Om Malik’s got a little embryo of a theory, and it revolves around Mozilla’s hosted services/browser sync service called Weave:

I sat around gabbing with Lilly and Jay Sullivan, Mozilla’s VP of Mobile, talking about Weave and the Awesome Bar, which is a way to get access to all your browsing history and bookmarks by just typing them in the URL bar on your browser. And while we were talking about Weave, I asked them if it was going to be part of this new, mysterious iPhone app. Lilly and Sullivan smiled and remained silent. Interestingly, they didn’t correct me.

It’s a telling anecdote, and nearly enough to assume that Weave will be some part of the app, and if the alternative is a browser—which Apple probably wouldn’t be too excited to approve—then is may be the whole app. But goddamnit, let’s indulge our modest fantasies anyway! Lifehacker flags a (cautious) thesis by Kevin Tofel at JKOnTheRun, who sees a Fennec hiding behind the smoke:

Apple did begin to approve third-party applications earlier this year, so a Mozilla browser does have a chance for approval. And that could open the door for the Weave service, as well. Apple’s Mobile Me service doesn’t sync bookmarks or web passwords over-the-air currently, although I suspect these functions could be added in the future. In light of that, I’m thinking we’re about to see Fennec on the iPhone.

So in conclusion, Mozilla: ^This.^ [GigaOm and JKOnTheRun via Lifehacker]

No, it’s not Explorer. Microsoft wanted first to order browsers from left to right, in order of market share. That meant Explorer was going to go first, then Firefox, then Safari, Opera and Google’s Chrome. The EU objected, so Microsoft complied and offered the only possible option: Alphabetical order.

That puts Apple Safari in the number one position, followed by Google Chrome, Microsoft Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera. Looks good enough to me, but Jenny Boriss—a Firefox user experience designer—disagrees:

This ordering is about the worst option possible. Microsoft wrote in their proposal that ‘nothing in the design and implementation of the Ballot Screen and the presentation of competing web browsers will express a bias for a Microsoft web browser or any other web browser’, but this is exactly what the current design does. Windows users presented with the current design will tend to make only two choices: IE because they are familiar with it, or Safari because it is the first item.

“The disproportionate advantage to Safari is what really makes this design poor,” she said, citing several studies that claim first position in a ballot gives an advantage, in part because Western voters scan from upper left to lower right when they read.

She goes on and on and on about this, but her basic message is: If Firefox is not first, this design is BAD. She timidly proposes a random order every time the selection screen opens, but she argues that this is bad because it “unfortunately does not provide users with any information about what browsers are preferred”.

Then she shows her true colours, proposing the order according to market share—what Microsoft proposed—but excluding Explorer from that ordering and leaving it to the last position. Wouldn’t that be unfairly helping Firefox and putting Safari, Chrome and Opera in a bad position? And why discriminate Microsoft Explorer too?

Finally, she also proposes probability ordering by market share excluding Internet Explorer, which again gives Firefox the advantage over the rest 50 per cent of the time.

In other words, Microsoft and the EU should help Firefox to become the new monopolistic browser, no matter what. Jenny, please: Stop. Saying. Words. [Boriss' Blog via Computer World]

As with any marketing statement, I’d encourage people to be somewhat sceptical about large number claims. It’s an interesting number and I have not seen the math [but] how many internet connected users are there? 1.1 billion, 1.5 billion, something in that area.

She described the number as “interesting math,” even while that one billion figure includes every download and update since Firefox launched since 2004. Repeated downloads too. And people having multiple computers.

