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

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.

Apple's launch of Safari on Windows has already managed to irk a competitor. However, Mozilla's John Lilly isn't upset that there's a new browser in town; what bugs him is how that new browser was introduced. One of the pie charts Steve Jobs used to illustrate browser market share showed only Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Safari, with no mention of Firefox or any other browser.

Mozilla has unveiled a spectacular new concept browser, dubbed Aurora. The bleeding-edge browser is part of a new Mozilla Labs initiative, in which the open-source foundation is encouraging people to contribute ideas and designs for the browser of the future.

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.

Mozilla has been forced to justify its decision to herd third party coders, whose add-ons sometimes break the Firefox user interface, away form the browser's components directory. In a meaty blog post on Saturday, the open source browser maker’s development boss, Mike Connor, explained the rationale behind Mozilla’s move to debut a "lockdown" feature in Firefox 3.6.

With a sliding market share, Netscape decided to focus on its enterprise oriented products and gave away the browser but most importantly allow volunteers to work on the product. Mozilla was nothing but Netscape’s user agent (the name a browser uses to contact the web server), a reminder of the first Netscape code name.

"[...]it's official: while Firefox 3 boasts some great new features like a smart address bar and better bookmarks manager, the best reason to upgrade will be for the performance improvements. Firefox 3 is noticeably faster and more stable than Firefox 2 to the casual user and Mozilla engineers have numbers that show it will be the fastest browser on the market."

One of the features that attract geeks and power users to Firefox is add-ons. these simple browser extensions allow you to customize pretty much everything about the browser, from the page being displayed to the browser itself. Extensions are powerful stuff, but Mozilla is working on a project that could see add-ons as we know them disappear.