Bribes can represent an easy way of securing a person’s loyalty; throw enough cash at someone, and they’re almost sure to be appreciative.  Mozilla might have an advantage in the browser wars, however, as it appears that many Mozilla bug finders are so fond of the organization they don’t require payment.

Chitika has provided some very interesting search market-related findings. According to the firm, Firefox is responsible for a significant amount of Google’s share. In fact, based on the sample looked at, there were more Firefox-based Google searches than total searches from Bing or Yahoo.

It’s important to note that this isn’t representative of the entire search market, but it’s an interesting finding that may indeed have bigger implications in that market.

Mozilla is working on a new Firefox feature called "Tab Candy", which might make you more productive, or at least less irritated by the number of tabs you have open.

"The power of the browser has grown substantially in the last ten years," writes Aza Raskin, Firefox Creative Lead. "We now use the Web to multi-task the activities we juggle every day, like vacation plans, purchases, sharing pictures, listening to music, reading email, and writing a blog post."

Mozilla has launched Firefox Home for the iPhone and iPod Touch. This is a free application that works with Firefox Sync.

Recently Mozilla unleashed Firefox 4 Beta upon the world, and most of us couldn’t be happier. The latest edition, of the world’s second most popular browser, has been in discussion for well over a year now… but the wait is finally over, you can download it here.

Are you downloading the Beta version? Let us know.

Mozilla has served its 2 billionth Firefox Add-on download. The download rate has been increasing each year, but Firefox also faces increasing competition in the open source browser market.

This week Google actually took efforts to make Chrome more accessible, and introduced a new category of featured extensions.

Mozilla’s milestone is certainly a significant one though, and there’s no question that Firefox has been revolutionary in the web browser space.

Mozilla is working on a new iPhone app for Firefox users, called Firefox Home. It’s based on Firefox Sync (formerly Weave Sync), and allows users to access their Firefox browsing history, bookmarks, and tabs from the most recent browser session on the desktop.

Mozilla CEO John Lilly dropped a bomb late yesterday in announcing that he would be stepping down from his position. The news came just after Mozilla revealed its early product plan for Firefox 4, in which it placed great emphasis on speed and HTML5 support – two of the big selling points for competing browser Google Chrome.

Google’s Chrome browser has received a lot of buzz lately as it has showcased its efforts in speed testing using potato guns, paint, a pirate ship, lightning, etc. Meanwhile, Chrome has been creeping up steadily in web browser market share.

Perhaps in an effort to keep users from switching to Chrome, Mozilla wants it to be known that it is working on speed as well, and is enabling new open, standard web technologies ("HTML5 and beyond" it says).

A new way for Android users to get around the Web should debut this year.  Jay Sullivan, Vice President of Mobile at Mozilla, has indicated that Firefox Mobile for Android will land sometime in 2010.

Thanks to Google, PayPal, and Mozilla, the anti-malware organization borne out of Harvard’s Berkman center has become an independent entity.  StopBadware.org is now a non-profit known simply as StopBadware.

This change should be viewed as more evolutionary than revolutionary; like before, StopBadware will work to minimize the threat of malware, and at the moment, nothing more significant than some colors, logos, and site content has been changed.

According to data released by the AT Internet Institute, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has fallen to under 60% of visits in Europe. The firm suggests that with widely publicized news of a major security flaw and moves being made by competing browsers, IE’s fall may not be reversed in the very near future.

Mozilla has launched the latest version of its popular Firefox web browser – version 3.6. They say this version is a whopping 20% faster than version 3.5. New features in Firefox 3.6  include:

A while back, Google launched an extensions gallery for its Chrome web browser. Ad-blocking add-ons are among the most popular for Mozilla’s Firefox, so it stands to reason that they will be for Chrome as well. With Google’s primary source of revenue being its ads, a lot of talk has surfaced about Google letting people block its own ads with its own product.

Mozilla’s next salvos in the browser wars won’t come quite as soon as the company previously promised.  Firefox 3.6, which was supposed to ship this month, now isn’t scheduled to be finished until sometime during the first quarter of 2010, and the release of Firefox 4.0 has been pushed back, as well.

The mobile version of Firefox – also known as Fennec – is almost ready to launch.  Indeed, a Mozilla exec was recently quoted as saying that a release could be "days away," so it’s possible that the new mobile browser will appear in time for some tech-inclined individuals to play with it on New Year’s Eve or even Christmas.

Mozilla’s director of community development is not at all happy with Google.  Following an eyebrow-raising comment from CEO Eric Schmidt on the subject of privacy, Asa Dotzler has, in fact, pretty much suggested that everyone use Bing instead.

Update 3: Mozilla has now released Weave Sync Version 1.0 Beta 2.

Update 2: Mozilla has now announced the release of Weave Sync Version 1.0 Beta 1.

Update: Mozilla has now released Weave Version 0.6.

Mozilla has introduced a new inbox program called Raindrop. They refer to it as an "exploration in messaging innovation" to "explore new ways to use Open Web technologies to create useful, compelling messaging experiences." Sounds kind of like  what Google’s trying to do with Google Wave from that description doesn’t it? There is already talk that this may compete with it.

If you use Firefox, you are no doubt aware that there are many add-ons that can enhance your browsing experience. Many of these can make your online life a whole lot easier and save you time. Following are some that I have found particularly useful. Which do you like? Tell us.

1. Fire Gestures

Google has added a bookmark sync feature to its Chrome browser. Essentially, this lets users sync their bookmarks between their Chrome browser on different machines.

"This new feature makes it easy to keep the same set of bookmarks on all your machines, and stores them alongside your Google Docs for easy web access," says Google’s Tim Steele.