The impending final release of Firefox 4 is something of a big deal for the Mozilla Foundation. Over the past year the popular open source browser has been facing some stiff competition from the likes of Google's Chrome and, even, Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.

Apple-Mozilla power struggle has just returned as a Mozilla employee expresses disdain; Microsoft's force-fed Firefox plug-in leaves the Web browser vulnerable

Most Firefox users don't realize that Firefox's current existence is owed almost exclusively to its search partnership with Google wherein Mozilla Corp receives a portion of ad revenue from Google queries initiated from Firefox's search bar. This revenue amounts to tens of millions of dollars.

"The Mozilla Corporation is hard are work on a version of Firefox for smartphones, and has some proposals for what the different versions this web browser will look and act like. There will be two versions, one for devices with a touchscreen, and another for devices without one. The design elements of this browser are still in development, and Mozilla welcomes comments on its proposals..."

Since Google launched their own browser, Firefox maker's relationship with them has become "more complicated". Mozilla is dependent on Google for the vast majority of its revenue and has previously worked closely with the search king's engineers on the development of Firefox.

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.

Mozilla's open source Firefox browser can be augmented with add-ons -- miniature programs from third-party developers that change its functions. Add-ons can be fun and useful, but Mozilla has warned against using ones still considered "experimental." For example, one called "China Channel" gives users a taste of what it's like to surf on China's censored Web.

A representative of Firefox web browser developer Mozilla, has criticised computing giants for ‘unwanted plug-ins’ installed by the companies into the Firefox browser. “Why do they think this is okay?

"...I wager that most of the technically-adept Mozilla community, who should be the first people to test new versions of the browser and file high quality bug reports, have a large set of addons they can't do without. And until those addons are available for Firefox 3.0b1, they won't be migrating - or will do so only for dedicated testing sessions, not every-day browsing..."

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk-l10n/