Google, Web Browser | featured news

Much as I love the powerful minimalism of Google's Chrome Web browser, I really love the customizing power of Mozilla's Firefox. That's because Firefox is a tinkerer's delight with its many add-ons that let you personalize the browser to meet your many needs. Well, Google has finally opened up Chrome to the wide world of extensions.

Just last week, Google finally released official betas for its Chrome browser for Mac and Linux.

It’s only Tuesday, but it appears as if we’re in the midst of Google Week. Yesterday saw the launch of Google real-time search, Google Goggles and even more Wave invites.

People hate IE6; they've made that abundantly clear on the web. Unfortunately, plenty of people are still stuck using it for reasons such as their work not letting them upgrade. So Google is doing something about it.

Chrome Frame is a new browser plug-in developed by Google to give you a Chrome browsing experience inside of Internet Explorer.

...but What About the Other Web Browsers?

The new browser wars on on. More than a decade after Microsoft killed off Netscape with Internet Explorer, competition in the browser market has never been stronger. Just last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5, which has now been downloaded nearly 14 million times.

The company announced Thursday that an update to Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine, combined with a new version of the Webkit browser engine, should improve the loading speed of JavaScript-heavy Web pages by up to 30 percent. The updates will be automatically downloaded to existing copies of Chrome.

Power browsers are coming. And they'll look mighty familiar. Software is supposed to be a mature industry, characterized by some sort of mono- or duopoly. How to explain, then, the activity around Web browsers. Three of the tech industry's biggest names -- Microsoft, Google and Apple -- each has a significant in-house browser development effort, with periodic fresh releases.