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.

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.

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.

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.

Speed has always been one of the big draws to Chrome, and one of the biggest points Google has always made about the browser.

Now, with this beta, Chrome will actually start loading pages in the background before you’re even finished typing the URL in the omnibox. Essentially this is the browser equivalent of Google’s Instant Pages, which took Google Instant a step further to load search results quicker.

Maybe soon, all you’ll have to do is think of the page you wish to visit, and Google will deliver it.

“If the URL auto-completes to a site you’re very likely to visit, Chrome will begin to prerender the page,” explains Chrome software engineer Dominic Hamon, who also goes by the title “Speed Demon”.

“Prerendering reduces the time between when you hit Enter and when you see your fully-loaded web page–in some cases, the web page appears instantly,” he adds.

The security part comes in with the Safe Browsing feature, which has received some improvements with the latest update. It now includes functionality to analyze .exe and .msi files that can be downloaded.

“If a file you download is known to be bad, or is hosted on a website that hosts a relatively high percentage of malicious downloads, Chrome will warn you that the file appears to be malicious and that you should discard it,” explains Hamon. “We’re starting small with this initial Beta release, but we’ll be ramping up coverage for more and more malicious files in the coming months. Remember, no technical mechanism can ever protect you completely from malicious downloads. You should always be careful about which files you download and consider the reputation of their source.”

The features will surely be much more appreciated when they come to the stable release.

Since the deal was announced, there has been a lot of discussion about Google essentially funding its competitor in the web browser market, as money from the deal is pretty much the only thing keeping Mozilla afloat.

It’s very possible that Microsoft would have taken the opportunity to boost Bing’s market share without the Google deal in place. Others have noted how much more Google is paying this time around than its previous search deal. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that a big part of Google’s strategic thinking is about keeping that part of its search market share. There are still a ton of people using Firefox, despite Chrome’s growing popularity.

Peter Kasting, a software engineer and founding member of Google’s Chrome team, who also designed and built Chrome’s omnibox (the address bar that lets you conduct a search), takes issue with this whole “funding a competitor” mentality, insisting that rather, Google is funding a “partner”.

He posted a rant about this on Google+ (h/t: 9to5Google), where he said:

People never seem to understand why Google builds Chrome no matter how many times I try to pound it into their heads. It’s very simple: the primary goal of Chrome is to make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible. That’s it. It’s completely irrelevant to this goal whether Chrome actually gains tons of users or whether instead the web advances because the other browser vendors step up their game and produce far better browsers. Either way the web gets better. Job done. The end.

But that was not the end. He continued:

So it’s very easy to see why Google would be willing to fund Mozilla: Like Google, Mozilla is clearly committed to the betterment of the web, and they’re spending their resources to make a great, open-source web browser. Chrome is not all things to all people; Firefox is an important product because it can be a different product with different design decisions and serve different users well. Mozilla’s commitment to advancing the web is why I was hired at Google explicitly to work on Firefox before we built Chrome: Google was interested enough in seeing Firefox succeed to commit engineering resources to it, and we only shifted to building Chrome when we thought we might be able to cause even greater increases in the rate at which the web advanced.

Nor was that the end of the post, but that pretty much covers the meat and potatoes.

Apparently a lot of people went on to criticize Kasting’s post and general mentality, basically implying that he’s living in a fantasy land, though browsing through the comments on the post, I see a fair amount of support for his points, or belief at least. Even tech columnist MG Siegler, who’s post in particular was the catalyst for Kasting’s rant, said, “We’re not saying opposing things at all, I totally buy all of this. But there are a few other sides which can’t be ignored.”

In a follow up post, Kasting went off on another rant about people’s perception of him being “hopelessly naive and idealistic.” In that one, he says:

Let me be clear: I’m not denying that Google makes money, or claiming that isn’t a factor in decisions. But the “realists” (as multiple people proudly declared themselves to be yesterday) are so busy patting themselves on the back for “seeing through” Google’s actions to expose what they think is the short-term, exploitative focus driving everything that they completely miss the possibility that people in for-profit corporations can actually care about humanity, the world, ethics, doing the right thing, or hell, even long-term strategic planning. You don’t have to be an idealist to see why, for a company that benefits when people use the web, making the web better is a good long-term move; or why a company that wants its users’ trust and loyalty would benefit from not secretly spying on everything they do.

