Today, Google launched a new beta version, with some graphical enhancements, which we can expect in a future stable release – specifically, improvements to 2D Canvas and a software rasterizer. Engineers John Bauman and Brian Salomon explain on the Chromium Blog:

For most Windows and Mac users, we’ve enabled GPU-accelerated rendering of 2D Canvas content, so that canvas-based games and animations run faster and feel smoother. You can go to chrome://gpu to see which features are being accelerated. This is a tricky area to optimize, due to the wide variety of hardware and operating system configurations found in the wild. We’ve made a series of small improvements to the way this acceleration works in the latest release, and we’re seeking feedback on it from our Beta users. If you notice performance problems with 2D Canvas graphics content, particularly if you’re a web developer using 2D Canvas on your site, please file a bug.

SwiftShader automatically kicks in for those users who cannot run content on the GPU. If you want to take a peek at what the performance is like with SwiftShader, you can use the –blacklist-accelerated-compositing and –blacklist-webgl flags, wait a few minutes for the automatic download to complete, and then load the relevant web page.

It’s been a pretty big week for Chrome. Earlier in the week the beta version of Chrome for Android launched as well. This could very well be an early step towards the convergence of Google’s two operating systems.

With this update, Chrome will begin loading your most frequented pages even before you finish typing the URL in the omnibox (the URL bar within Chrome that also serves as a Google search). Chrome will prerender the page in the background, which will allow it to load faster – “even instantly as soon as you hit Enter,” according to a blog post.

The security updates involving further protections from malicious downloads. “In addition to checking a list of known bad files, Chrome also does checks on executable files (like “.exe” and “.msi” files). If the executable doesn’t match a whitelist, Chrome checks with Google for more information, such as whether the website you’re accessing hosts a high number of malicious downloads”

They also announced intentions to update Chrome OS to improve Chromebook functionality:

In the near future, we will also begin rolling out updates to Chrome OS to further simplify the Chromebook experience. With a new image editor, Chromebook users will be able to quickly view, edit and share photos on the web. Users will also see an improved Verizon 3G activation portal, which includes the ability to set up a recurring purchase of mobile data.

Today, Google also unveiled their Screenwise initiative. The program works only in Chrome and allows Google to monitor your web activity so Google can generate info on how people browse. Participation in the program is optional, and Google is now taking email applications. You won’t be letting Google spy on you for nothing – they are offering up to $25 in Amazon gift cards to willing participants.

It’s a start though. This represents more than just allowing Chrome users to use the browser on their mobile devices. It could very well mean the beginning of a more integrated Google experience, somewhat parallel to what Google is doing by integrating Google+ into everything and consolidating its privacy policies.

Chrome is a browser, but it’s also an operating system in the form of Chrome OS. Android, of course, is also an operating system, and questions have been circulating around how Google would proceed in the future with two separate operating systems pretty much since Chrome OS was revealed.

Co-founder Sergey Brin has actually said that Android and Chrome OS would likely converge over time. I’d consider getting the Chrome browser on Android a first step in that direction.

Last year, we already saw some early stages of Chrome OS-based tablets.

There’s even a rumor that LG may be working on a Chrome OS tablet.

A merger of operating systems would likely also mean a merger of app markets – Android Market meets Chrome App Store.

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. So far, all we’ve really got is a beta version of the Chrome browser for Ice Cream Sandwich. There’s a developer site for it here.

“Chrome for Android brings support for many of the latest HTML5 features to the Android platform,” says Chrome engineering manager Arnaud Weber. “With hardware-accelerated canvas, overflow scroll support, strong HTML5 video support, and new capabilities such as Indexed DB, WebWorkers and Web Sockets, Chrome for Android is a solid platform for developing web content on mobile devices.”

“In addition to support for the latest web technologies, we hope to make interactive web content super easy to develop,” adds Weber. “Chrome for Android introduces remote debugging through Chrome Developer Tools to make it simple for developers to debug web sites running live on their mobile devices.”

