This means that Firefox is retaining a slender lead over Google's browser. Last month we speculated that the halt in Chrome's growth might be related to Google's decision to penalize Chrome's positioning in its search results due to an advertising campaign that contravened Google's rules. The sixty day penalty will expire in the next few days, restoring Chrome's prominent positioning in Google searches.

Get your diaries out and watch for those Chrome ads.

Andreas Gal is one of the Mozilla team leaders:

I want to land bug 714408 on mozilla-central as soon as I get review for it. It adds hardware-accelerated audio/video decoding support to Gecko using system decoders already present on the system. Android, for example, ships by default with a number of decoders, and in particular for such mobile devices we really have to use these hardware-accelerated decoders for good battery life (and performance).

Looks innocuous; in fact, it's the Firefox team caving in and using system decoders for H.264 and AAC and MP3 (patent-encumbered all), and essentially admitting that the open source WebM video codec is not going to get any traction on the web. Those with long(ish) memories may recall which company said it would drop H.264 support from its browser - but so far hasn't. Read the whole thing; fascinating.

HTML5 demo showing how you get tracked by cookies across various sites. Available as a downloadable add-on for Firefox. More than a little creepy:

If you haven't realized it yet, companies are tracking you across most of the sites you visit daily on the web. It's quite likely that these companies know more about you than your government. Some of them might even know more about you than your best friends.

"'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 report by Kara Swisher suggests Google will pay $300m per year to Mozilla. That's a big increase on the last contract. And Google beat Yahoo and Microsoft to it. There's still life and rivalry in web search

Email thread from the Bugzilla dev list showing that (on OSX at least) Firefox swallows memory and won't release it in an orderly fashion. Happily, a fix is in the works, and should go through very soon.

"While most of the talk for the past month has been [scareware scammers'] move to Mac with fake Finder pop-ups that appear to scan your computer, they haven't stopped innovating on Windows either.<br />
"Their latest scam? They detect your user-agent string from your web browser and display a fake Firefox security alert if you are using the Mozilla Firefox web browser."

Mozilla gets bolshy when the Feds come calling.

"Did Microsoft really rush Internet Explorer 9 into Windows Update in a desperate move to catch up with Firefox?<br />
"Sorry, conspiracy theorists, but the answer is an emphatic no."