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Mozilla Foundation president Mitchell Baker is sitting on a ticking time bomb. The survival of her company, which pledges to make the web a better place, is at the mercy of one of its main competitors, Google.

Modern Web standards are taking gaming on the Web to the next level. We took a brief look at how Mozilla and Google are contributing to the effort. Standards-based open Web technologies are increasingly capable of delivering interactive multimedia experiences; the kind that used to only be available through plugins or native applications. This trend is creating new opportunities for gaming on the Web.

When you have it on, every time you visit a Web page, it records all the third-party trackers that glom onto you. There’s no great technical wizardry involved—anyone who knows how to navigate the developer settings on her browser can see the same data—but Collusion visualizes the information in a simple, alluring schematic.

Google’s recent ~$1b 3-year deal with Mozilla for Google to be the default search provider for hundreds of millions of Firefox browser users, which comprise over a quarter of the global browser/search market, has much broader and more serious antitrust implications for Google’s already very tenuous antitrust situation than most everyone appreciates.

In our Top Consumer Products of 2011 list, we selected the Chrome web browser as our number 1 pick. Its market share has grown over 2011 and it's on track to surpass Firefox as the 2nd most popular browser on the desktop (exactly when it passes Firefox depends on whose statistics you read). Over 2011 Google has demonstrated, in both user numbers and technical innovation, that Chrome is the most significant challenge to Microsoft's dominance of the browser market since the days of Netscape Navigator in the late 90s.

Ahead of an expected Tuesday release, Mozilla has put up Firefox 6 up for download for Mac, Windows and Linux on its FTP servers. As could be expected from Mozilla’s new, faster updating schedule, the changes in Firefox 6 appear to be mostly incremental.

Google has been doing some major housecleaning: The web giant announced Wednesday that it would be shuttering Google Labs, an online incubator of experimental products.