So today is Star Wars Day, AND it is Friday. You will hardly get a better excuse to dress your Firefox in an awesome Star Wars costume. Head to Mozilla Add-ons and get one before they run out!

Star Wars personas on Mozilla Add-ons.

Recent Firefox nightlies feature more bits from Australis, the new major theme update. This time, toolbar buttons have gone flat, featuring no borders but when hovering them.

As with all things fashion, this is a back to past: Firefox 1 through 3.6 all featured flat buttons. Here’s a Firefox 1 screenshot.

Mozilla CTO, Brendan Eich announced today on his personal blog that Mozilla has taken the hard decision to support the H.264 video format on mobile editions of Firefox.

The reasons are pretty clear: Mozilla and Opera seem to be fighting this battle alone (EDIT: sort of, Brendan clarifies that Opera already supports H.264 on mobile), and the result is a less than optimal experience for mobile users: WebM or Theora are more power consuming since they don’t have widespread hardware acceleration support. Support that would come if more major players (browser makers and content providers) would come aboard.

Google announced a year ago that it would drop H.264 support from Android and Chrome in favor of WebM, the open format it bought and released a year earlier. But it hasn’t happened, while YouTube, the main web video property keeps HTML5 video as a hardly discoverable feature and covers just about a third of all videos, out of 100% as announced by Google years ago.

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Latest Firefox nightlies feature an important new face for users: a new home tab.

Enter about:home in Firefox location bar and right now you get a search box and not much more. The new design aims to improve discoverability of several features to users including a launcher to manage bookmarks and history, tweak Firefox through preferences/options, check download status or enable Sync, which will probably be an important boost for Mozilla’s browser data synchronization service.

It also brings a large button to restore your previous browsing session in case you haven’t set Firefox to restore it automatically.

Considering Firefox’s 6-week release pace, the new tab should become available in final form around July, later this year.

The latest Thunderbird dailies have just got powerful instant messaging capabilities, thanks to a major code check-in which integrates Instantbird capabilities to Thunderbird’s.

Instantbird is a Mozilla technologies powered instant messaging application that integrates ICQ, AIM, Yahoo!, MSN Live, Google Talks and other Jabber based networks, Twitter and Facebook Chat, all in the same application

On Thunderbird, integration is coming in a new tab where all your accounts come together. Not all services are supported yet. Only Facebook, Twitter, Google Talk and IRC are supported, and it is not clear if other services will follow.

In my short tests, I got IRC and Google Talk working but couldn’t get Facebook or Twitter to jump aboard.

So it is the beginning of some very important work, that, surprisingly, comes before Lightning (Mozilla-based calendar application) integration, an event announced several years ago and that would definitely position Thunderbird as a stronger competitor in the productivity market.

Daily is the development unstable branch of Thunderbird, but if you are feeling risky, go for it.