Google’s Chrome browser is shining brightly, and it’s not hard to see why. First, the stats: According to the latest NetApplications figures, Chrome now has 6.7 percent of the browser market–a stunning rise from zero prior to 2009. Competing browsers are either treading water or, as in the case of Microsoft Internet Explorer, in precipitous freefall.

So what explains Chrome’s sudden burst of popularity? Here are five reasons:
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It’s very fast

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browser is a speed demon. PC World’s performance tests have shown that Chrome has the fastest page-loading times versus leading competitors Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Opera Software’s Opera. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that the speedy Chrome runs circles around slow, lumbering IE. Sometimes, however, Chrome’s need for speed is annoying. The browser times out too quickly and fails to load web pages because, well, it’s too impatient. Hopefully Google will let users adjust this setting in the future.

It’s very simple

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Like many Google apps and services, Chrome emphasizes ease of use. Compared with IE, there are fewer menus, options, and features to configure. Usually that’s a good thing, but not always. Sometimes I find myself reverting to IE for, say, the print preview feature. Could you add that, Google?

Better security

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IE’s security mishaps are well chronicled. To be fair, Microsoft has worked diligently to make its browser more secure, but nagging problems persist. By comparison, Chrome is a paradise of protection due in part to two factors: architecture and obscurity. Chrome’s use of “sandboxing,” isolating Internet commands from the operating system and other apps and data, makes it harder for hackers to load malware onto PCs. At Vancover’s Pwn2Own contest in March, security experts were able to hack the other leading browsers, but not Chrome. In fact, they didn’t even try to hack Chrome, the New York Times reports. It’s important to note, however, that Chrome’s low market share also contributes to its relative safety. If you’re a malware creator, why direct your efforts toward Chrome when IE represents such a big, fat target?

Runs well on older hardware

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There’s still a very large installed base of Windows XP machines out there, particularly in the enterprise market. Chrome’s speediness is ideal for older hardware with slower components.

Chrome’s ad campaign

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Google may have inexplicably under-marketed its tepidly received Nexus One smartphone, but it hasn’t made the same mistake with the Chrome browser. A TV ad campaign helped introduce Chrome to the masses, most of whom don’t give much thought to their choice of browser.

Microsoft, of course, will continue to improve Internet Explorer, as will the developers of competing browsers. But Google Chrome’s early success shows that simplicity sells.

Firefox 3.5 is now the most popular browser worldwide, edging past Internet Explorer 7, according to analytics site StatCounter.

The timing has favored FF3.5, however: IE7 usage has died off as people upgrade to IE8, meaning that Internet Explorer’s market share is currently spread equally across IE7 and IE8. Add together all versions of IE versus all versions of Firefox, and Microsoft’s browser is still leading the pack by a long way.

Nonetheless, the trend lines favor Firefox in the long run: IE’s market share continues its slow decline while Firefox has sustained steady growth.

Just last week, Google finally released official betas for its Chrome browser for Mac and Linux. That release had a nice effect on market share for the browser, propelling it past Apple’s Safari and into third place.

Of course, third place — according to Net Applications — means 4.4 percent market share (Safari’sSafari market share is 4.37 percent), but that’s still 0.4 percentage points higher than Chrome’sChrome stats for November. The releases for Mac and Linuxlinux, plus the official Chrome Extensions rollout, might be enough for the browser to finally gain some traction against competitors Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Both Firefox and Chrome have a new version out, fixing mostly stability issues and a couple of minor security vulnerabilities.

Firefox 3.5.5 brings several stability fixes, most importantly the notorious GIF decoder bug which sometimes caused the browser to crash. You can find a complete list of changes in this version here.

Chrome (Chrome) has a bit more important update, bringing its (awkwardly long) version number to 3.0.195.32. The new version includes five stability fixes and several security issues. Among other things, Chrome should now behave better with Acrobat Reader 9.2, Google Maps (Google Maps), and AAC files.

Opera released Mobile Browser 10 for nokia and other symbian smartphones, today the Norwegian software developer is following up on that release with that of the latest beta build of Opera Mobile, a custom browser specifically built to give Symbian and Windows Mobile equipped handset users a (much) more pleasant Web browsing experience.

The new Opera Mobile 10 beta features a fresh look that was first introduced with the recent release of Opera Mini 5 beta. The new design also comes with a set of new features like the Speed Dial, bookmarking and tabbed browsing elements Opera desktop browser users have long grown accustomed to as well as a handy password manager. Opera Mobile 10 beta can be downloaded here and is optimized for both touchscreen and keypad-style navigation on Nokia devices and select Sony Ericsson and Samsung smartphones running Symbian/S60.

Opera Software claims the latest build of the smartphone browser product is notably faster than the previous beta release (9.7) and is even twice as speedy when downloading or zooming in on pages. Apart from the performance upgrade, Opera Mobile 10 also sports full integration of Opera Turbo, the company’s server-side compression technology that makes loading Web pages from mobile devices faster and cheaper.

