As we pointed out earlier, today is Google Chrome’s second birthday. Since it launched in beta on September 2, 2008, it has come a long way (it’s already 6 versions deep). Back then, it was Windows-only, with official Mac and Linux support only coming late last year. But now it’s on the verge of another milestone: becoming the top browser coming to this site.

I’ve checked out our logs over the past few years to see how well Chrome has been doing compared to its rival browsers. The numbers are shockingly strong for such a new entry — particularly in the past year. Obviously, TechCrunch has a tech-centric audience, but I don’t think it’s off-base to say that you’re also a leading audience of early adopters that often point to where the general public will be in the future.

The numbers are clear: Firefox is in trouble. It has been the top browser since we began using Google Analytics to record stats back in 2007. By 2008, it was nearly 25 percentage points ahead of the next closest rival, Internet Explorer. As of yesterday, it stood just 3 percentage points ahead of the next closest rival, Chrome.

Here are the numbers. In August 2010 (the month that just ended):

• Firefox: 33.98%
• Chrome: 26.22%
• Safari: 18.40%
• IE: 13.23%
• Mozilla Compatible Agent: 5.46%

One year ago, in August 2009 (right before Chrome’s first birthday), the numbers looked like this:

• Firefox: 45.91%
• IE: 20.61%
• Safari: 18.85%
• Chrome: 10.09%
• Mozilla Compatible Anent: 1.83%

Two years ago, in August 2008 (right before Chrome launched), the numbers looked like this:

• Firefox: 55.63%
• IE: 31.21%
• Safari 9.76%
• Opera: 2.23%
• Mozilla: 0.62%

By September 2008, the month Chrome launched in beta, it had an immediate impact. But remember, it was Windows-only at the time:

• Firefox: 52.36%
• IE: 28.55%
• Safari: 9.18%
• Chrome: 6.58%
• Opera: 2.05%

And just for fun, let’s go back three full years, to August 2007.

• Firefox: 48.81%
• IE: 40.61%
• Safari: 6.59%
• Opera: 2.29%
• Mozilla: 0.72%

Chrome has clearly taken a bite out of Firefox, IE, and even Opera’s already small share. Safari is up big over the past couple of years as well, but its growth has seemingly stalled over the past year — despite iPad browser usage (in terms of visits to TechCrunch) exploding.

Of course, overall traffic to TechCrunch is also way up over these past few years. It just appears that more and more people who are visiting are now doing so via Chrome.

Let’s look at the numbers from yesterday:

• Firefox: 34.68%
• Chrome: 31.09%
• Safari: 15.65%
• IE: 12.77%
• Mozilla Compatible Agent: 3.48%

Yes, it’s just a matter of time before Chrome is on top.

As a humorous aside, IE with Chrome Frame, the plug-in Google made to make IE behave like Chrome, is now a bigger source of traffic to TechCrunch than Opera Mini or BlackBerry. While still tiny, it too is growing.

Windows/Mac/Linux: Two years after its inception, web browser Google Chrome reaches version 6 in its stable release today, bringing with it the much sought-after extension syncing, form autofill and autofill syncing, and an even more streamlined UI. More »

It's Chrome's second birthday today, and in addition to posting some fancy-schmancy images to celebrate Google Chrome's stable channel has been bumped to version 6. For those of you still keeping tabs on version changes, it's only been four months since Chrome 5 went stable.

The update means that all Chrome users can now take advantage of extension and autofill sync -- both important parts of Google's desire to keep your 'browsing platform' uniform across all the computers you use.

Version 6 also brings the new consolidated menu, richer content settings (JavaScript, plug-ins, notifications, and the like), and the first-run search engine selection screen. There's also a faster V8 JavaScript engine under the hood.

No announcement yet from the Chrome Blog, but we'll add a link once their official post has gone live. In the meantime, the Chromium blog has a breakdown of some of the more important security updates and feature additions.

