The folks over at Mozilla who have been working feverishly on the new Firefox 3 also will be working with the Google team to provide support for Google’s applications when offline. Similar to Google Gears which offers support for Google application via a browser plugin, Google applications will be built into the new browser itself. Firefox 3 will be the first browser to offer this built in feature.

There is also some good news for those of us who have experienced high memory usage in Firefox 2. Mozilla is working to solve this problem as well, making the next browser version more lean in its resource usage. Additional enhanced features of Firefox 3 will be a new bookmark and history features which will make synchronizing between PC’s easier.

At first glance one could conclude that Mozilla is attempting to take over the browser market by continually upgrading and refining their software product. But the folks at Mozilla take a different view of their efforts. Each time Firefox is improved it forces the other browser developers to improve their products as well. Case in point is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Microsoft seemed content to provide IE 6 for a long period of time, and only adding security fixes and patches. With the introduction of IE 7 Microsoft finally introduced tabbed browsing and additional security features to their software.

In addition to the current Google applications that are presently being offered, Google is also planning additional applications to enhance the user experience. When Firefox 3 debuts towards the end of this year, expect to see Google offering more Google applications for us to use such as Google Presentation.

Comments welcome.

[tags]google, firefox, mozilla, microsoft, [/tags]