I think the video speaks for itself!

If you can't watch the video: IE9 is some orders of magnitude faster than HTML5 when it comes to hardware-accelerated canvas rendering.

In some other initial benchmarks, IE9 is about 30% slower than Chrome 6 in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark -- and about 10% faster than Firefox 3.7.

I also tested FishIE with Opera and Firefox -- and believe it or not, Opera's a lot faster than both Chrome and Firefox!

Anyway, if you missed the news, IE9 developer preview 3 came out earlier today -- Lee's post has more info, if you're curious, or simply download it now.

I'm sure most of you have used Google Docs in one form or another. You might've shared a document with a friend or collaboratively planned your trip expenses in a shared spreadsheet -- maybe you've even used the new 'public sharing' feature for more nefarious purposes!

Even if you're looking forward to Microsoft's Office Web Apps, the point remains: we're doing more and more processing in the cloud. The platform that matters is no longer Mac or Windows or Linux, but rather which Web browser. And let's be honest, Web browsers still have a long way to go before they're as usable as operating systems. Sure, one day you'll have a Windows 7 Superbar at the bottom of Firefox, but not yet -- and that's why we have EXTENSIONS!

I should probably get to the point of this post: the Google Docs blog has collated a bunch of handy extensions for making the most out of... Google Docs. At their most basic, they provide 'New Spreadsheet' and 'New Doc' buttons next to your address bar, but advanced extensions like Snippy allow you to copy and paste entire sections of websites to a new Google Doc.

That's Chrome out of the way, but now someone needs to collate a bunch of Firefox add-ons for Google Docs integration. I found 'Send to Google Docs', but I'm sure you guys know of some other great add-ons? If so, share them in the comments!

The Safari 5 feature that's caught the web's attention is the Reader button, which strips down articles and blog posts into an ad-free, highly readable format.

A Mozilla Firefox employee, Asa Dotzler, in his blog,  has estimated from the recent download stats of both Google Chrome and Firefox that, for every one new user of Google Chrome there will be 2.5 new users of Firefox. He has also created a graph in which you can see the download rates of both the browsers. Here is the graph:

It is difficult to say which is good. Firefox has been ruling the browser industry for a long time, while the new baby, Google Chrome has also made a tremendous growth in a short span of time.

However, I personally feel that, one factor for the exponential growth of the Chrome browser is advertising. Google has been advertising its browser everywhere. Starting from its homepage, Chrome ads are on, almost every page of Youtube. They also have promoted it offline by creating banners all over Europe.

Quite some days back, Google introduced encrypted Google searches. The concept of encryption comes into play when Internet services use secure socket layers, better known as SSL connections to encrypt the information that travels between your computer and their service.

An encrypted service is recognized by a web address that starts with “https” and this is the default address for any e-commerce or banking site, where the transaction of money is involved. If you try to access Paypal by typing http://www.paypal.com the address will be redirected to https://www.paypal.com

What is Google SSL Search and Why Use it?

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) provides secure connections for web browsing, email, instant messaging and other data transfers. When you perform a search over an SSL connection, the query and search traffic are encrypted so that they can not be read any intermediate third party. This includes Internet service providers, network administrators or may be the employer of your office.

SSL search is different from the regular Google search in the following number of ways:

• SSL Search is slightly slower than normal Google search because of the need for secure connection.
• SSL search is only supported in Google web search and not for Google images or any other Google products.
• SSL search may turn off your browser’s referrers

More information on Google SSL Search can be found in this page.

How to Use Encrypted Google Searches from Firefox Search Bar

If you want to change your default search engine in Firefox search bar to the Secure version of Google, following are the steps involved:

1. Install the Add to search bar Firefox add-on. This extension makes any webpage’s search functionality available in the Firefox search bar. You will have to restart Firefox for the changes to take effect.

2. Open https://www.google.com in a new browser tab. This is the more ‘Secure’ version of Google, known as Google SSL search and it’s currently in Beta.

3. Right click on the search box and select “Add to Search bar”, as shown below

4. This will open a pop up window asking you to enter a name for the search engine. Enter a name as “Secure Google”or “Google SSL” or anything of your choice. You can also add a keyword in the keyword text box, but that isn’t mandatory.

5. Now you will see that the Google SSL search has been added to the Firefox search bar. You can change the order of your preferred search engine by clicking the arrow placed at the extreme left of the Firefox search bar.

