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.

Looks like Mozilla has nothing to worry about after all… at least for now. Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has signed a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Mozilla. Google will remain the default search engine for Mozilla Firefox for at least another 3 years.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has sent Mozilla a take-down request for the Firefox add-on called MafiaaFire Redirector. MafiaaFire Redirector allows Firefox users to access websites, whose domain names were taken down by the government over copyright issues. Mozilla responded by asking the government why they should remove the add-on. About two weeks have gone by without a response.

John Resig, the creator of javascript library jQuery, has left the Mozilla Foundation to join the online education organization Khan Academy. Resig had worked at Mozilla for more than 4 years when he joined in January 2007 as a Javascript Evangelist. At Khan Academy, Resig will continue to work on jQuery. Resig plans to work on Khan Academy’s iPad application as well. [ReadWriteWeb]

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]

According to the Firefox official roadmap, Mozilla wants to ship Firefox versions 4-7 this year. The primary focus of Firefox this year is to make sure that there the time between any user interaction and feedback from the browser is less than 50 milliseconds. Below is a list of features that each version would have:

Aza Raskin is leaving the Mozilla Foundation in order to create a new start-up company called Massive Health. Raskin is the man behind the Firefox Mobile concept and also worked on the geolocation specification for the W3C standards.

In the company’s annual report, Mozilla has announced that they are planning to launch a new “Open Web App ecosystem.” A prototype has already been designed as well. This app store platform would have apps that could run on any devices with Mozilla on it. It appears that Mozilla is trying to get around the middle-guy when it comes to mobile apps. The problem that Mozilla has to overcome is that people tend to buy applications from a store that comes bundled with mobile and tablet devices. [Digitizor]