Chrome: TabRocket is a small Chrome extension that allows you to shuttle open tabs between remote Chrome sessions. If you've ever wanted to send a tab to your home computer or your laptop across the room, TabRocket can help. More »

Windows only: If you keep a copy of Chrome's bleeding-edge Canary build on hand, you can check out Chrome's optional Side Tabs feature right now. Update Canary, activate a "Labs" feature, and you're a right-click away from vertical tabs. More »

I enjoy using Google’s Chrome Canary build so that I can try out the latest features of Google Chrome. Today, Canary’s update included the Chrome Labs page. This feature has been available for a few days, but only in the Chromium code base. To bring up the Labs page, you have to open a new tab and type: “about:labs” (without the quotes).

Google may say that it’s “Some crazy experimental stuff”, but so far, it’s not that crazy. The only experiment available right now is “Side Tabs”. Once enabled, you can right click on any tab to enable or disable it. Here are two screenshots below to show you what it looks like.

As you can see, the Side Tabs really change the look of the browser. I miss the rounded tabs and I’m guessing that I won’t use this new feature often. The reduction in screen width isn’t worth the ease of navigation unless you have lots and lots of tabs open.

While I’m not excited about the Side Tabs lab experiment, I am happy to see the Labs page in Chrome Canary. At least I can hope they’ll stop using those stupid command line switches now.

Labs Extension: If you don’t like having to type “about:labs” in a new tab, there’s a Labs Chrome Extension that let’s  you click on a Labs icon to bring up the Labs page.

More New Features: Be sure to check out three other new features in Chrome 7, Chrome Web Apps, Voice Recognition and Hardware Video Acceleration.

As Google Chrome 7 (dev) now includes hardware acceleration, guys from DownloadSquad decided to test it along with Internet Explorer 9 (developers preview) and Firefox 4 (beta).

What are the results?
Google Chrome 7 utilized the most of the hardware resources, delivering better FPS (frames per second) than Internet Explorer 9 or Firefox 4, which took the last place.

However, as those are not the final builds, don’t draw your conclusions yet, things might change in the future.

Thanks to geek for the news tip.

Chrome only: If there's an app, a link, or anything else on the web you want to quickly pull up on a smartphone, or send to friends, QR Code Generator gets you there with just a right-click from Chrome. More »

After yesterday's announcement that Chrome 7 is now hardware accelerated, I instantly wanted to get the major browsers back into the ring for another screencasted deathmatch. Back when I did the 4-way speed test, only Firefox and Internet Explorer 9 featured hardware acceleration, and as a result Opera and Chrome were many orders of magnitude slower. If you watch the video, however, you'll see that's definitely no longer the case: Chrome is now the fastest of the three major browsers.

That speed comes at a price! As I discuss in the video, Chrome might be faster, but it uses significantly more resources than either IE9 or Firefox 4. Firefox is some 30% slower, but at the same time seems to use less CPU and GPU time. IE9 seems to utilize the same amount of CPU time as Chrome, but a little less of the GPU -- and it's marginally slower as a result.

What I don't know is whether this is by design or not. You'll notice that the GPU never went far above 50% -- why, with three browsers open, does it not get closer to 100%? The resources are there to be used -- why not use them?! Likewise, my CPU is still only half-used even when all three browsers are drawing 1000 frantic fishes at the same time. If you're curious, the other IE9 test drive samples all provided similar results. I wanted to try Google's 'HTML5 rocks' sample gallery, but they intentionally used elements of CSS and HTML5 that aren't yet supported in Internet Explorer 9 or Firefox 4.

In the name of science, here's some more information about my process: the screen capture does slow down each browser by a few frames per second, but relatively the figures are still accurate. I saw a small deviation in FPS when I was only running one browser at a time (probably because my CPU has multiple cores). There are a few unknown variables too, like whether the CPU core usage is defined by the app, or by the operating system (but with Chrome using more resources than IE9, you can only assume that Windows isn't unfairly biasing its own-brand browser).

If you'd like to recreate my test, you'll need to enable hardware acceleration in Firefox 4 and Chrome -- IE9 has it turned on by default:

• Firefox 4 -- grab a nightly build, navigate to about:config and add gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled -- set it to 'true'
  
  
• Chrome 7 -- grab a nightly build and add the following flags to the shortcut before opening it: --enable-accelerated-compositing --enable-gpu-plugin --enable-gpu-rendering --enable-accelerated-2d-canvas

It takes a lot for a music video to grab my attention anymore. Arcade Fire's HTML5 collaboration with Google, however, does a pretty damn good job.