In the following video, Google engineer Boris Smus demonstrates remote debugging in it:

Features of Chrome For Android include fast browsing and searching with the beloved Omnibox functionality and instant page loading. There’s also tabbed browsing, with unlimited tabs, link previews, tab/bookmark syncing, and the ability to send pages from your computer to your phone or tablet with a click via the Chrome to Mobile extension. It also includes auto-sign in for Google services.

Here are some more details from Googlers:

It even comes with incognito mode, which lets you browse without leaving traces of your history, cache or local storage.

The browser can be downloaded from here.

Chrome for Android also includes a feature rarely seen on smartphone browsers: tabbed browsing. Though Apple introduced tabs to the iPad version of Safari with iOS 5, tabbed browsing on phones of any kind – Apple or Android – has proven tricky. Chrome for Android appears to have done a good job, however.

Chrome for Android is compatible with phones and tablets running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. It is, unsurprisingly, available for free in the Android App Market. Chrome is currently in beta. Of course, beta doesn’t mean for Google what it means for everyone else, so you can probably expect a polished, well-made app.

Google announced the release of Chrome for Android on their blog today. The post includes a video showing off some of what Chrome for Android can do.

Chrome for Android looks pretty slick. Check it out for yourself, then let us know what you think in the comments.

The firm attributes the loss in Chrome market share to the penalty Google placed on it after the the whole paid post controversy last month. Google reduced the PageRank of the Chrome home page after it was found to be in violation of the company’s own webmaster guidelines, and as a result no longer appears on the first page in a variety of popular browser related searches.

It’s a bit hard to fathom that this could have such a major impact, but it’s at least one thing to take into consideration. It will be interesting to see how the market share looks next month, and after the Chrome page gets its PageRank back. Google said the PR would be lowered for a period of at least 60 days.

Also in January, Internet Explorer gained 1.1% and Firefox dropped 1%.

Google announced SPDY in 2009 as a protocol for transporting content over the web. SPDY, Google explained, was designed for minimizing latency through features like multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression.

This week, Mozilla launched Firefox 10, but it is Firefox 11 that will be the first version of the popular browser to implement SPDY.

Google’s Matt Cutts is pleased.

“The most important goal of SPDY is to transport web content using fewer TCP connections,” explains Patrick McManus on the hacks.mozilla.org blog. “It does this by multiplexing large numbers of transactions onto one TLS connection. This has much better latency properties than native HTTP/1. When using SPDY a web request practically never has to wait in the browser due to connection limits being exhausted (e.g. the limit of 6 parallel HTTP/1 connections to the same host name). The request is simply multiplexed onto an existing connection.”

“Generally speaking, web pages on high latency connections with high numbers of embedded objects will see the biggest benefit from SPDY,” he says. “That’s great because its where the web should be going. High latency mobile is a bigger part of the Internet every day, and as the Internet spreads to parts of the world where it isn’t yet common you can count on the fact that the growth will be mobile driven. Designs with large numbers of objects are also proving to be a very popular paradigm. Facebook, G+, Twitter and any avatar driven forum are clear examples of this. Rather than relying on optimization hacks such as sprites and data urls that are hard to develop and harder to maintain we can let the transport protocol do its job better.”

Mozilla has been a contributor to SPDY. Google said last week that they’re all working hard at finalizing and implementing draft-3 of SPDY early this year. Google also provided the following video:

Best practices for SPDY can be found here.

It actually looks like Firefox may be soon getting more Chrome-like in other ways as well – particularly with the home page and new tab page.

PC Mag is reporting that the update will apply to the desktop formats as well as the mobile edition for Android. For those “people,” who never upgraded to Firefox 4, version 3.6 will be updated to version 3.6.9 which only adds security and stability fixes.

During a meeting today, Firefox announced a new hire for Mozilla’s marketing team. Pete Scanlon, who previously worked for Google’s campaigns for Chrome, is now working for Mozilla.

As with the past few full version updates to Firefox, there’s not much going on for consumers. The new capabilities are mostly for developers.

