Earlier this week The Khronos Group announced an initiative with Mozilla to bring accelerated 3D graphics to the Web in hopes of improving online games and other Web applications.

The initiative has garnered excitement among the press, with discussions around the benefits of having games available directly from a Web browser, the eventual integration of 3D features into Firefox, and what this might mean for the competition.

WIRED’s Michael Calore notes, “Nobody can ignore the obvious fact that any 3D graphics technology with the weight of Mozilla, Google and Khronos behind it has one hell of a chance of succeeding. And even if it takes years to truly mature, Adobe should be worried.”

Coverage highlights include Ars Technica, CNET, ZDNet, BBC, Internet News, Information Week, and The Escapist.

On Tuesday, our mobile team released Fennec 1.0 Beta 1!

Scott Gilbertson at Wired writes, “The latest Fennec beta brings in two new features from its desktop cousin — The “awesome bar” search engine, which makes it easier to get to frequently visited sites with less typing; and also new is  TraceMonkey, the same, much-improved JavaScript engine set to arrive in Firefox 3.5. Other improvements in the latest release include faster panning, better zoom tools, and other performance related tweaks.”

You can read more about this important mobile milestone in TechCrunch, Lifehacker, CNET, Ars Technica, Network World, Gizmodo, and PC World.

Late last week Mozilla released Firefox 3.1 beta 3. There’s been much excitement in the media around the new beta and enhancements to features and performance. Coverage has highlighted improvements to web worker thread support, Private Browsing Mode, performance stability and the Gecko layout engine.

Gregg Keizer notes the enhancements to private browsing mode. He says, “Now, however, users can selectively tell the browser to “forget” specific already-visited Web sites from the History sidebar by right-clicking and choosing ‘Forget About This Site.’”

Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul says, “The 3.1 release will bring a lot of very impressive changes, including performance enhancements and new features for users and developers.“

Coverage highlights include Internet News, eWeek, Ars Technica, Lifehacker, ZDNet, PC Advisor, WIRED and CNet.