A security hole in Internet Explorer that opened the browser to hackers since early July was caused by a single typo in Microsoft’s (MSFT) code.

An errant ampersand (“&”) took the blame for the exploit, admitted Microsoft in a blog published Tuesday at its Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) Web site.

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Just six years ago, the web was dominated by one browser: Internet Explorer, specifically Internet Explorer 6. Without Netscape to compete against it and the ability to bundle its browser with Windows XP, Microsoft (MSFT) experienced superior market share–up to 95 percent at the peak. Today though, we have far superior browsers like Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome, as well as Internet Explorer 8.

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For much of this decade, Mozilla and its Firefox browser were the upstarts, out to beat the big, bad Microsoft (MSFT) and its Internet Explorer browser. Firefox, the descendant of Netscape, the browser that helped jump-start the web revolution, was nimble and it was secure–something Microsoft’s IE wasn’t.

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Lately I’ve been worried about Firefox. Ever since its debut in 2004, the open-source Web browser has won acclaim for its speed, stability, and customizability. It eventually captured nearly a quarter of the market, an astonishing achievement for a project run by a nonprofit foundation. But recently Firefox seemed to go soft.

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It’s 1996, and you’re bored. What do you do? If you’re one of the lucky people with an AOL account, you probably do the same thing you’d do in 2009: Go online. Crank up your modem, wait 20 seconds as you log in, and there you are–”Welcome.” You check your mail, then spend a few minutes chatting with your AOL buddies about which of you has the funniest screen name (you win, pimpodayear94).

Then you load up Internet Explorer, AOL’s default Web browser. Now what? There’s no YouTube, Digg, Huffington Post, or Gawker. There’s no Google (GOOG), Twitter, Facebook, or Wikipedia. A few newspapers and magazines have begun to put their articles online—you can visit the New York Times or Time—and there are a handful of new Web-only publications, including Feed, HotWired, Salon, Suck, Urban Desires, Word, and, launched in June, Slate. But these sites aren’t very big, and they don’t hold your interest for long. People still refer to the new medium by its full name—the World Wide Web—and although you sometimes find interesting stuff here, you’re constantly struck by how little there is to do. You rarely linger on the Web; your computer takes about 30 seconds to load each page, and, hey, you’re paying for the Internet by the hour. Plus, you’re tying up the phone line. Ten minutes after you log in, you shut down your modem. You’ve got other things to do—after all, a new episode of “Seinfeld” is on.

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Google’s release Tuesday of a test version of its new open-source web browser, Chrome, marks an important moment in the ongoing shift of personal computing from the PC hard drive to the Internet “cloud.” I distinctly remember when, back in 1988, Apple Computer added MultiFinder to its Macintosh operating system, allowing my beloved Mac Plus to run more than one application at a time. That was, for us Mac users, anyway, a very big deal. Chrome–if we can trust the comic book–promises a similar leap in the capacity of the cloud to run applications speedily, securely, and simultaneously.

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Why is Google building a browser? A better question is, why did it take so long for Google to build a browser? … “The browser matters,” CEO Eric Schmidt says. He should know, because he was CTO of Sun Microsystems during the great browser wars of the 1990s. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin know it, too. “When I joined Google in 2001, Larry and Sergey immediately said, ‘We should build our own browser,’” Schmidt says. “And I said no.”

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To unleash the wild creativity of the Internet on mobile phones, we have to open them up to the real Internet, says Mitchell Baker, the second speaker of the morning at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

The chairman (er, chairwoman) of Mozilla says it shouldn’t matter what device you use to access the Web.

Mozilla is the nonprofit that makes the Firefox browser, which is being used by hundreds of millions of people as an alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

She says that mobile browsers should all just work. The use cases do argue for different devices, but you will always want things quickly and with few keystrokes. “The information is the same,” she said. “We should be able to access it, mix it up, mash it up, save it, store it. All of those things should be the same if I am on a laptop or phone, at home or on a train.”

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