It's the second of January 2010 and the figures are in from December. In just 16 months, Chrome has caught up and passed Apple's Safari browser. Google Chrome now has 4.63% of the global market share, while Safari has only4.46%!

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.