Late Wednesday, Mozilla released the second Release Candidate for its upcoming Firefox 3.0.

With about 40 bugs identified since Release Candidate 1 (RC1), it appears that version 3.0 is imminent. But instead of releasing the stable version with all of the bug fixes now, Mozilla opted to hold off because of the remaining server-side and website-related issues.

I use RC1 and don’t plan on switching. I especially love the bookmarking feature to keep track of my favorite sites. With one simple bookmark, you only need to click once on the blue star in the URL box. How easy is that?

According to recent data from Net Applications, Firefox has a 18.4 percent share of the browser market, although Internet Explorer still is king with 73.8 percent. Apple Safari is slowly, but surely, creeping up with 6.3 percent. The data also predicts that Firefox could top 20 percent next month.

Just a note: Dogpaw Studio tests all of our client’s new websites on Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari on both PC and Mac.

Apparently, there’s a large ISP (Internet Service Provider) called Charter Communications that plans to partner with an ad company to track customers’ traffic on the internet. If the deal goes through, NebuAds will log all of the websites that Charter’s customers visit and eventually serve targeted ads.

Fortunately, two House members have asked Charter to put this deal on hold, as they question whether this “spying” complies with federal privacy laws.

Spooky, isn’t it? It’s creepy just thinking about this ad company knowing exactly what websites I’m visiting, and who knows what else they’ll find out about me? The internet is about the free exchange of information, but is this going too far? I wonder what my ISP is up to these days …

According to the web tracker StatCounter, the Apple iPhone (and Wi-Fi iPod Touch) is the most used mobile phone browser for internet access in the U.S. Almost 25% of all internet traffic from cell phone browsers is generated from the iPhone! This is truly amazing, because it’s only been on the market since last summer.

More and more people are leaving their laptops in their cases and opting to cruise the net on cell phones. I have to admit that I, too, caught the iPhone bug and left Verizon Wireless for AT&T. Already a web junkie, I can now surf practically anywhere using the fully HTML-supported iPhone Safari browser.

So what does my totally cool iPhone have to do with work, you ask? Well, I’ve added the iPhone Safari browser to our list of browsers we use to test our clients’ websites. If a quarter of mobile surfers are riding the iPhone Safari browser, we’d better be prepared! By default, we test the sites we develop to make sure they display properly on the following common browsers:

• IE Windows
• Firefox Windows
• Firefox Mac
• Safari Mac
• and now, Safari iPhone