Google Chrome (on Windows): Password saving and management webapp LastPass offers a single space to drop your web site passwords and quickly use them on any browser—now including Chrome, through an extension available to development channel users.

LastPass works on Chrome similarly to how it does on Firefox and Internet Explorer, and it's a bit more convenient and functional than its bookmarklet form filler. The concept remains the same: you only have to remember your LastPass login, and LastPass remembers all your other passwords and, if you want, credit card and form data, too. Before you ask, here's how LastPass justifies its safety and encryption.

Google today released a new browser plug-in called Google Chrome Frame that creates an unholy union between Internet Explorer and Google Chrome, rendering web pages in IE using Chrome's rendering engine.

That rendering technology includes Chrome's support for HTML5 and its lightning-fast JavaScript engine. How does it turn IE into Chrome? By creating a new frame inside of Internet Explorer that basically embeds the Chrome browser. It's sort of like the previously mentioned IE Tab tool that embeds IE in Firefox, so users can access the now-rare IE-only sites. In this case, though, it's embedding Chrome in IE instead of the other way around, for the much more common dilemma of sites that won't render correctly in Internet Explorer.

Windows only: Chrome turned one year old just a couple weeks back, and as a belated celebration, the folks at Google have just pushed out a brand new stable release in the form of Google Chrome 3.

Chrome 2 (stable) hit servers back in May, and while the folks at Google are currently on Chrome 4 in the dev channel, those of you who haven't been eager to play on the bleeding edge of Chrome releases have a lot of nice improvements in store for them in Chrome 3, including:

The latest developer builds of Google Chrome enable extensions by default, add support for skins, and even improve compatibility with Windows 7.

If you aren't using the developer releases of Chrome, you'll still need to download the Channel Chooser and switch to the development stream, but you won't have to mess around with command-line parameters anymore—extensions have been enabled by default. This means you'll be able to install themes for the browser, and while there are only two themes to choose from at the moment, the theme specifications have been published and there is likely to be an explosion of new skins released very soon.

The other noteworthy fix, although not mentioned in the linked article, is that Google Chrome's "Application" shortcuts will now show up as separate taskbar items in Windows 7, a very helpful change for those of us that use them extensively.

Windows only: Free utility ChromePass displays all the passwords Google Chrome has saved for your web site logins. You can view saved passwords one by one in Chrome itself, but ChromePass displays the list all at once, and lets you export your username and password list to a file (XML, HTML, comma or tab delimited text). ChromePass also displays the name of the username and password field, and the time it was created. It doesn't look like ChromePass can import a file of passwords, so the exported file is just a reference if you want to take your saved passwords to go. ChromePass is a free download for Windows only.