Web developer site-building tools are only sexy to developers, but they get a big makeover in update to Firefox and that will affect how developers connect to the people who use their sites.

Although Mozilla has never limited its stated goals to merely building an open-source browser, there’s no doubt that Firefox has been the highest-profile project from the Mozilla Foundation.

It hasn’t been a good year for Firefox. Mozilla has lost share to Google, it’s lost the loyalty of enterprise customers, and it’s lost key talent. And a deal with Google that supplied 84% of its revenue last year was scheduled to end in November. Can Firefox avoid a slide into irrelevance?

The findings, reported in The Wall Street Journal, peg Chrome’s worldwide market share at 25.69% and Firefox’s at 25.23%. Internet Explorer, according to the same findings, dominates worldwide market share at 40.63%.

Besides the usual stability and performance fixes, Firefox 8 brings support for Twitter in the search bar, some additional tab options (tabs can now be loaded at a user’s request after a browser restart) and improved add-on management and security.

Now when you open a new tab, you’ll be able to navigate quickly between web apps and your most-visited sites by clicking the labels at the bottom of the page or the arrows on both sides of the browser window.

Rest assured that this is a joint project, though: the creatively-named Firefox with Bing website is run by Microsoft, and both Mozilla and MS are clear that this is a joint venture.

“With 3D, with the hardware acceleration, we will welcome a whole range of new types of content,” – said Opera’s chief technology officer and the founder of CSS.

Google is making Chrome’s ‘new tab’ page a robust launch pad from which you can interact with your recently visited sites, Web apps, and bookmarks.

Firefox product manager Asa Dotzler determined that figuring out the 64-bit confusion surrounding Firefox will be “near the top” of his to-do list this summer and fall. One could conclude that Mozilla has no idea at this point what people are expecting from a 64-bit version of Firefox, so Dotzler is asking for some feedback. [...]