Head over to The Wilderness Downtown, punch in the address of the home where you grew up, and watch the magic unfold. The "experience" is definitely one of the most interesting demos to come out of Google's Chrome Experiments thus far. It's a fantastic showcase of what HTML5 and modern browsers bring to the table.

As director Chris Milk told Wired, "[HTML5] is in its infancy right now, but I think the browser will be the next widely recognized artistic medium." He continues by adding "It allows such a larger dialog with the viewer. There's actual two-way communication going on between the art and the observer."

One parting note: is it just me, or was that HTML5 progress indicator every bit as annoying as the ones we've grown accustomed to with Flash preloaders? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Google is a big proponent of HTML5, especially for video and rich graphics in the browser. To show off what HTML5 can do, Google Chrome teamed up with the Arcade Fire and director Chris Milk to create a custom interactive video for their song, “We Used To Wait.” The experience is called The Wilderness Downtown and is best viewed in Chrome or other HTML5-compliant browser.

You start by typing in the address of the house you grew up in, then it loads a video of a guy in a hoodie running through the streets. Different windows pop open on your screen, some with graphics, some with videos. Google Maps and Street View images of your old neighborhood are incorporated into the video. All the video is in HTML5, different windows open up triggered by the music, and you even see a fly-over of your neighborhood based on Google Maps’ routing API.

Today we’re excited to launch a musical experience made specifically for the browser, called “The Wilderness Downtown.” The project was created by writer/director Chris Milk with the band Arcade Fire and Google.

“The Wilderness Downtown” is set to Arcade Fire’s new song “We Used to Wait”, and showcases many of the latest developments on the web. It features a mash-up of Google Maps and Google Street View with HTML5 canvas, HTML5 audio and video, an interactive drawing tool, and choreographed windows that dance around the screen. These modern web technologies have helped us craft an experience that is personalized and unique for each viewer, as you virtually run through the streets where you grew up.

Browsers and the modern web have indeed come a long way since Chrome was introduced, and we hope this project provides a glimpse at some of what the future holds. The project was built with Chrome in mind, so it’s best experienced in Chrome’s beta or stable builds. To launch the project and learn more about how we made it, please visit our Chrome Experiments site at www.chromeexperiments.com/arcadefire.

One of the most talked about features in Safari 5 has been its Reader function -- Apple's built-in implementation of the Readability bookmarklet. Both are nice ways to reformat articles on blog or news sites for distraction-free reading.

If you like the look of Safari Reader but would rather not change from Google Chrome or Firefox, don't worry. The iReader extension brings the same functionality to your browser of choice!

Like Safari Reader, iReader shrouds the background in semi-opaque blackness . Hover near the bottom of the page to display zoom and print controls, as well as e-mail/Twitter/Facebook sharing buttons. iReader is also highly configurable -- set Gmail as your 'send page' client, change the display font, activate smooth scrolling, set the "curtain" to be more or less transparent, and adjust the reading area and margins. You can also choose hotkey combination to activate iReader (rather than having to click on the Omnibar icon).

Download iReader : Google Chrome extension or Firefox add-on

I'm not sure when the changes actually landed, but Google has announced that an early implementation of hardware acceleration is now available in developer versions of Chrome 7.

Early testing suggests that performance is still worse than Internet Explorer 9, but the gap has definitely been closed a bit. The '1000 fish test' now clocks in at about 10 frames per second, which is definitely an improvement from last time -- but still some way short of IE9's 45 FPS.

The Chromium blog post says that only some content is being accelerated, so the Fish Tank might not be a fair comparison of the browsers. I'll try to find a better test or benchmark and share my findings later today. You can enable hardware acceleration in Chrome with the --enable-accelerated-compositing flag -- and if you discover anything interesting, please share your findings in the comments!

Update: you might need a nightly build of Chromium to take advantage of this hardware acceleration. It would be nice if Google could explicitly state when the changes were made...

It's only available in the Dev and Canary builds of Chrome, and very few pages support it—for now. But if you want to get hardware acceleration running in Google's browser, it's just a simple command line switch away. More »