Ever since the release of Google's Chrome, browser developers have emphasized JavaScript performance. There is still a lot of work left to be done in this area, but developers have also started to investigate other parts of the browser that could benefit from new technologies.

According to Firefox developer Bas Schouten, the current implementation of Direct2D in this pre-release version will work best with graphics cards that support DirectX10 and WDDM1.0 drivers. On systems that fulfill these specs, though, users are likely to see significantly better performance on graphics-heavy sites. Sites that mostly render static text or depend on Adobe Flash to display their graphics won't benefit greatly from Direct2D. One benefit of Direct2D that users will notice on most sites, however, is improved font rendering.

For the time being, this is just an experiment and it isn't clear if Mozilla will integrate this technology into Firefox 3.7. What is clear, is that Mozilla seems to be ahead of Microsoft and by doing its development out in the open and through open source, Mozilla will be able to rely on its vast developer community to test and enhance these features.

What About Google and Apple?

Some would argue that the release of Google Chrome started this new race towards faster browsers, and as CNet's Stephen Shankland pointed out earlier today, the Chrome development team is quite aware of Mozilla's efforts and investigating the use of hardware acceleration in Chrome as well. As Shankland also notes, these Direct2D efforts shouldn't be confused with other projects like WebGL or Google's Native Client. Direct2D-enabled browsers will be able to render current pages faster, while these other technologies will require developers to redesign their sites.

Currently, a lot of these experiments are mostly focused on Windows. With OpenCL in Snow Leopard, Apple already offers a programming interface for using graphics cards for general-purpose computing. Apple is probably also looking at OpenCL to speed up Safari, though we aren't aware of any projects from Mozilla or Google that are making use of OpenCL at this point.

Get it Now

If you feel like experimenting with a new browser, you can download an early pre-release of an alpha version of Firefox 3.7 here. While we have tested this browser for a while and didn't see any crashes, it is worth remembering that this version isn't meant to be run in a production environment and that most of your extensions will likely not work.

Feedly is much more than just another way to read feeds. Although it originally got its start as an alternative UI to Google Reader, today the service is part RSS reader, part social network aggregator and part search utility. Since its launch in 2008, Feedly's developer Edwin Khodabakchian has constantly added new features including Twitter and FriendFeed integrations, a river of news view, search tools, Mozilla Ubiquity integration, a Feedly "mini" toolbar and so much more.

Once installed, a click of a browser button transports you to the Feedly start page where you can browse through the latest news, comment, star, share, discuss and search through the articles displayed. As you read through the items, your activity is seamlessly synced back to Google Reader.

Although voracious RSS readers who subscribe to thousands of feeds may find using Feedly a bit slower than using Google Reader itself, a good many of the more casual consumers of RSS prefer Feedly's clean, easy-to-scan interface to Google Reader's more utilitarian look and feel.

Feedly for Chrome

The new Chrome version of Feedly is virtually identical to the one available for Firefox with only two major exceptions: there is no Gmail integration or Feedly mini toolbar available in the Chrome version just yet. The toolbar is one of Feedly's many innovative features which provides a floating bar that hovers at the bottom of your screen as you surf through blogs on the web. Toolbar buttons show you various pieces of metadata about the blog post you're reading, including number of Diggs and number of Google Reader shares. You can also save or share the post yourself in Google Reader or tweet a link to the article, among other things.

However, according to Khodabakchian, Feedly mini's omission isn't due to any technical issues. Instead, he notes in the comments of a Feedly blog post that the mini toolbar is in the process of being redesigned and when the Firefox version is complete and stable, he will then look into building a toolbar for Chrome. The estimated timeframe for its inclusion into the Chrome beta is 6-8 weeks.

How to Install Feedly for Chrome

In order to run Feedly for Chrome, you'll need to first install a dev build of the Google Chrome browser. These dev ("developer") versions of Chrome aren't as stable as the public release but allow you to play with yet-to-launch features like Google Chrome extensions, for example. And for Mac and Linux users, the dev release is your only option because Google has yet to provide stable versions of Chrome for those two operating systems as of yet.

After installing the dev release, you'll need to add the new Feedly extension to the browser.

Here's how to get started:

1. Download and install the Chrome 4.0 Dev Channel: Windows | Mac | Linux 32-bit | Linux 64-bit
2. Restart Chrome to make sure that you are running the 4.0 version.
3. Load http://update.feedly.com/release/feedly.crx to install Feedly.
4. Click on the Feedly icon on the chrome toolbar to load your Feedly.

After you have Feedly up-and-running, you can receive support through the company's Get Satisfaction page or by emailing feedly-chrome AT devhd.com. You can also tweet @feedly_chrome with questions, comments, and other feedback.

We're beyond excited to see Feedly on Chrome - although it was relatively easy to give up most of our Firefox extensions when we made the move to the Chrome browser, Feedly was one of the few that was sorely missed. However, if you're a more cautious user hesitant to install test builds of your browser and experimental extensions, you may not have to wait much longer before you can play with fully functional and stable versions of both. Yesterday, Google put out the call for developers to begin submitting their extensions for inclusion in the upcoming Chrome extension gallery, a step that signifies that this feature is closer than ever to launching. When the time comes, we're sure that Feedly will be among the top-rated extensions found there.