That’s it, your Google SSL search bar is ready for action. Whenever you want to use the secured version of Google.com, use this search engine. Alternatively, you can also type in https://www.google.com in the browser address bar or bookmark it as your homepage. Also read: More tricks for Firefox Address bar

How to Use Google SSL Search from Google Chrome

Google Chrome does not have a search bar like Firefox but you can use the KB SSL Enforce extension to use the encrypted version of Google. The extension automatically detects whether a website supports the SSL protocol and if the site supports it, the extension redirects you to the SSL version of the site.

Once the extension is installed, simply type Google.com in the chrome address bar and you will automatically be redirected to the SSL version of Google at https://www.google.com.

You can use the extension options to blacklist or whitelist some selected sites. For example: you may want to blacklist Facebook.com because the SSL version of Facebook is known to have some problems with Facebook chat. The extension does not perform any redirects once a site is put in the blacklist or when Google Chrome is running in “Incognito” mode.

Have you used the encrypted version of Google yet? Do you think, it is necessary or do you think that it’s just another way to perform a search and makes no difference to the search experience? Please share your ideas in the comments section.

We've said for a while that HTML5 will change the way you use the web, but not all browsers are ready for the big change. This interactive chart highlights which features are still missing in your browser of choice. More »

All browsers: Want your Google Calendar to look a bit more like a desk calendar—all appointments, no filler? The Mini Google Calendar user script cuts out everything except your data view, relying on keyboard shortcuts for everything else. More »

Statistics provided by Internet metrics company Net Applications confirm several trends in web browser and operating system usage. The Windows 7 operating system is still gaining market share mostly at the expense of its predecessors Windows XP and Windows Vista. Windows XP lost another 1.05% of market share accumulating to a total market share loss of 10.21% since June 2009 or 7.07% since October 2009 the month Windows 7 was released. XP’s market share in April 2009 fell to 63.41% which is still the largest share by far.

Windows Vista’s market share is going down as well from 17.58% in June 2009 to 15.60% in April 2010. Windows 7 gained 1.45% of market share in April closing in on Vista with its market share total of 11.68%. It will take approximately another four months before Windows 7 will become the second most used operating system in the world if the current trend continues.

It's an uncomfortable truth, but your Web browser probably knows more about you than your best friend. It's just a fact of life online. Your browser knows your name, your browsing habits, your interests, your bank balance, your passwords... in essence it really knows everything about you -- and this is something that Mozilla Labs wants to capitalize on!

Introducing: the Account Manager add-on for Firefox.

Mozilla Labs posed a simple question: why should you have to input passwords on every site you visit? Your browser is you. You shouldn't need to identify yourself every time! With Account Manager, website developers can let Firefox handle your sign-ins. Account Manager works behind the scenes so that you don't have to -- in theory you don't even know your name or password for a site: Firefox manages it for you. Changing your identity is a matter of selecting another name from a drop-down box in Firefox -- Account Manager does the rest.

It's an exciting concept and, given the surge of tailored-to-the-user functionality that we're seeing in Web browsers (the Chrome new tab page!), I think this is just the tip of the iceberg. Support of other authorization schemes like OpenID and HTTP Auth is next... exciting!

The experimental add-on is available for download on Mozilla's Account Manager site if you'd like to try it out.

Filed under: Browsers

Firefox's AwesomeBar is great, but there is no easy way to make the text (and the bar itself) larger from within Firefox. So this little trick might come in handy to those of you who use large monitors which are located somewhat far away.

1) Go to your chrome folder (not the browser Chrome, but Firefox's chrome configuration folder):

 C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[something random].default\chrome

2) Using Notepad or another text editor, edit userChrome.css.

3) Add the following lines:

  #urlbar { font-size:25px !important; height:42px !important; }

4) Now restart Firefox.

That's it! You should now get nice, large text in the AwesomeBar. What's cool about this method is that it seems compatible with many themes and add-ons.

I only just covered this bad boy in last week's Firefox Friday -- and now there's a Chrome version! RescueTime advertises itself as a 'Productivity Meter' but really it's just a cool way of seeing how you spend your time on the Internet.

All you have to do is install the extension and it'll do the rest. At any time you can click the menu button to see a quick breakdown of how distracted you are as well as how productive you are compared to other RescueTime users. If you visit sites like Facebook or Flickr, your distractedness rises; stick to work-related stuff and you're 'safe'. Talking of 'safe', no login is required to use this extension -- you are anonymous (for all intents and purposes)!

