The latest version of the Firefox browser hit the web this week and it’s quite an impressive update. The theme for version 11 of Firefox was “lighter and faster”, continuing a march forward on something that the team calls “Project Snappy”.

In a post from Mozilla today, the company discussed its success in 2011 and what 2012 holds for one of the world’s top browsers. Mozilla has been in a back and forth fight for the #2 browser spot with Chrome over the past six months, as Chrome passed Firefox for the first time last December.

What’s it going to take for Firefox to keep going strong? Mozilla seems to think that branding could have something to do with it, perhaps degrading the focus on version numbers for consumers:

Version numbers will play a lesser and lesser role for users, but they will still matter to web developers, IT administrators and similar. The reason for having major version number bumps (e.g. version 6 to 7, 7 to 8, etc) is that new versions have had cases of non-backward compatible APIs, and the version number have been there to signal that it is not a minor release or maintenance update.

From a branding perspective, it will likely more go into being just Firefox, and that versioning will be more transparent.

This is of course a page out of Chrome’s book, where Google’s strength in marketing shines through once again. The heavy focus on using “Chrome” and not a specific version of Chrome has definitely helped it grab consumer attention. There is nothing worse than hearing people refer to Internet Explorer’s version number during an “out loud” conversation. Even when you shrink the name to “IE”, it still sounds lame.

Along with consumer and branding focus, which is the first time I’ve personally heard Mozilla speak on the subject, the company wants to make the update process easier for consumers as well. That’s a plus, since I’ve found that every time I upgrade to a new version of Firefox at least a quarter of my installed add-ons end up not working.

In yet another consumer-focused move, Mozilla shares that within the next few versions of Firefox, updates will become “silent”, meaning that they’ll run in the background. No longer will you bit hit with a request to download a version now or later:

To cater to update fatigue, updates will now be downloaded and installed silently in the background. It means that startup and shutdown of the web browser won’t be affected by installation routines. Additionally, the What’s New page displayed after an update can now be displayed depending if there is important information needed to be displayed to the end user. Silent updates are currently planned to land in Firefox 13.

Additionally, Firefox plans on upgrading the experience for its Web Apps, including seamless integration with the Mozilla Marketplace. Needless to say that Firefox has a full plate of work ahead of them for this year.

Since the team spent 2011 working on speed and usability it’s nice to see that the company is focused on making Firefox more consumer-friendly. With the latest version of Internet Explorer getting decent reviews it’s going to take something extremely special for Firefox to keep up. That something special might just be a better relationship with consumers, and it just might work.

While Mozilla was promising to release version 9 of its Firefox browser tomorrow, the official download links are live now.

Huge performance changes have been made in this release, while there aren’t any user interface changes that you’ll notice.

The double-digit increases in performance that most are reporting come from a new feature called “type inference”, created by Mozilla developer Brian Hackett. The feature now quickly chooses how to handle JavaScript, which doesn’t require a developer to define a variable. That makes the browser work overtime, but with type inference, the difference in performance is definitely noticeable.

Here are the rest of the changes and updates that come with version 9 of Firefox:

Added Type Inference, significantly improving JavaScript performance
Improved theme integration for Mac OS X Lion
Added two finger swipe navigation for Mac OS X Lion
Added support for querying Do Not Track status via JavaScript
Added support for font-stretch
Improved support for text-overflow
Improved standards support for HTML5, MathML, and CSS
Fixed several stability issues

You can download Firefox 9 for Mac, Windows, and Linux now.

On Friday, I wrote about Mozilla’s Firefox Challenge for charity. The idea is simple; 12 celebs, 12 causes, and the one who raises the most money by January 11th, 2012 gets an additional $25,000 from Mozilla for its charity.

“Which celeb will win?” was the question a few folks have had. Well, we might have our answer before the competition is over. It’s not a celebrity that’s in the lead, it’s a group of geeks calling themselves #TeamJS. JS standing for “JavaScript”, of course. Mozilla allowed anyone to create a team to compete with celebs like Seth Rogan, Jonah Hill, and Sophia Bush.