Developers can contribute to the project by uploading creations to the Developer Dashboard here. If you need ideas, a good place to start would be to look at the "Most Shared" in the Firefox Add-ons Gallery and think about how you can port some of those gems over for the Chrome experience.

Chrome is deliciously fast compared to other browsers, but the very limited extension support and ecosystem are hard for Firefox-lovers to swallow. Firefox advocates always question Chrome converts about just how fast Chrome will be when it gets weighed down with extensions. It looks like we're about to find out.

We wrote about some of the first unofficial extensions to hit Chrome this Spring and then some code upgrades intended to shore up extension support this Fall. An unofficial directory of Chrome extensions can be found at ChromeExtensions.org. Install them with caution, it's not yet as simple as managing Firefox extensions is.

What's your #1 request for a Chrome extension? I want Firefox Drag and Drop Zones or the GCal pop-up plug-in for Chrome. Greasemonkey would be nice too, though user scripts can be added manually to Chrome already.

And I want it to sing with speed, just like Chrome does today!

It's an awfully charming video by one of the greatest musicians of all time. This 63-year old mega-millionaire is downright folksy when talking about web browsers.

Hey Dolly, if you like IE8 - you should let Google's Chrome sweep you off your feet! Not a lot of features, but it's super fast for a fast-thinking woman like you. Is it customization you're looking for? We know you've seen a whole lot of things all around the world - but have you seen Firefox yet?

Dolly Parton? How are you going to top that, Mozilla?

Thanks to James Governor for finding the above video.

Here are the latest tools and services we've come to love, maybe you'd like to give them a try too.

Think you find a lot of great stuff online? You should try sharing it with people using Posterous. The user experience for this curation and blogging tool is remarkable, a real model for other app makers to check out. Posting by email, iPhone and a web bookmarklet are all really easy. My Posterous is here and Frederic Lardinois shares some of this favorite stuff here. If you like what we write about on ReadWriteWeb then check out the cool little things we find but don't blog about at the day job - or the things that will make it to ReadWriteWeb later. Posterous just went real time this week, too.

See also: How to Use Tumblr, Posterous and Other Light Blogging Services

Topify

Ever feel frustrated by the emails you get from Twitter? We did, until we signed up for Topify. From really smart "X is now following you" emails to the ability to reply to direct messages by email - Topify delivers Twitter emails like Twitter ought to. It's another project from Ouriel Ohayon, who's also behind the wonderful iPhone app sharing service AppsFire. Ouriel makes cool stuff.

See also: Ten Companies Twitter Should Consider Acquiring Next

Seesmic Web

The never-ending battle between Seesmic and Tweetdeck to see who can make the coolest Twitter client is great for users. Tweetdeck ate my groups last night in an upgrade, after I'd spent hours building them, and so I decided to give Seesmic another try. The Seesmic Web app is awesome and Mac users can turn it into its own app on the desktop using Fluid. The best of many cool features? List support! You can turn any list you're following on Twitter into its own column in Seesmic. Frederic Lardinois says he's been using this combo for a few weeks, I still have some kinks to work out.

See also: Seesmic + Twhirl is a Vision of the Web's Future (From 18 months ago, how did our prediction turn out?)

Tweetie 2

The iPhone app Tweetie (iTunes link) made a major upgrade last month and we're loving it. Sarah Perez put this one on the list but everyone agrees - this is hot stuff. Will the forthcoming Seesmic Mobile app be as good? Will Tweetdeck's eventual support for Twitter lists turn into an awesome iPhone app? We'll see - but Tweetie's many rich features make it the app to beat right now. My favorite feature? The way the replies page can be pulled down like a spring to prompt a refresh. It's a little thing, but it's fun.

See also: The Favorite iPhone Apps of Five Geek Rock Stars

Aardvark

Aardvark leverages what it calls "the real-time web of people" to deliver answers to any question you have - from people in your social circle who know about the topic and are available at that very moment. Vark gets mixed reviews from some people, but I love it. From technical questions to practical ones about life to opinions about questions I have at work - I've been getting a lot of fast, helpful information from people on Aardvark lately. It's another app that scores very high on User Experience, especially in its iPhone and IM interfaces.

See also: The Robot Made Me Do It: Comparing 3 New Cyborg Q&A Services

Chrome/Chromium

Google's web browser is fast, it's really fast. It's hard to say goodbye to all the wonderful Firefox extensions we've been using for years - but it's harder to use any other browser once you've been using Chrome for awhile. We have high hopes for Chrome plug-ins, but even without them it's a joy to use. You can download Chrome for Windows here and Chromium for Mac here.

LazyFeed

LazyFeed is a topic-driven "discovery engine." It's basically a blog search client that brings in the freshest posts about topics you're interested in. A couple of months into using it, I'm still finding great content every time I fire it up. I've got this running in Fluid and it works great.