The proof is in the pudding, though: after a few hours or days, check out 'Detailed Stats'. Prepare to be shocked, awed, amazed and disgusted by the damning but beautiful graphs. The amount of data that the RescueTime team and its users have collated, and thus the accuracy of the reports, is quite stunning.

(Incidentally, if you're a manager of some kind, there's a 'pro' version which you could no doubt use to improve the efficiency of your team...)

Internet Explorer slowly nears 60% market share mark. This time it went down from 61.58 to 60.65, 0.93 point decrease.

In March, Firefox managed to increase its market share by 0.29 point, moving up from 24.23% to 24.52%.

Google Chrome continues to grow steadily; 0.52 point increase this time, up from 5.61% to 6.13%.

Safari has also increased its market share by 0.2 point, from 4.45% to 4.65%.

Opera’s market share also went up by 0.02 point, from 2.35% to 2.37%.

Maxthon team has released a technical preview of Maxthon 3.0 web browser, which now includes a GPU rendering support for smoother text on Web pages.

Here’s an example:

“The current implementation of GPU rendering is merely an initial step. The final version will be more powerful and will support more features”, Jeff Chen, CEO of Maxthon said.

As of today, Firefox 3.7 and Maxthon 3.0 are the only browsers to include GPU accelerator support, with Internet Explorer 9 soon to follow.

Download Maxthon 3.0.

Firefox/Chrome/Opera/Safari (with user script support): The original Helvetireader gave Google Reader a facelift, with a singular font and emphasis on keyboard shortcuts. Helvetireader 2, unofficially released, provides even fewer graphical controls, and the author admits it's not everyone's cup of tea.

Helvetireader's developer has toyed with the idea of releasing Helvetireader 2 as a separate entity, since not everybody might want even more functionality stripped out of Google Reader, with a resulting stronger emphasis on learning all the keyboard shortcuts (visible at any time by entering a "?" key). So before changing everything around, Helvetireader 2 is getting a soft release through Helvetireader's Twitter feed, where you can click to install the mostly finished release as a user script or extension, depending on your browser.

Apple's offered browser-based iTunes previews for a couple of months now, so is there any good reason my browser should show the preview and open iTunes every time I click an iTunes link? We think not; here's how to fix that.

Apple-focused site The Apple Blog details how to stop the iTunes web previews from automatically opening iTunes along with the web preview. (You can always choose to click through to iTunes after you've seen the web-based preview.) The post explains how the pages open iTunes (JavaScript), then the author sets out solutions for various browsers (and they should work whether you're on Windows or OS X), including Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. In Firefox, for example:

Dear Lifehacker,

I've been a huge fan of Firefox for years (prompted in great part by Lifehacker's recommendation), but it seems like Google Chrome has made huge strides lately. My question: Which is better, Chrome or Firefox? Which should I use?

Signed,

Uncertain About My Browser

Dear Uncertain,

Yours is a question we've been hearing more and more lately, and with good reason. The fact is, Google Chrome has fixed a lot of problems with Firefox that most Firefox users didn't even know they had, and Firefox is still working to catch up. (Restart-free extension installation, isolated processes that keep one bad tab from crashing the entire browser, etc.) As a result, Chrome's smart feature set has been winning over a lot of Firefox die-hards.

The answer to your question depends a lot on what operating system you're using, so we'll separate our answers for Windows and Mac users.

If you ever thought previously mentioned Xobni looked cool, but you prefer Gmail to Outlook, free Gmail plug-in Etacts adds many of the same features. You get social information, conversation history, and advanced sending preferences right in your Gmail sidebars.

The Etacts plug-in automatically adds detailed contact information to the sidebar of messages, as shown above, similar to previously mentioned Rapportive, but Etacts takes it one step further. Not only do you get links to any social networks that contact is a part of, and some of the information contained therein (such as their occupation and location), but you also get a detailed summary of your mailing history with them, complete with nice little graphs and charts. All this information is also available in compose mode as well, so you know exactly who you're sending it to.

Whenever we talk passwords, we always preach the same thing: Use strong, difficult-to-remember passwords, and different passwords for every site. Easy to say, extremely difficult to do through sheer willpower. I've tried many password-remembering systems, and this is what I've stuck with.

To paraphrase photographer Chase Jarvis, the best password manager is the one you have with you. Of all the password management utilities out there, I consider LastPass the most elegant compromise between convenience and security, and if you're not using it already, I recommend you start. It's mostly free, plugs into nearly any browser or smartphone, is KeePass compatible, and just works.