Google Chrome browser is now 30 million users strong, 30 million is certainly a big number, but it is still a tiny fraction of Internet Explorer or Firefox (which has 330 million users). NetApplications shows Chrome with only a 3.58 percent market share at the end of October, compared to 24 percent for Firefox and 65 percent for IE. But remember, Chrome only launched a year ago, so that is a fast ramp by any standard.

Considering that Google is ranked #1 on the web; the Chrome Browser is growing in popularity very fast. It is the most secure web browser; hackers don’t like playing in the “sandbox”. The security of Google Chrome will only lead to the creation of the most secure Operating System on the market when Chrome OS is released early next year. Pay attention Microsoft…you could learn a lot from Google.

Chrome has added 30 million users in 14 months compared to Firefox which has added 30 million new users in the last 8 weeks. Firefox is a mainstream browser which means it has hundreds of millions of non-geek users. These “regular people” don’t spend 24/7 online.

Google Chrome 4.0 graduates to beta status. More people will get a chance to try out bookmark synchronization with Monday’s release of a beta version of Google Chrome for Windows.

Google introduced the bookmark sync feature for the developer-preview version in August, but now it’s also in the better-tested beta version, Chrome 4.0.223.16. However, there’s still no Chrome beta for Mac OS X or Linux. In a video explanation, Google’s Anthony LaForge somewhat breathlessly describes how the sync feature can keep bookmarks the same on multiple machines. That’s a fair point, but let’s be realistic here–bookmark sync in Chrome is more catch-up than paradigm shift. Indeed, with the popular Xmarks extension–in the works for Chrome, people can synchronize bookmarks among multiple browsers, not merely multiple computers.

And Chrome’s clever message-based sync technology notwithstanding, Chrome bookmarks would be a lot more magical if they synchronized with the Google bookmarks service, which is linked with iGoogle and the Google Toolbar. Speaking of extensions, one of the 4.x series’ biggest features is the ability to accommodate extensions, but because Google is shifting the extensions interface, the feature isn’t enabled in the beta version. Chrome is released in three versions: the roughest, fastest moving developer preview, the more stable beta, and the stable edition for the broadest audience.

CoolPreviews is the top downloaded Firefox Addon and its reached 99,433 weekly downloads.

CoolPreviews is a free browser add-on that lets you preview links and rich media without leaving your current page. Simply mouseover any link or our CoolPreviews icon, and a preview window instantly appears with your content. No more clicking back and forth! Speed through search results, news, and just about any website. CoolPreviews is all about browsing faster. The customizable preview window lets you preview or browse just about any link without ever leaving your current page or tab. No more need to click in and out of tabs.

Browse faster — Preview links and images without leaving your current page or tab. Just mouseover any link, and a separate preview window immediately appears to show you the content. (TIP: The fastest way to view many links on a webpage, such as Google, is by mousing over subsequent links while the preview window is still open or locked.

Mozilla late on Friday released the first beta of Firefox 3.6, a minor upgrade slated to wrap up later this year. Delayed by over two weeks as developers closed out last-minute bugs, including one that pushed the release back by several days last week, Firefox 3.6 Beta contains relatively few visible changes from June 2009’s Firefox 3.5. Instead, most of the enhancements have been made to under-the-hood components, including the TraceMonkey JavaScript rendering engine.

Also debuting in the beta of Firefox 3.6, said Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox, are support for new CSS, DOM and HTML 5 technologies; support for full-screen video embedded with the video HTML tag; and support for the Web Open Font Format (WOFF). JavaScript performance has also been boosted, said Beltzner in a post to the Mozilla developer center blog, and start-up times have been reduced.

Some features once destined for Firefox 3.6, however, have been dropped, including one that was to take advantage of Microsoft’s new Windows 7. Integration with Windows 7’s Jump Lists — a feature that would list recently-visited sites when Firefox’s icon is right-clicked in the taskbar — has been postponed and wasn’t included with the beta.

Today brings the first release candidate for Mac Browser Camino 2, the new version of the browser. Camino is an open source web browser developed with a focus on providing a superior experience for Mac OS X users. Camino is built on open source technology, which means anyone can help in the development process. Would you like to code a new feature for Camino? Or maybe help triage the handful of bugs reported each day? Or maybe you just want to help write documentation or website copy? The information below will give you an idea of how you can contribute to Camino.

The Camino Project has worked to create a browser that is as functional and elegant as the computers it runs on. The Camino web browser is powerful, secure, and ready to meet the needs of all users while remaining simple and elegant in its design. Camino combines the awesome visual and behavioral experience that has been central to the Macintosh philosophy with the powerful web-browsing capabilities of the Gecko rendering engine.

Camino also introduces some advanced features like ability to easily customize the toolbar search field. Camino 1.6 now includes an editor that allows deleting, renaming, and reordering search engines. Camino also supports OpenSearch search engine plug-ins. New search engines can be added to the toolbar’s search field by automatic discovery or by web pages that provide links to OpenSearch plug-ins. It Also includes enhanced AppleScript support. AppleScripts can now refer to individual tabs and windows, add, open, and delete bookmarks, and even have custom toolbar icons.