The open source Firefox web browser from Mozilla now has some 270 million users. That's the figure that Mozilla staffer Aza Dotzler is now claiming, and it's not an easy number to calculate.

The writing is on the wall. While Mozilla and its Firefox browser appear to be a very solid institution in the browser market, it is the weakest link with an extremely attractive portion of the browser user base as well. Could Mozilla be squeezed out of the market?

When Mozilla released the Firefox browser in 2004, Microsoft's Internet Explorer dominated the market with a whopping 95 percent share. Now Firefox has 18 percent of the market and Apple's Safari has another 6 percent.

Firefox for Mobile (codenamed Fennec) is the name of the build of the Mozilla Firefox web browser for smaller non-PC devices, mobile phones and PDAs. Firefox for mobile 1.0 uses the same version of the Gecko layout engine as Firefox 3.6.

If you're like me, you're using more than one open source browser these days. That's why I was absolutely heartened to see Firefox guru Chris Blizzard, from Mozilla, endorse the concept of using those exact two browsers in a recent interview.

Mozilla vice president of products Jay Sullivan says that unlike Google, the open source outfit has no intention of bundling Firefox with Adobe Flash —– or with a plug-in that runs native code inside the browser. Mozilla, Sullivan says, believes that the future of online applications lies with web standards, including HTML5.

On the back of the release last week of Firefox 3.0, Mozilla's open-source browser gained market share at the expense of rivals Internet Explorer (IE) and Safari, Net Applications said Monday.

A Mozilla Developer Preview of improvements in the Gecko layout engine is now available for download. This is a pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.3 platform, which forms the core of rich Internet applications such as Firefox.

The Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit organisation behind the Firefox web browser, has published its first ever Quarterly Analyst Report on the state of the internet and its browser's worldwide market share