chrome

Google has released a new beta version of Chrome today, which the company says is much faster and improves upon the tab page and Omnibox features. It also comes with some new options for themes.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard that Google announced that it would be releasing a new operating system called Google Chrome OS this week. One mysterious blog entry popped up soon after, claiming to have snagged some screenshots of the OS as Google demoed the product to Acer. Here's an excerpt from that post:

Google has announced that it is working on an operating system based on Google Chrome (their browser). The company says the project is an attempt to "re-think what operating systems should be." The OS-in-progress is simply called Google Chrome OS,  it is open source, and it will initially be aimed at netbooks. The announcement came on the same day that Google dropped the "beta" tag from Google Apps.

For the longest time in hacker folklore Internet Explorer and Microsoft Windows were the key targets and most exploitable while Macintosh and Safari were virtually ignored. But times they are a-changin’, roles are reversing, and Google’s Chrome comes out as a dark horse.

In the past two days both Google and Microsoft have announced either changes or a new releases for their browser. Both are obviously touting improvements with speed being the main focus of Google and features being that of Microsoft.

Everyone knows that Google loves the word "beta"; Gmail has stood as evidence of this for years.  Well, love can do powerful things, and Google's brought back the term to describe a fresh, faster-than-ever version of its Chrome browser.  There's a new Chrome blog, too.

The main competitors in the browser war may still be Internet Explorer and Firefox, but it looks like Google's found another way or two in which to give Chrome an advantage.  YouTube and Facebook users have started to notice promotions for Chrome pop up left and right. 

Like its metallic namesake, Google's browser named Chrome attracted a lot of attention at first, then seemed to lose its shine and fall out of favor.  Still, Hitwise found a surprising side effect of Chrome's introduction, and Matt Cutts believes that it's solid in most fundamental senses.