Last week Mozilla’s VP of Engineering Mike Shaver spoke at the Churchill Club on a panel entitled, “Browsers are Hot Again!”, moderated by Businessweek columnist Steve Wildstrom. Joining him on the panel were representatives from Microsoft (Dean Hachamovitch), Opera (Christen Krogh) and Google (Sundar Pichal).

Below is coverage from the event, including articles in CNET, InfoWorld, and TechCrunch. The overall theme through the coverage was the feeling of increased competition.  Paul Krill writes, “While it appeared Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had won the browser battle five years ago, things have changed with the advent of mobile browsers, Firefox and Safari, Wildstrom said”.

Mike Arrington highlighted the importance of the Mozilla community, “Mozilla’s Shaver said Firefox was about ‘putting the web first’ and creating a standards-compliant browser in as many languages as possible to ensure that no one was left out of the Internet”.

Earlier this week Mozilla Labs announced updates to two of its recent projects – Snowl and Ubiquity. Both projects have demonstrated impressive momentum and are being well received in both the Mozilla community and the press.

Snowl 0.2, a messaging-in-the-browser experiment, builds on the first release with an updated river view, a new stream view for keeping track of messages in a sidebar while you do other things, the ability to send tweets, and support for multiple Twitter accounts. Sean Michael Kerner from Internet News notes, “For Mozilla, a close embrace of Web 2.0 with Snowl may have an impact beyond simply making it easier for users to access Twitter and similar services: It may actually represent the future of the popular browser.”

Highlights of Snowl in the news include Internet News, ReadWriteWeb, WIRED, ComputerWorldUK.

On Wednesday, Mozilla Labs released Ubiquity 0.1.5. With it, Ubiquity gains a sleeker look, a smarter core and the ability to be skinned – anyone who knows how to write standards-complaint CSS can now create and share a custom Ubiquity skin. Scott Gilbertson from WIRED writes, “Think of Ubiquity as an on-the-fly mashup creator, taking information and reorganizing it to make it more useful.”

Ubiquity was featured in InformationWeek, WIRED, Internet News, and Lifehacker.