Firefox the open source browser and web developers’ friend is expected to break the one billion download barrier in the next 24 hours.

Firefox currently is used by nearly one third of the worldwide online population, that’s an amazing 31%. Internet Explorer still rules the marketplace at over 60% while, both Safari, Chrome and Opera together hold around 5% of the market.

The European competition regulators ruled in January that on new computer systems, Microsoft only adding internet explorer to its windows operating system and did not give users a choice of different browsers. This is felt was damaging its competition. After negotiations, Microsoft have acknowledges that they will include a selection of download links on the up and coming Windows 7. This decision should really open the playing field.

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After a whole year of development Firefox 3.5 has finally been released.

The open source browser, Firefox 3.5 now features the new “TraceMonkey” JavaScript engine which has been designed to improve the browsers performance by up to 3 times. Html 5 support for video and offline storage, a new and improved Tab Browsing system and increased security are just a few of the new features you will find in this much anticipated release.

With over 270 million users, Firefox seriously packs a punch, this influential browser directly affects the internet and web technologies, how sites are designed and built and how users browse and view websites.

“We’re not just considering this to be an upgrade for users,” Mozilla’s Director of Firefox Mike Beltzner told InternetNews.com. “We’ve also stuffed Firefox 3.5 full of free open source technology that will upgrade the Web.”

One of the most instantly recognisable upgrades is support of CSS web fonts. Developers will be able to utilise this technology and improve website design and user ability.

“When you think about it, Web designers have had to play with the same ten fonts that they could reliably ensure were on everyone’s computer,” Beltzner said.

“You can just say ‘use my handwriting font, here’s the font and it’s a 20kb file,’” Beltzner said. “So when the browser hits the page, we pull down the file and render the page in that font. When you leave the page, we dispose of the font.”

Download Firefox 3.5.

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In very popular move, Google have announced the launch of the Google Android Native Development Kit which will allow software developers to build applications that will run directly on the Native Android platform. Up until recently Android applications were written in Java and ran on the Google Dalvik Java virtual Machine. The native developer’s kit lets software run on Linux although Google sees this as a way of running component based Android applications and not fully fledged programs.

Android applications run in the Dalvik virtual machine. The NDK allows developers to implement parts of these applications using native-code languages such as C and C++,” said Google’s David Turner in a Native Developer Kit blog post.

This move has caused Mozilla to start an investigation into building a new version of Firefox which will run exclusively on the Android platform. The Mobile version of Firefox is known as Fennec but insiders believe the Firefox will continue to use its existing brand.

“Developers are taking a look at the NDK to see if it provides the capabilities we need to bring Fennec to Android. If it’s possible, I think our community would be interested in doing it, because Android will be appearing on more smartphones with the capabilities to provide a good browsing experience,” said Jay Sullivan, Mozilla’s vice president of mobile.

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