Microsoft’s Internet Explorer wound up grabbing 61.58% of the market after suffering a month-over-month loss of 0.54 percent, while Safari was down 0.08 points to 4.45% and Opera dipped 0.03 to a mere 2.35%. Google’s Chrome, meanwhile, continued its climb for the sixteenth straight month. Its small 0.4 point gain isn’t exactly overwhelming, but looking at the bigger picture its 5.6% share is remarkable given its short life on the market.

That trend looks likely to continue as Microsoft today starts offering a “browser ballot” encouraging IE users to consider the other browsers on the market. If Chrome keeps up the pace of the last three months it is estimated it will break the 10% mark in October, 11 months ahead of a goal it set last year.

Source: TechSpot

The Google Chrome Beta channel for Mac and Linux has been updated to 5.0.307.9. This release fixes a few issues to make the browser a bit more reliable:

* [Mac, Linux] Fixed a tab crash that could be triggered by visiting wordpress.com, http://acid3.acidtests.org/, and many other sites. (Issue 35498)
* [Mac, Linux] Fixed a tab crash in image loading. (Issue 32230)
* [Linux] Improved font bolding for fonts without native bold. (Issue 22360)

Download Link

Changes:
* Integrated page level language translation.
* Added new privacy management tools, under “Options->Under the Hood->Content settings…” which all for better management of images, JavaScript, plugins, and popups.

Direct download through FileHippo

Imran Hussain at iThinkDifferent points out at a great feature, the ability to pin tabs in Google Chrome, simply put a feature that will remember the tabs you most like. It won’t do it automatically for you ofcourse, you have to right click the tab and select “Pin Tab” option and to make sure the tabs re-open each time you start Chrome Browser, you have to choose “Reopen the pages that were last open” from options and you are good to go.

In their constant strive to outperform and eclipse Apple’s gadgets, Google has provided a possible peek at what their rival tablet computer may look like. To develop the tablet, Google is reportedly teaming up with Taiwan-based HTC, the same company it worked with to create its Nexus One phone.

The images, which popped up this week on their Chromium site, reveal a glimpse at how Google’s OS would work on the tablet. The photos were reported to be developed by Glen Murphy, the company’s UI lead on its OS and browser. It features a configurable keyboard, zooming functionality, and resizable windows that can be altered by dragging your fingers across the screen.

The Google Chrome tablet concept designs showcases a range of touchscreen tablet PC features, including a range of touch-screen keypad configurations, including a split keyboard with keys assigned to left and right hands.

Read full @ source with images

1. Google Mail Checker – Install Now (Direct Link)
   Displays the number of unread messages in your Google Mail inbox. You can also click the button to open your inbox.It also comes with a swell animation when the number of items in your inbox changes. Google Page for the extension
2. AdBlock by gundlach – Install Now (Direct Link)
   Your favorite feature in Firefox finally comes to Chrome! Block all advertisements on all web pages. Your browser is automatically updated with additions to the filter; just Install and enjoy. This replacement for Firefox’s AdBlock Plus does everything possible to make your browsing experience awesome:
   • It’s optimized for speed! It squeezes every millisecond out of every filter, figuring out several ways to go faster than a standard filter subscription checker.
   • You can have a button next to the Wrench — or not if you don’t want it. We’re pretty proud of that, as we think we’re the only extension that supports an optional browser action button!
   • It has an awesome blacklisting UI for if an ad does sneak by — click on the background of the page and press Ctrl-Shift-K (or use the browser button), and it will walk you through targeting exactly what to block.
     Google Page for the extension
3. Google Translate – Install Now (Direct Link)
   This extension adds a button to your browser toolbar. Click the translate icon whenever you want to translate the page you’re visiting.The extension also automatically detects if the language of a page you’re on is different from the language you’re using for your Google Chrome interface. If it is, a banner appears at the top of the page. Click the Translate button in the banner to have all the text on the page appear in the new language.
   Google Page for the extension
4. Facebook for Google Chrome by benhiller – Install Now (Direct Link)
   This unofficial extension lets you read your Facebook news feed and wall. You can also update your status by clicking on your profile picture. This extension works with the nightly version of Chromium for Linux, but not with the Chrome beta for Linux.
   Google Page for the extension
5. Chromed Bird by cezarsa – Install Now (Direct Link)
   Chromed Bird is a Twitter extension that allows you to follow your timelines and interact with your Twitter account. Chromed Bird is an awesome Twitter extension for Google Chrome with lots of features. Some of the current features are:
   • Supporting lists and favorites timelines;
   • Follow your timelines and navigate through your tweets;
   • Compose, reply, RT, share, favorite and delete tweets;
   • Create short URLs within the extension;
   • Track read / unread tweets;
   • Notify user whenever new tweets arrive;
   • Tweets caching to avoid hitting Twitter’s API rate limit;

   Google Page for the extension

Step 1: Download and install the latest version of VirtualBox for Windows 7. (download link)

Step 2: Download .vmdk file for Google Chrome OS. (from gdgt)

Step 3: Start VirtualBox and click on “New” button. This will start a wizard that will help you create a new VM in VirtualBox.

Step 4: Name your VM “Chrome OS” and select “Linux” from Operating System dropdown menu, and “Other Linux” from Version dropdown menu.

Step 5: Assign your VM some Ram in megabytes. For this tutorial, I have allotted Chrome OS VM 512 MB of Ram.

Step 6: Now Select “use existing hard disk” option and select the .vmdk file of Chrome OS that you downloaded in Step 2.

Step 7: Click Next and finish the wizard.

Now simply click on the green colored “Start” button as seen in the screenshot above and wait for about 7 seconds for Chrome OS to boot up. You will need a valid Google ID to login into the operating system.

In July we announced that we were working on Google Chrome OS, an open source operating system for people who spend most of their time on the web.

Today we are open-sourcing the project as Chromium OS. We are doing this early, a year before Google Chrome OS will be ready for users, because we are eager to engage with partners, the open source community and developers. As with the Google Chrome browser, development will be done in the open from this point on. This means the code is free, accessible to anyone and open for contributions. The Chromium OS project includes our current code base, user interface experiments and some initial designs for ongoing development. This is the initial sketch and we will color it in over the course of the next year.

We want to take this opportunity to explain why we’re excited about the project and how it is a fundamentally different model of computing.

First, it’s all about the web. All apps are web apps. The entire experience takes place within the browser and there are no conventional desktop applications. This means users do not have to deal with installing, managing and updating programs.

Second, because all apps live within the browser, there are significant benefits to security. Unlike traditional operating systems, Chrome OS doesn’t trust the applications you run. Each app is contained within a security sandbox making it harder for malware and viruses to infect your computer. Furthermore, Chrome OS barely trusts itself. Every time you restart your computer the operating system verifies the integrity of its code. If your system has been compromised, it is designed to fix itself with a reboot. While no computer can be made completely secure, we’re going to make life much harder (and less profitable) for the bad guys. If you dig security, read the Chrome OS Security Overview or watch the video.

Most of all, we are obsessed with speed. We are taking out every unnecessary process, optimizing many operations and running everything possible in parallel. This means you can go from turning on the computer to surfing the web in a few seconds. Our obsession with speed goes all the way down to the metal. We are specifying reference hardware components to create the fastest experience for Google Chrome OS.

There is still a lot of work to do, and we’re excited to work with the open source community. We have benefited hugely from projects like GNU, the Linux Kernel, Moblin, Ubuntu, WebKit and many more. We will be contributing our code upstream and engaging closely with these and other open source efforts.

Google Chrome OS will be ready for consumers this time next year. Sign up here for updates or if you like building your operating system from source, get involved at chromium.org.