Knowing that, it doesn’t seem that crazy to me. What do you think about Amy’s claims? And about Firefox’s figure? [The Guardian]

The one billion downloads milestone includes users downloading multiple copies for different computers as well as any manual downloads for upgrading purposes, though not any automatic updates. With so many users, it’s now holding about 31% marketshare, second only to that ornery old dinosaur Internet Explorer at around 60% (Opera, Chrome and Safari are all below 5%). Once Firefox Mobile and the oddly Chrome-like Firefox 4.0 come out, we can expect that number to skyrocket even more. Congratulations and mazel tov, Mozilla. [BBC]

Internet Explorer isn’t mandated in every governmental department, and Firefox has been vetted and cleared as just as secure as IE (duh), so it’s a legitimate question: Why not use the faster, safer, more customisable and more reliable browser? Clinton has no idea why Firefox is barred, which is totally fine with us—we really are happy she’s spending her time on other things.

But Undersecretary Patrick Kennedy chimes in that it’s “an expense question,” at which point he is promptly and rightfully shouted down that Firefox is free, for god’s sake. He goes into a lot of nonsense about “patches” and how even things that are free aren’t really free, which sounds to us like a lame attempt to explain away his first answer—he probably didn’t know Firefox was free when he cited expense in the first place. If Firefox has already been implemented in other sectors of government, it stands to reason that it could be adopted by the State Department fairly easily and quickly.

The rest of both his and Secretary Clinton’s answer is mostly impenetrable, metaphor-laden government-speak about cutting costs that, sorry guys, isn’t going to make us forget that you just claimed a free and vastly superior program, one that’s already in wide use in other sectors of government, is too expensive to implement.

Pat Kennedy, you’re officially on my bad side. [State Department via Switched]

If you feel like 3.5 has kind of appeared out of the blue, you’re not crazy—the Firefox team deemed this set of changes as too significant for a 3.1beta4 designation, and gave it a more impressive name.

But boring Mozilla politics aside, this release—the final beta for this cycle—is more than another 3.1 build, and actually deserves its half-step name boost: The private mode is accompanied by much broader options than either Chrome’s or Safari 4’s, the geocaching and HTML 5 video and audio features are pretty cool, at least on concept, and an undo close feature can heroically salvage lost tabs. Most importantly, with TraceMonkey and a few other rendering engine tweaks, the browser at least feels faster than 3.0, so it’s definitely worth a download. Full feature list below. [The Inquirer]

Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 10 months. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use, and adding new features for users:

* This beta is now available in 70 languages – get your local version.
* Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
* Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
* The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.
* Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
* Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
* Support for new web technologies such as: HTML5 and elements,
downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data
storage for applications, and SVG transforms.

What is best in life? To crush other browsers, see their worm-ridden code driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their fanboys.

And if the whole thing is depicted in a chalk drawing, so be it.

And it was, so here’s the details. The chalk drawing was delivered to us fresh from the annual SideWalk Arts Festival, which is held by the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia.

According to the artists, students are given a set of chalk and are assigned a tile on the cement sidewalk surrounding a local park. They can draw whatever comes to mind. In the case of Michael and Ferhan, “whatever comes to mind” meant an epic battle between Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (Conan served as a reference for the illustration).

It looks like it didn’t well for the browser from Redmond. Then again, it rarely does. [Thanks, Michael and Ferhan]

The build is very rough and probably not usable for day-to-day browsing—early reports suggest that the loading time is very long, and that page loading is quite slow—but it should provide a glimpse of where Firefox Mobile is headed, how it will render pages and if its novel control scheme is usable on a device smaller than the N810.

The CAB download is available here, but I had no luck launching the app on my T-Mobilised HTC Touch Diamond variant. Let us know about your successes and failures in the comments. [WMExperts via Slashphone]

Yes, Firefox thinks that, instead of typing the name of our beloved publication, I should instead choose from Gizzard, Quasimodo, Commodore and Sodomize. While they’re not necessarily the four words I would immediately choose to sum up the wild, at times off-colour yet always authoritative spirit that exudes from these pages, I couldn’t help but be impressed at what may have been the Firefox dictionary AI’s first successful attempt at humour. Gizmodo: Is it a chicken part, a tragic hunchback, a top-ranking naval officer or a sex act named after a damned Biblical town? Can’t it be all of these things, Firefox?