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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.

September is almost upon us, and it will mark the first anniversary of Google's Chrome browser. The very first post I ever wrote on Chrome appeared on September 1st of last year, and I can remember the initial thoughts that came to mind when I considered its prospects: Won't it require extensions, like the great ones available for Firefox, to succeed? What kinds of resources will be available for customizing it? What it will mean in terms of the substantial financial support that Google gives to Mozilla Firefox? Will it be cross-platform?

Almost a year after the arrival of Chrome, it's doing reasonably well, although not shaking the Earth. Net Application's latest browser market share data shows Chrome at 2.6 percent of the market, and growing, not far behind Safari's share of 4.1 percent. I continue to believe, though, that an ecosystem of useful extensions, and good versions of Chrome for the Mac and Linux, are essential for its long-term success. On that last front, there is good news emerging.

In a recent post I did on WebWorkerDaily, I provided three efficiency tips for using dual monitors. I recently switched to a dual monitor setup, and I'll never go back to using a single monitor. The efficiency benefits are tremendous. Not only can you treat the large amount of screen real estate that two monitors next to each other create as one long tapestry of desktop space, but you can also pick logical ways to organize multiple applications that you're running so that you can see a lot of information at once. If you do any type of writing or graphics work, it's essential.

Many of us live within browsers all day, and I've made the point several times that the lion's share of innovation is going on in the open source browsers, especially Firefox and Chrome. I use both of these browsers concurrently throughout the day on dual monitors, and here are some of the many benefits of doing so.

Firefox 3.5, Release Candidate 1 is available now. It's being delivered as an automatic update, and the release notes and download are here.

Google: We want Chrome to grow the Web. Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, weighs in on browser innovation.

Will Google Wave revolutionize free software collaboration? What impact might it have on free software users and developers?

A Mozilla update on open video codecs and quality. How does video encoded with Theora compare to video encoded by YouTube?

Will Ubuntu remain a minor player? It has problems in the channel.

Though the Opera browser isn't open source, it's free and its new server-in-a-browser feature, Unite, is really making significant inroads toward online collaboration. If Chrome and Firefox are to keep their edge over Opera, their development teams had better sit up and take notice.

Opera's Unite technology lets users run chat rooms, host Web sites, and share files that even people not using Opera can access. The interaction is all done via a central Opera Unite server ? Opera Unite uses a proxy between the server and its clients (found at operaunite.com) to avoid the need for any special firewall configuration, writes the development team. Unite launched today with six features but is calling on the Opera community to design and create any new services they'd like to see available.

Read on to have a look at what Opera unite can already do and why Google and Mozilla haven't cornered the market on browsers just yet.