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.

Mozilla is considering slowing down its recent “let’s move as fast as Chrome” release schedule for Firefox. Sounds like a good idea to me.

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?

Those seem like worthy pursuits to me. First-party smartphone browsers tend to be stagnant, touting speed gains and little else with each new operating system version. It’s taken Apple two OS updates to add tabbed browsing to the iPad, and neither Apple nor Google have figured out faster ways to switch browser windows on smartphones. Extensions? Gesture commands? Custom home screens? Forget about it.

Dolphin Browser HD provides all those features. And crucially for tablets, it lets users identify the browser as a desktop to avoid frequently awful mobile websites.

The problem, right now, is that phone and tablet users generally don’t bother venturing beyond their devices’ stock web browsers. Dolphin, for instance, has 8 million downloads to date, compared to 130 million Android devices activated worldwide.

My hope is that the years ahead bring big gains for cross-platform mobile browsers like Dolphin (once this iOS thing pans out), Firefox (if it ever expands beyond Android and Maemo) and Opera. If these alternative browsers get big enough to threaten first-party browsers, OS makers might stop comparing themselves to each other with little speed tests and start addressing their missing features. Dolphin, at least, is getting serious about moving that ball forward.

The latest web apps update from Mozilla Labs, available as an add-on for Firefox, gives the experimental project a new look and helps individual apps communicate with one another.

Web apps now appear in a tray at the bottom of the browser window. Once opened, they become pinned tabs with no URL bar, giving them a more app-like feel. Mozilla also wants to aid app discovery by letting web developers notify visitors when an app is available — kind of like the App Store link that appears when you visit Yelp’s mobile website.

The bigger improvement in this release is “Web Activities.” This is basically a calling service for web apps to pass data back and forth. So for instance, if you’re using an online photo editor such as Pixlr and want to import an image from Dropbox, neither service would have to support the other specifically. The Web Activities calling service would handle the file transfer.

Mozilla says it’s working with Google’s Chrome team on the concept. Native smartphone apps can already communicate through standardized methods — Android has an intents system, as TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid points out, while iOS audio apps can use third-pary methods such as Sonoma AudioPaste — so it makes sense for web apps to follow along.

Hopefully, these features will do a better job of justifying the existence of web apps in the first place. When Google launched the Chrome Web Store last December, critics dismissed these apps as glorified bookmarks. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but unless web apps evolve, they’ll never be viewed as a vital part of the web browsing experience. I’m glad Mozilla and Google are working on that.

Here’s Mozilla’s video overview of the new features:

Except, it’s not. Firefox 5 is actually the first update in a new, faster development cycle for Mozilla. From now on, new versions of Firefox will arrive every six weeks, meaning that 2011 will bring more Firefox updates than the entire six years prior.

In some ways, I like this approach, which is roughly the same way Google handles updates to Chrome. If a feature isn’t ready, Mozilla can simply hold it until the next version, which means less waiting for the features that are ready.

But the rapid release cycle introduces its own issues. It can result in some pretty dull updates, as evidenced by Firefox 5, in which CSS animation support and performance enhancements are among the biggest new features.

More importantly, I’m worried that these rapid updates will discourage dramatic user interface changes, like the difference between Firefox 3 and 4, or Internet Explorer 8 and 9. I don’t know for sure that this will happen, but I do know that after more than two years of rapid releases, Google Chrome pretty much looks the same as it always has.

So while rapid releases may allow Firefox to get better at a faster clip, it could make bold new changes harder to implement. Let’s hope the new development cycle doesn’t confine Mozilla to mere incremental improvements.

Google's Johanna Wright shows off the new Search by Image feature.

“I don’t need ten blue links — just give me the answer!”–Bing Search Blog post, October 2010

“Yahoo Vows Death to the ’10 Blue Links’”–IDG News article, May 2009

It’s funny: Google’s competitors spend a lot of time explaining that “ten blue links”–the traditional search results that we’ve known since the dawn of search engines–are annoying and/or obsolete. But I haven’t noticed any consumer uprising over them, or a mass exodus from search engines that use them. Actually, I suspect that any company that rails against “ten blue links” would cheerfully swap places with Google if it had the chance, dependent on blue links though Google may be.

And at Google’s Inside Search event today, thee was lots of news–but the company didn’t seem to be on a mission to deemphasize traditional results pages. Instead, most of the news was about making the blue links more useful–getting you to them more quickly, in more ways, then letting you get past them and onto a Web page that provides the information (Google would probably say “knowledge” rather than “information” which you’re looking for.

The morning’s announcements included recaps of recent Google search improvements, plus some new ones:

• Instant Pages is a new feature in Chrome which loads the first result in a Google search in the background before you click on it, so it loads almost instantly if you do click on it–even if it’s a page that normally takes several seconds to render. (You can get it in Chrome’s Dev version now, or in the next beta, or in non-beta Chrome this summer.)
• Search by Image lets users of Google.com’s desktop version drag and drop an image into the search field, then get results that relate to it. Google’s demo involved a snapshot of a Greek island which the search engine’s image-recognition technology was able to identify. (It should show up in the next couple of days.)
• Voice Search, a feature of Android and Google’s iPhone app that lets you speak a query rather than typing it, will be available in Chrome as well. (It’ll roll out over the next week.)
• Google Images will get the Google Instant feature which starts displaying results as you type. (This one will arrive over the next couple of months, but you can turn it on in Google Labs now.)
• Google.com’s mobile version has some new features, including icons on the home page for items such as “Restaurants” and “Coffee” that take you directly to blue links coupled with an interactive map, and a query “builder” that lets you construct searches based on Google’s suggestions as you type. (I confess that I don’t completely understand how this second feature works even after seeing it demoed and trying it for myself.)

That’s a lot of new functionality to chew on, not all of which is available quite yet. And some of it will require Chrome, at least for now, although Google says it’s using open standards that would let other browsers implement these features, and that it plans to roll some of the new functionality into Google Toolbar.

Almost none of what the company announced today is about eliminating blue links; at most, it’s about supplementing links with additional useful info, as Google Mobile is now doing with its links-and-map view. In that respect, it strikes me as being both extremely ambitious and rather traditional.

As usual at Google events, the spokespeople on stage said (over and over) that Google is obsessed with speed–and in one way or another, everything they showed off today was about making searching faster. It says that it benchmarks how long searches take down to the millisecond, and that the new improvements can shave several seconds off a search, resulting in happier users and a happier Google.

Of course, it said similar things about Google Instant when it announced it last year. If Google watched me search and timed how long it took, I don’t dispute that Instant might be speeding things up, but I’ve never quite warmed up to it: it still makes me feel a bit as if I’m being smacked in the face with search results (some of which are irrelevant ) before I’m ready to look at them. Speed in other words, is unquestionably essential–but I’m not so sure that it automatically translates into a better experience.

I was still impressed overall by what Google showed off today, and I’m looking forward to trying it and writing about it as it rolls out. More thoughts to come…