As 2011 comes to an end, Mozilla is drawing a line and summing up the year. And, unlike many other companies, Mozilla did have quite an exciting year, arguably its best yet.
It was also going to be the last of its kind, Mozilla moved to a rapid release cycle after that, with a new Firefox coming out every six weeks.
Despite disbelievers, Mozilla delivered, a new Firefox has been released on the date it was supposed to since the team made the switch.
Firefox 9 came out only a few days ago, bringing with it a big improvement in JavaScript performance, by as much as 30 percent in some cases.
Another milestone was the first ever Firefox for Android. Since that first release, a new one has been made available along with the regular desktop version every time. The very latest Firefox 9 for Android introduced an UI for tablets.
But Mozilla's biggest challenges are ahead of it. The fact is, the world is going mobile. There are hundreds of millions of smartphones and their number will grow, fast.
Mozilla needs to be on those phones and it knows it. For now, there are only plans to develop for Android since it's the only one which allows other browsers in the app store.
But Android is the most popular smartphone platform and Firefox mobile already has quite a few users. It's going to need a lot more though if it wants to play a role in the future of the web. As the only independent browser out there, we need Firefox now just as much as we needed it in 2004.
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