In October, Mozilla witnessed a surge in Firefox 3's market share as it continued its plan to decommission Firefox 2 -- and the Gecko engine that powered it -- before the end of December.

For two weeks in October, Firefox 3 claimed 20% market share, something that web metrics company Net Applications predicted might happen within a month of the new version's June release. Stalled growth, and Chrome's appearance caused some backslide, but Firefox 3's pulse is getting stronger.

Although you'll occasionally come across someone who uses Opera, the world of browser users consists largely of people using Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. However, for niche applications, fast performance, and for other reasons, many free spirits use some of the unusual open source browsers out there. Here, you'll find four of them, and what they're good at.

Mozilla has a whole roster of news headlines related to its browsers out today. In its about:Mozilla newsletter, the company has announced that a new version of the Camino browser is available (it's developed by the Camino Project, but is based on Mozilla's Gecko layout engine). Many Mac users love Camino for its lickety-split performance. Mozilla has also confirmed that a sixth milestone version of its upcoming mobile browser, dubbed Fennec, is out. And, as ZDNet reports, the beta of the next version of Firefox--version 3.1--has been delayed from August 19th until September 9th. Here are the details.