Proving the Old World can still be positively refreshing when it comes to some things, the unstoppable decline of Internet Explorer in the motherland has finally left Firefox with the European pole position.

Internet Explorer, across all versions, lost about 8% of its market share between December 2009 and 2010. Firefox, on the other hand, by losing just 3% of its share, has ended up on top. The biggest winner, and seemingly the only browser to gain market share, is Google's fleet-footed Chrome browser, which began the year at 5% and ended at almost 15%.

In the rest of the world, Internet Explorer is still by far and away the most popular browser (at least according to StatCounter). In fact, the only other territory where Firefox is in the lead is Antarctica...

Voice Search is an extension for Google Chrome that allows you to speak search queries instead of typing them, and it's not limited to Google searches.

It works very similar to the voice input system that Google has built into Android. A microphone icon will show up in your browser's extensions area, as well as near any HTML5-powered search box on websites that it can be used for. To search for "kittens", the developer says, just click on the microphone and say "kittens". To search Google Images for kittens, say "google images kittens". To search Wikipedia, say "wikipedia" followed by your query.

Voice Search can search using the following sites by default: Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha. However, you can also add other search engines that you like.

This is at a very experimental stage at the moment, and as such you may find that you need to start Chrome with the flag --enable-voice-input for the add-on to even work. Instructions on how to add the flag are available on the app's page in the Chrome Web Store, which is also where you can download Voice Search for Chrome for free.

Brown says that he's working on an option to pop up your actual notifications when you click on the toolbar icon, and he's even posted a work-in-progress screenshot of what those notifications will look like. For now, you can install the extension or follow its development via a GitHub repo.

These days, you no longer have to be an esoteric nerd to sport a dual-monitor setup. Heck, many of us use three monitors, and some have been known to use entire walls. Now, when you have such a setup and try to watch a YouTube video in full-screen, you quickly discover an irritating fact: While you're watching a video in full-screen on one monitor, any click on another monitor collapses the video back to its tiny windowed size.

There are ways to get around this by replacing specific Flash DLLs with tweaked versions, but really, who wants to mess with system files like this? Window Expander for Chrome is a far less invasive solution. It adds a button to Chrome's Omnibar which you can click to display a full-screen window with the video you're currently watching. Since Chrome has so little, well, chrome, it's the next best thing to full-screen. Window Expander is simple, and it works. Go give it a try!

Chrome: If you've ever been on a site and wanted a more immediate form of communication than, say, comments can offer, Chrome extension Talkita lets you live chat with users that are currently viewing the same web site. More »

Okay, so we're not quite at the point where you're going to be playing the next Crysis sequel in your browser, but still -- the arrival of WebGL in Chrome's beta channel is kind of a big deal. Apart from being able to play around with cool demos like the ones offered up by Google in its official announcement, WebGL is another important step in bringing more desktop-like functionality to the Web.

In addition to cloud-y 3D support, hardware acceleration support is due to arrive at some point -- presumably before Chrome 9 gets pushed to the stable channel. Whether or not that will happen remains to be seen, but we'll know soon enough thanks to the six-week release cycle.

Check your Chrome wrench icon for the update notification, or hit About Google Chrome to force a check.

Anyone else up for some WebGL Quake action?

Google's Chrome for a Cause extension promises to donate money to a charity for every new tab you open in Chrome until this Sunday, December 19. At the end of each day you can choose where the money will go, and you have five charities to pick from:

As a quick follow-up article to the Adobe Flash 10.2 beta announcement, we thought we'd show you how to disable Google Chrome's built-in Flash plug-in so that you can use a pre-release build like the 10.2 beta. It's a quick and simple process, but please remember that once you've disabled Chrome's built-in Flash you won't get the benefit of Chrome's internal Flash updates.

1. Download the Flash plug-in that you'd like to use with Chrome (10.2 can be found here).
2. Fire up Chrome and type about:plugins into the address bar; hit enter.
3. Click on Details in the top right of the window to expand the plug-in details.
4. Find the Flash plug-in that's listed as being in the Chrome directory and hit Disable (shown above).
5. Check which version of Flash you have by heading here.

That's it -- now you can jump on over to Adobe's Stage Video demo and watch as your CPU basically idles as you play HD video. If you want to reverse the procedure, just re-enable Chrome's built-in Flash plug-in and it'll take priority over the pre-release version.

The Google Chrome Dev channel received an update yesterday, and while its changelog was a lengthy one, most of the changes were stability fixes and interface polish. There was, however, an interesting note on one of the less significant entries.

Revision 67228 removed some un-needed text from the channel changer in Chrome OS -- which lets you choose to listen for updates to the stable, beta, or dev build. The removed text was Canary, which isn't needed since Chrome Canary currently only runs on Windows.

The revision, however, reads "Remove 'canary' as it's not yet supported as of now." Now, this is just a comment in the Chromium code at the moment -- but it could well indicate that Canary is headed to other OSes. What do you say, Mac and Linux users? Would you install Chrome Canary if it was available for your OS?

Sandboxing, the process of isolation and containment of untrusted executable code, is an important tool in securing your browser, and thus your computer, against unruly malware. Google Chrome has been sandboxing HTML rendering and JavaScript execution for a while, but now they've followed through on their promise and brought sandboxing to the Flash plug-in. Not only can Chrome sandbox the built-in Flash plug-in, but also the standalone Adobe version too -- so no matter whether you're running the latest Flash beta, or the automatically-updated Chrome one, you can browse a little bit safer.

Sandboxing in Chrome is currently only available for Windows, where it's particularly important for the relatively insecure Windows XP, and is rolling out to all Chrome Dev installations on Windows automatically. If you have a particular aversion to sandboxing your Flash experience, you can easily disable it with the flag --disable-flash-sandbox. For those of you who are running the beta or stable release of Chrome, but want to try out the developer version with Flash sandboxing for Windows, then head on over to Chromium.org and grab yourself the 'Dev channel' and install it over the top of your current Chrome version.

Google Chrome can already create application shortcuts for your favorite sites via the wrench menu. The option had disappeared for a while, but made its return earlier this year. Adding Gmail to your taskbar is as simple as loading it in a tab, clicking the wrench, choosing tools and then clicking create application shortcut.

Recently, Chromium added that same functionality to Chrome Web apps. If you've got any apps installed, you can right click its icon on your new tab page and choose create shortcut. A menu like the one pictured above will appear, and you can then pin your Chrome Web app the Windows 7 taskbar or slap a shortcut on your desktop or start menu.

This is currently only available in Chromium, but expect to see Web app shortcuts make their way to the Canary and Dev builds in short order. Google is making a push to get the Chrome Web Store launched, and polished app support in Chrome will need to be in place prior to, well, whenever that happens.

Take the awesome power of Wolfram Alpha; add the convenience and intelligence of Google's built-in calculator. Now mix them up and serve in a piping hot Chrome add-on: Chromey Calculator.

When you click the extension's humble button, it opens a quick prompt pane (you can also pop it out to its own separate Chrome window). You can then feed it with any expression Wolfram Alpha or Google Calculator understands, and even mix those expressions up.

Chromey Calculator decides whether to use Google or Wolfram Alpha. You can see what engine it used for your calculation by hovering over a result; clicking the logo takes you to the source page (handy mostly for Wolfram Alpha calculations, which usually yield interesting graphs).

The add-on even supports variables. One proposed example goes like this:

@Everest = height of Everest
@K2 = height of K2
@Everest - @K2 in meters

So this basically takes the height of Everest and of K2 (the world's second-highest mountain) and calculates the difference - all within your Chrome window, without opening any other sites or tabs.

This is very powerful stuff; the only limit is your imagination - I would love to hear any interesting examples in the comments.

If you ever share a computer with a friend or family member, you've probably experienced the challenge of remembering who is logged in to accounts on Google or other services. Users of Google's excellent Chrome browser will be happy to hear that now in the works is a simple feature that will allow multiple browser windows to run different Google Profiles with a simple click of a button.

The feature is not yet available but was spotted in developer documentation and first reported on by the watchdog blog Google Operating System. While this might seem like a simple matter of convenience, it also represents the convergence of a number of other trends in online computing.

Above, a mock-up of how the Mac version of Chrome might display which account is running in a particular window. New browser windows will use the same account that the last active window was using, and all browser extensions will be common across all windows regardless of account.

Incidentally, speaking from one ad-supported company to another, it's hard not to notice that there's Ad Block Plus running in the mock-up screenshot of this browser. Thanks, Google.

Android and Chrome: If you don't like the small, hard-to-use bookmark manager on your Android phone, Chrome extension and Android app PhoneMarks lets you manage them from Chrome on your computer. More »