VentureBeat

A few weeks ago, we covered how Mozilla’s Firefox, the open-source web browser, is now used by more than 160 million people around the world. Earlier today, we covered Firefox’s plans to develop a robust mobile browser. Now, here’s some more data for you about Firefox’s growth around the world, based on a study by French web survey company ZiTi Monitor.

This past March, according to the study, Firefox was being used by nearly 29 percent of all European Internet users. Firefox is already more popular in Europe than in the US, where it is used by nearly 22 percent of people.

Notably, Firefox usage went up to a little more than 30 percent on weekends, presumably because people were accessing the web from home, where they could choose it over competing browsers rather than being forced to use the browser selected by the IT manager at their workplace.

This matters for many web companies that at least partially rely on browser plugins to work. While Firefox’s biggest rival, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, also offers plugins, that browser is generally harder to develop applications and plugins that work well on it. Sample plugin oriented companies include news-sharing site StumbleUpon, phone bill tracker Skydeck and social info aggregator MySocial24×7.

Firefox is gearing up for its next release, version 3, later this year. You can test out the beta version here. Testing it out, we’ve found it to be much faster than Firefox 2 currently is, especially on Apple computers.

Here’s the full study, in French.

The Coop is a new social networking feature by Mozilla, which will let users of its Firefox browser keep track of what their friends are doing online, and share content with them.

It will integrate with web services, using data feeds so that you can keep up your friends’ activities on various sites. This may hurt Flock, the browser company that was about to release a version with similar features (we saw a demo several months ago).

And if it reminds you of Friendster, it should. Though it works with Friendster, not against it.

According to the Mozilla blog:

[One build] uses Facebook’s “Share” feature as the data transport layer for now, and allows you to share web content by dragging it onto your friend’s picture. As the project page indicates, we’re thinking of several different data transport mechanisms, as well as how we want to expose various interactions. This prototype really helps to get a feeling of what The Coop might become over time.

That’s what Rolling Stone wants you to believe, in its latest edition. In a story called “Baby Billionaires of Silicon Valley,” Rolling Stone catches up with a group nine entrepreneurs who get together to strategize. This is another hype job, since none of these people are billionaires. (Update: Blake Ross, in comment below, says this is no secret society, and headline is wrong.)

From the piece:

That’s why they’ve gathered here tonight. This is one of the first meetings of a secret society they formed and jokingly called the Young Guns; a more apt moniker might be the Valley Brats. It’s an invite-only cabal of the most powerful under-thirty-year-old mavericks in town. Every few weeks they gather to drink, plot global domination, make friends and, mainly, just act their age. “We got sick of hanging out with older guys,” says the Brats’ gregarious founder, Rob Pazornik, twenty-six-year-old creator of an online shopping startup called LicketyShip. “All they talk about is mortgages and nannies. It’s like hanging out with your dad’s friends.”

Featured in the cover photo, from left to right: Blake Ross (formerly Firefox, now Parakey), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Matt Sanchez (VideoEgg), Robert Pazornik (LicketyShip), Seth Sternberg (Meebo), Todd Masonis (Plaxo). Also featured are Chad Hurley & Steve Chen (YouTube), and Bram Cohen (BitTorrent).