Out of nowhere, #TeamJS has raised over $12,000 for its charity, “Feeding America“.

At the helm is O’Reilly tech writer, David Flanagan. In a post called “Geeks vs. Celebs“, Flanagan calls on his geeky pals to help raise enough money to win the $25k prize in January for Feeding America.

Here’s what Flanagan had to say about his rally for social good:

I want to challenge the JavaScript community, and the web developer community, and heck, the whole geek community to go head to head with the celebrities and raise more money than they can. So I’ve formed TeamJS to compete against the celebs in the challenge. We don’t get the head start of $5k seed money, but we can still win the $25K prize!

While everyone wins during this challenge, especially the charities, this is an interesting narrative to the social good movement on the web. No big names are needed to raise money, just passionate people with big hearts. Geeks have a voice too, and can obviously move crowds in a big way. See the tally below from the team’s Crowdrise page:

I’d love to see celebs like Jason Bateman and Will Ferrell pick up the pace as we enter the holidays. Putting a celebrity name in front of a charity alone doesn’t make the true difference, the passion has to be there too. Get involved by giving money to your charity of choice, and be sure to share your good deed on Twitter and Facebook.

Will the geeks reign supreme? We’ll be watching!

➤ Mozilla Firefox Challenge

This week, creator of Firefox, Mozilla, announced a holiday charity campaign called the “Mozilla Firefox Challenge” in which it has seeded 12 celebrity backed charities with $5,000. The organization that ends up with the most donations by January 11, 2012 will get an additional $25,000 donation from Mozilla.

That’s a total of $85,000 Mozilla will donate to charities over the holidays.

This is what Mozilla had to say about the challenge, which is taking place on the popular charity platform Crowdrise:

Mozilla builds products, like Firefox, that put users in control of their online experience and shape the future of the Web — not for profit, but for good. As part of our commitment to making a difference, this holiday season we’re hoping to get everyone in on the spirit of doing good. So, just like we do with Firefox, let’s turn individual action into global impact together.

Mozilla certainly nabbed a well-known group of celebrities. Here are the twelve of them and their organizations who get $5,000 each to start and could win the $25,000 prize if they raise the most money on their own:

• Paul Rudd, The Rolling Dog Farm
• Will Ferrell, Cancer for College
• David Blaine, Charity: Water
• Barbra Streisand, Cedars-Sinai Women’s Heart Center
• Jason Bateman, City Year
• Christy Turlington Burns, Every Mother Counts
• Sophia Bush, F Cancer
• Seth Rogen, The Alzheimer’s Association
• Sean Penn, The J/P Haitian Relief Organization
• Edward Norton, The Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust
• Jonah Hill, Nothing But Nets
• Zooey Deschanel, The Innocence Project

Donating to a cause that you care about is at the crux of this campaign, but the celebrities have some treats in store for lucky folks who are of the giving persuasion. For example, you could win a signed cowbell from Will Ferrell, a voicemail from Paul Rudd, or a signed copy of the “Elf” DVD from Zooey Deschanel. That’s pretty neat.

Go support your favorite causes and celebrities, and win some cool stuff in the process.

➤ Mozilla Firefox Challenge

Mozilla has announced that it is blocking the official Skype Toolbar. According to the Mozilla Blog, the toolbar is causing “browser crashes and [it] slows down certain processes by up to 300 times.”

The browser plugin, which automatically installs itself to all Firefox user profiles upon installation of the Skype application, lets the the users call directly to the numbers displayed on websites using the Skype application.

“The current shipping version of the Skype Toolbar is one of the top crashers of Mozilla Firefox 3.6.13, and was involved in almost 40,000 crashes of Firefox last week.”

All versions of the Skype Toolbar for Firefox will be blocked in all versions of Firefox.

Update from Skype via TechCrunch:

Based on our initial investigation, we know that downloading the new client will fix for most users any compatibility issues, and we are working with Mozilla to ensure that there are no other compatibility issues. We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused our users.

Users can download the latest Skype client with the latest included Toolbars OR the latest toolbar installer itself is here.