Google and Mozilla have renewed their search partnership. Google will end up paying Mozilla about $300 million per year to be the default search engine for the Firefox web browser. This seems odd because Google’s own web browser, Google Chrome, is growing at a rapid pace. CrunchFund partner, MG Siegler, wrote a blog post speculating that the reason why Google is funding a competitor is because of antitrust issues. However, Chrome engineer Peter Kasting said that “Google is funding a partner.”

Google and Mozilla have struck a search deal for another three years. Google will be paying a little bit under $300 million to renew the deal. This is a huge jump from a previous arrangement that Google had with Mozilla. Google had to outbid other companies like Microsoft and Yahoo! for the search deal. The $900 million agreement is the minimum revenue guarantee for delivering search queries that will be garnered by consumers using Firefox.

Mozilla Firefox has been rapidly losing market share ever since Google released a browser called Chrome. Mozilla has also lost a lot of their enterprise customers. On top of that, Google’s contact with Mozilla is expiring. Google supplied Mozilla with 84% of their revenue.

Mozilla is officially launching Firefox 8 on November 8th. Mozilla uploaded the final version to the web a couple of days earlier and gHacks spotted the files on Mozilla’s FTP servers. Firefox 8 has launched six weeks after Firefox 7. The new version of Firefox has Twitter embedded in the search bar and has an improved tabs system. There is support for HTML5 context menus as well. You can download Firefox 8 for Mac here and PC here.

Mozilla has updated their beta channel to include Firefox 5.0 beta. It’s only been about 2 months since Firefox 4 was available for download. Firefox 5.0 Beta is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Firefox 5.0 Beta has performance and stability enhancements.

Mozilla released Firefox 4 about a month ago and they hit 100 million downloads within one month. The milestone was revealed by the Firefox download stats ticker. Now Firefox 4 has a 7.94% browser market according to StatCounter. Internet Explorer 8.0 has 29.99%, Firefox 3.6 has 24.43%, and Chrome 10 has 15.35%. [TechCrunch]

If you want to get your hands on the newest version of Firefox, you can download it now from their FTP servers. It currently is not available from the Firefox homepage. Some of the new features in Firefox 4 include hardware acceleration, HTML5/CSS3/WebGL standards, built-in Sync, and Panorama workspace management. You can download it from these links:
- Windows
- Mac OS X
- Linux

[Download Squad]

Mozilla has released Mozilla Firefox 4 Release Candidate for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Firefox 4 has exited the beta cycle and is available in over 70 languages. Firefox 4 users will be automatically updated to this version. Over 70% of the Firefox Add-ons are now compatible with Firefox 4 too. You can download Firefox 4 Release Candidate here: http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/RC/. [Mozilla Blog]