OStatic

The Mozilla Foundation has posted its financial statements and tax info for 2008, and a FAQ on the topic for those of us with short attention spans. While plowing through financial statements may not be the most exciting topic for Free and Open Source advocates, it's worth taking a look at what Mozilla has achieved as an independent project, where it's going, and how other projects might be able to emulate Mozilla's success to fund more and more FOSS development.

The good news is that, as of the end of their 2008 fiscal year, Mozilla is weathering the lousy economy pretty well. According to Mitchell Baker's post, reported revenues were up 5% from 2007, and the bulk of that revenue comes from the Firefox search functionality linking back to Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay. But Moz got dinged by the financial crisis in 2008, losing nearly $8 million of its long-term portfolio.

Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of open source mobile solutions company Funambol, has a post up called The next sync: app sync. In it, he discusses sync features working out in the cloud, so that your status in any given application is carried across all your devices. As people increasingly work with hosted applications, more sophisticated mobile synching is indeed going to be required. Mozilla, Funambol and other players are at work on this idea, as are proprietary players. The results may be promising.

Now that the new version of Mozilla's Firefox browser is out, many of us are still busy customizing it with favorite extensions, and more. Slowly but surely, I've been able to get my favorite extensions working as I want them to, including the libraries of information that some of them are designed to manage. I continue to find updates to many extensions for the new Firefox, and I notice that others around the web are doing so as well. Here are some top recommendations.