What do you think? Is Google’s main motivation simply making the web better?

Now, they have announced a new version of Firefox for Android, optimized for tablets.

The new Firefox for Android also comes with some bells and whistles for dvelopers to enable them to create interactive mobile web experiences.

Mozilla says it aims to be very visual and “magazine-like” with this version. It integrates Firefox sync so you always have access to your browsing history, open tabs, bookmarks, saved passwords, etc.

Tabs appear as thumbnails, and the browser is optimized for portrait and widescreen modes.

“With the new Action Bar menu (next to the Awesome Bar), you can access Firefox Preferences, Add-ons, downloads and more. The Action Bar adds the back, forward and bookmark buttons for easy access,” Mozilla says. “One-touch bookmarks enable you to add an icon to your Android home screen for your favorite websites and Web apps, making Web apps as easy to use as native apps.”

“Developers will enjoy new HTML5 tools in Firefox that make it easier to create fun and interactive mobile Web experiences for phones and tablets,” says Mozilla. “The HTML5 Input Tag for Camera Access enables developers to make websites and Web apps more powerful and interactive. Developers can build mobile websites and Web apps that allow you to use the camera on an Android phone or tablet to take pictures, scan bar codes and more without leaving Firefox.

A demo of this is available here.

This version of Firefox also supports the HTML5 Form Validation API.

Now, you can forget about all of that. It’s not happening. Google and Mozilla have renewed their deal.

Mozilla has posted the following message on its blog:

We’re pleased to announce that we have negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Google. This new agreement extends our long term search relationship with Google for at least three additional years.

The specific terms of this commercial agreement are subject to traditional confidentiality requirements, and we’re not at liberty to disclose them.

Well, at least Firefox can still use Bing if they want. In fact, Mozilla even has a special version of Firefox for “Bing enthusiasts.”

At the beginning of the month, a report came out indicating that Google Chrome had overtaken Firefox in users.

Ed Bott at ZDnet has put out an interesting report indicating that Mozilla’s deal with Google ended in November, and questions Mozilla’s future without the money it gets from that, and the increasing popularity of Google’s competing browser. He writes:

A search partnership with Google has historically been Mozilla’s greatest source of income. In its most recent financial statement, prepared in August and published recently online (see this PDF copy), the Mozilla Foundation won’t even mention Google’s name…

He points to this passage from that document:

The Corporation has a contract with a search engine provider for royalties which expires November 2011. Approximately 84% and 86% of royalty revenue for 2010 and 2009, respectively, was derived from this contract.

You know who would probably love to snag a nice chunk of search market share by being the default search option on a popular browser? Microsoft is certainly not shy about pumping money into its search business, and the fact that there is already a Firefox with Bing shows that they’re not shy about teaming up with a competitor. It could be a small price to pay. There’s a lot more money in search.

Earlier this week, we looked at a report from Statcounter indicating that Chrome has overtaken Firefox for the first time in terms of users. Microsoft is surely not blind to that upward Chrome trend either (or the downward IE trend). And now Google is even advertising Chrome on TV (not to mention pushing an operating system based on it).

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Market Share

So far, there’s nothing out to my knowledge indicating that Microsoft is pursuing replacement of Google’s contract with Mozilla, but we’re certainly not the only ones considering this to be a distinct possibility.

MG Siegler writes, “But because Firefox has a huge user base, this is something that Microsoft would have to consider. Such a deal could potentially finally turn Bing from a multi-billion dollar suck hole into an actual business.”

Ouch.

A deal with Mozilla would help for sure. I still think they could be doing more to leverage their uber-popular Xbox to further Bing’s cause.

The Mozilla situation will be one to keep an eye on for sure. Will it be able to compete with those who have their own mobile operating systems?