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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.

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.

Novell Linux revenue soars as global server revenue plummets. The company reported Thursday that its Linux Platform revenue climbed 25 percent year over year in one of the worst recessions in history.

Google expects 18 Android phones by year's end. Andy Rubin, senior director for Mobile Platforms for Google, said the number could be as high as 20.

A grab bag of Linux games. From first person shooters to racing games, here are some titles to try over the weekend.

Microsoft Update quietly installs Firefox extension. A routine security update for a Microsoft Windows component installs a .NET update extension.

Navigate the web faster with these Firefox hotkeys. Here are a whole lot of easy shortcuts.