A big improvement from previous versions is how Firefox 10 handles extensions. Instead of rejecting extensions not specifically made for Firefox 10, it will assume extensions are compatible unless otherwise noted. Most extensions compatible with Firefox 4 will work fine on Firefox 10.

Interestingly, Mozilla reported that 75 percent of all extensions in use were not acquired from their own addon site. They have updated the browser to support those extensions as well.

The update will also allow users to hotfix update extensions themselves to address minor issues.

The Android version of Firefox 10 will get multitouch gesture support. Firefox Sync will also be updated to allow users to sync their phone or table with Firefox without having to be at their desktop computer.

The changes for developers are more robust featuring enhancements to code editors and anti-aliasing for WebGL content. CSS3D Transforms will bring 3D animation to 2D objects. They will also add in support for full-screen Web applications.

Firefox 10 will also be the first Extended Support Release version. The program was made for enterprise IT professionals who were concerned that the more-frequent Firefox updates were unsupportable in a business environment.

Firefox 12, which is a few more weeks out, will finally add a tab page that users of Chrome and Opera enjoy now.

Firefox Nightly builds are early, untested versions of Firefox where new Web technologies and user features evolve rapidly. As the first stop on the Firefox release model, Nightly is the initial testing ground; features are added and removed daily. Features that reach a high level of stability and confidence then move through iterative testing on our Firefox Aurora and Beta channels. Only when testing in those channels confirms their general excellence do we release those features to hundreds of millions of Firefox users. In this model, improvements to Firefox reach our users regularly, and faster than ever before.

Original Article: It looks like Firefox has been testing more-Chrome like features in its (Firefox Nightly testing builds).

ExtremeTech points to some testing of a new “new tab” page and home page, providing the following screen cap:

This will look familiar to Chrome users.

The new home page is similar but goes a bit further, with a chat section and a “recently shared” section.

In an update, Extreme Tech notes that the new tab page was removed from the Nightly builds, and that it will likely appear in Firefox 13.

Firefox’s home page has really not changed much over the years, so a more Chrome-like experience would really symbolize the evolution of the browser.

Chrome reportedly overtook Firefox in users last month.

Google has really pushed the boundaries in the browser space, despite being the newer kid on the block. Don’t forget that Mozilla basically owes Google for Firefox’s continued existence. Google considers them a partner, not a competitor.

As Google explained at the time, it’s for transporting content over the web, and is designed for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression.”

Today, Google is talking about how it’s making the web even speedier and safer. In a post on the Chromium Blog, Google software engineers Will Chan and Roberto Peon write:

Chrome, Android Honeycomb devices, and Google’s servers have been speaking SPDY for some time, bringing important benefits to users. For example, thanks to SPDY, a significant percentage of Chrome users saw a decrease in search latency when we launched SSL-search. Given that Google search results are some of the most highly optimized pages on the internet, this was a surprising and welcome result.

We’ve also seen widespread community uptake and participation. Recently, Firefox has added SPDY support, which means that soon half of the browsers in use will support SPDY. On the server front, nginx has announced plans to implement SPDY, and we’re actively working on a full featuredmod-spdy for Apache. In addition, Strangeloop, Amazon, and Cotendo have all announced that they’ve been using SPDY.

Mozilla (which Google considers a partner, not a competitor, remember) is a contributor to SPDY, and Google says they’re all working hard at finalizing and implementing draft-3 of SPDY early this year.

Best practices for SPDY can be found here.

It’s called Nuke Comments and it drops a bomb on annoying commenters. Here’s the description, courtesy former Google engineer Tzafrir Rehan on Google+:

Are you getting comments on Google+ from people that you don’t want commenting on your posts? Time to go nuclear on them! Hit the Nuke button and delete the comment – Nuke Comments will then block them so you’ll never be bothered by their annoying comments again.

Two clicks, and you’ll never have to hear from John Q. Spammer again.

The “Nuke” button will appear right next to the “+1″ button under the comments, as seen below: