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.

Only 2 years ago, Google has released the very first build of Chrome web browser. Now, two years later, company is celebrating its browser birthday with two new releases: stable and beta.

Google Chrome then


Google Chrome now

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 »

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.

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 »

Google had originally pegged December 2010 for the first release of Chrome OS, but it's been looking like a fall release is now a safe bet. It's certainly netbook-ready at this point, though some missing features (like an on-screen keyboard) may mean that tablet devices arrive slightly later.

Developers keep plugging ahead, however, and continue to work on tablet-friendly features. Two code revisions have landed in the past couple days which will definitely make Chrome more at home on tablets. The first is device orientation support (think auto-rotating content on your Chrome OS tablet and accelerometer-enabled games) and the other is speech input (hello, voice commands!).

Both features have been part of the Chromium code for a while now, but they're now enabled by default and it's typically a very short amount of time between a new Chromium feature being defaulted and its arrival in the official Google Chrome builds. It's also worth noting that voice input support is only on by default for Chromium's Windows users -- Mac and Linux users would need to add the --enable-speech-input switch to their shortcut for the time being.

Developer Jeremy Selier has posted a simple-yet-cool demo video of device orientation using his Macbook Pro -- check it out after the break!

There's a big crop new extensions showing up which take advantage of Google Chrome's new context menu API, and that's great news for those of you who can't live without your right-click menu.

You can see a pair of newer extensions in my screenshot -- and while I'm not certain I'll be using the tab switcher, Copy Short URL is probably here to stay.

Just right-click a link and left-click and a bit.ly or tinyurl shortened link is copied to your clipboard for hassle-free sharing on your favorite social sites. That's it. Nice and simple, just how I like my extensions!

The developer states that more truncators will be added soon, which would be a welcome improvement. API and account support would be a nice touch as well -- perhaps that will be tacked on as well.

In general, I prefer Chrome extensions which don't try to do too much. Do one thing, and do it well is a good general rule, after all. However, once in a while a Swiss-knife extension crops up which is filled to overflowing with useful features and just begs to be installed.

Enter Chrome Pig. Yes, it's weirdly named. Yes, it includes a somewhat random mish-mosh of features, but dang, are they handy ones. Chrome Pig can:

• Screenshot an entire page, the viewable portion, or a selected region
• Check Gmail for unread messages (you must be signed in)
• Open supported files types in the Google Docs previewer
• Edit a page's CSS to your liking
• Re-enable right click on sites which disable it
• Search the site you're currently browsing
• Open the current page in IE
• Set a clipboard image to your desktop wallpaper

I've put the last one in bold because it's a feature which you would think should be included by default in a Web browser. Firefox, Opera, and IE can all do this, but Chrome can't? Why? At any rate, problem solved! With Chrome Pig installed, just right click and copy an image, click its browser action button, and set the clipboard image to your wallpaper -- it will even resize, center, or tile.


Some of Chrome Pig's features -- lyric search, form fill, and translate, for example -- I can do without. The configuration page offers checkboxes to disable unwanted items, though they still appeared in the drop-down after multiple disable/enable attempt and a browser restart. Hopefully the developer will address this issue in a coming update.

That shortcoming aside, I'm happily adding Chrome Pig to my extensions -- it'll replace two other and add a couple additional features which will come in handy.

Chrome: If you find yourself frequently cutting and pasting links from your web browser to include in Twitter updates, TweetRight offers easy sharing of pictures, text, and links right from the Chrome's context menu. More »

In a move that is surely an effort to keep pace with Firefox's helter-skelter development of Jetpack, Chrome Beta now has a context menu API!

There's also a bunch of other new APIs, the most exciting being the Omnibox API. Imagine Chrome's built-in search engines (type 'Amazon', then a space, and then a book name -- it searches Amazon!), but with extension access. Type the name of an extension into the Omnibox, and then any further input is redirected to the extension. Actually, having said this is an exciting addition, I'm really not sure what an extension would do with it... Perhaps something Ubiquity-esque?

The new Infobar API might be of interest, too. You know that blue bar that appears when Chrome asks you whether you want a page to be translated? Well, extensions can now pop those up for you. I can see security and privacy extensions like LastPass making use of them, or an extension that alerts you when a page you're visiting has an 'official Chrome extension' (you know, instead of that awful JavaScript hack...).

Oh, and if you make an extension (featuring the new APIs? It's not clear), let Google know and they might send you a free Chrome hoodie! Hooray.