really like the Firefox 4 beta–in fact, it’s my primary browser right now.

Of course, people who read sites such as TechCrunch and Technologizer are by definition more interested in technology than average folks. Among the populace at large, IE is still the most popular browser, Firefox is #2, and Chrome is still a pretty distant #3. Different research outfits report different numbers; here’s a handy-dandy chart I swiped from Wikipedia.

So what browser are you using, and why?

Finding the right one is sometimes just a matter of saying, “gawd, why can’t I…” and sticking it into a Google search field. So here are a few that I’ve found — and integrated into my browsers.

One thought, though, before you start. Adhere to the Bass International one at a time rule. It’s the best way to experiment when modifying your browser with add-ons or extensions. You know the reason: If your browser starts acting hinky, you’ll find the culprit pretty quickly with only one new add-on installed. Also, adding a bunch at a time has been known to cause sunspots and make people faint. No, seriously.

Okay, then, let’s get started with Firefox.

A New Annoyance: Local Shared Objects LSOs are tracking cookies created by Adobe Flash applications. They never expire and there’s no way for you to look at them as you might regular cookies. Even the Wall Street Journal has taken notice, saying some sites can stick over a hundred tracking components on your computer. I’ve got BetterPrivacy running in the background to dump these intrusive little buggers.

Take a Note! Every so often I’ll feel the need to scribble a note about a Web page I’ll revisit later. (No surprise that by the time I’m done for the day, I’ve forgotten about the site and never get back to it. But that’s another story.)

Web Notes is handy: Click its toolbar icon and a small Web Notes window appears on the Web page you’ve got open. The note you enter stays with the page, and the little window hangs around if you want it to. If you don’t put a note on the page you’re on, the note rolls up. Web Notes is less intuitive to use than I’d like, but easy enough once you get the knack.

A smarter note-taking tool, and the one I like best, is  Internote, which is still in beta at version 3.0beta2. Individual notes stick with the page, have changeable background and text colors, and are easily added or removed. I like the note management feature that lets me search through my notes and open the search result’s corresponding page. You can find product features and screen caps on the developer’s SourceForge page

Desktop Shortcut Remember how you have “Create Shortcut” on Internet Explorer’s right-click context menu? Now you’ve also got it in Firefox with deskCut. (Okay, I hear the IE crowd gloating; I agree, the Mozilla folks should have built it in, but they didn’t.)

Google--your way

100 Ways to Use Google There are a dozen or so Google spots I visit often — Accounts, Maps, Web History, and others — and Google Shortcuts gives me a handy way to stack my Google favs in a pull-down toolbar icon. There’s also a version for Chrome.

Back Up Firefox Xmarks syncs your favorites in the cloud (actually, on an Xmarks server) and lets you retrieve them from anywhere. So if you’re on the road, you’ll always have access to your favorites. (It’s also available for Internet Explorer.) While you’re adding add-ons, grab a copy of Firefox Environment Backup Extension to save a copy of your profile, extensions, themes, preferences, cookies, user names, and passwords.

Download and Run Remember the Internet Explorer Run option? Now that you’ve switched to Firefox, you’ll need OpenDownload to the same thing.

Send E-mail If you need to send the link for a page to a buddy, it should be a no-brainer in Firefox. Unfortunately, you’ll need Email This! to do it.

Free Internet Explorer Add-ons

I don’t know why, but developers aren’t nearly as interested in creating add-ons for Internet Explorer. It’s probably because they use IE only when they have to — or it could be that Internet Explorer 8 is notorious for becoming unstable when too many add-ons are installed.

If you have trouble with any Internet Explorer add-on, Microsoft has two spots to give you a helping hand. The first explains how browser add-ons can screw up your computing experience and gives you instructions for disabling them. Okay, no, the Microsoft folks don’t use my descriptive language, but that’s essentially what they’ve said. The other page supplies a more comprehensive FAQ about add-ons.

Back Up Internet Explorer BackRex Internet Explorer Backup does what Xmarks does (there’s an IE version), but backs up favorites locally, on your hard drive. BackRex also stores IE’s security zones, cookies, history, and any other customized settings. I’d use BackRex as well as Xmarks, just for the extra stuff it saves.

Nice Gesture Move your mouse this way and move back a page. Flick down and close a tab. Mouse Gestures are nothing new (except to IE) and can really speed things up when you navigate.

Max Out If you’re willing to give up on Internet Explorer, try Maxthon. It’s a browser that uses Internet Explorer’s core engine, but its feature set far surpasses IE and gets close to what Firefox offers.

That’s it. Really. I searched — lots — and couldn’t find any other cool tools. And I even looked on Microsoft’s Add-ons Gallery, an embarrassingly boring array of mostly toolbars and search engines. That’s too bad, too, because every time I use Internet Explorer, I can’t imagine why Microsoft would maintain its lameness.

If you find something cool for IE I promise to write about it.

[This post is excerpted from Steve's TechBite newsletter. If you liked it, head here to sign up--it's delivered on Wednesdays to your inbox, and it's free.]