Want some serendipity on the iPhone? Try out competitor YourVersion's app. The first version isn't easy on the eyes, but it delivers roughly the same experience on the go.

See also: Ten Useful Examples of the Real-Time Web in Action

Those are some of our favorites lately. What apps have you fallen in love with this season? We'd love to know.

See also our previous installments in this series:
30 Days Later: 22 Apps We're Still Using One Month After Finding Them From one year ago!
Still Shiny: 23 Apps We're Using One Month Later From this Spring.
What We Use: A Tour of RWW Desktops (Mac & PC) Video screencasts.

According to Google's blog post about the beta release, the sync feature has to first be activated on each of your computers where Google Chrome is used. To do this, you'll need to download the beta build of the browser available here. Once installed, click the "wrench" menu (yes, the one with the wrench icon) in Google Chrome and select "Synchronize my bookmarks" from the menu that appears. Sign into your Google account in the dialog box that pops up. If you've already set up Sync on another computer, you'll then be prompted to confirm that your different sets of bookmarks should be merged together. In that case, click "Merge and Sync" to complete the process. Finally, click "OK" when you've finished.

Not only does this feature sync your bookmarks, it also creates a copy of your bookmarks file on Google Docs in a new folder called "Google Chrome." (Wonder what else will go in that folder in the future?)

What's in Store for Sync

For now, the Sync feature is only synchronizing browser bookmarks, but the framework behind Sync is ultimately designed to handle the synchronization of other kinds of browser data as well. As to what sort of data that could be, Google can't provide any official confirmation just yet. However, they did say that you could imagine that "this type of infrastructure could be extended to other types of user data such as passwords" in the future. We'll speculate that it will eventually include those passwords, your browser history, and whatever favorite websites appear as thumbnails on the New Tab page. After all, if Mozilla's Weave Sync prototype can handle those sorts of tasks already, there's no reason to believe that Google couldn't do the same.

Because the new Sync feature uses an XMPP connection to synchronize the changes, changes made on one computer are synchronized immediately to another. Not just quickly, mind you, but immediately. This is possible because XMPP is what's known as a "real-time" communication protocol - the same one that powers Google Talk, the company's IM service.

The use of this sort of technology hints at how Google plans to make their Chrome web browser the core of their upcoming netbook operating system, Google Chrome OS. The new OS will run web applications "in the cloud," a radical change from current OS offerings where many applications are still installed on the computer's hard drive itself. With Chrome (the browser's) ability to synchronize data in real-time between computers, it's easy to see how a cloud OS could operate. It wouldn't matter which machine you used, your data would be available, stored in the cloud, synchronized, and all accessible upon login to your Google account. That prospect is either amazing or terrifying depending on your trust level when it comes to Google. Perhaps it's even both. 

Chrome Gets Faster, Too

While Bookmark Sync is the most interesting feature to debut in the new beta, there are some notable speed improvements to mention, too. The latest build improves performance by 30% since the current stable release of Chrome and by 400% since the very first stable release, as measured by Mozilla's Dromeao DOM Core Tests. 

As noted earlier, speed was a major factor in Firefox's 3.6 beta 1, released just this Friday. Both companies are going head-to-head when it comes to browser speed, JavaScript performance and startup times, but no official speed tests have been done yet to compare the two new beta releases.

To download the latest build of Google Chrome beta, head over to the Chrome beta site here. The official beta requires Windows XP SP2 or higher.

In the latest edition of the Firefox browser, the team has introduced the following new features:

• Built-in support for Personas, Firefox's themeing system which lets you browse through a gallery of skins and apply different ones with just a click
• Plugin alerts: Firefox will now alert users if their plugins are out-of-date, a useful addition since older plugins can lead to performance problems and even security issues.
• Open native videos can now be viewed full-screen
• Drag-and-drop features: In the beta, you can drag and drop files from your computer into the browser allowing you to easily upload files from your PC to web sites. 
• Support for the WOFF font format
• Support for CSS, DOM, HTML5, and other developer features
• Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time

Why Speed Matters

Although Firefox and its rival web browsers are all fighting to best Internet Explorer in terms of install base, they still pit themselves against each other with their unique features, being first to offer support for new standards, and of course, web browser performance.

It's in this last area that Firefox has struggled recently. Past builds showed Firefox beaten by the up-and-comer Google Chrome in boot-up, page-loading, and JavaScript performance. Despite Chrome's low market share of only around 4%, no company can safely ignore the competition when that competition is Google (just look at what Google did to the GPS market last week!).

Chrome may be a relatively unknown browser among mainstream users for now, but if Google holds true to their promises to launch their netbook operating system, Google Chrome OS, which uses the Chrome browser to run applications, there could be a whole new user base of Walmart shoppers who rapidly make a browser switch without even realizing it. And with Chrome's primary focus on browser speed, designed from the ground-up with the idea of running intensive web applications, Mozilla knows that one day Chrome could end up being serious competition...at least once the large majority of computing moves to the cloud. In fact, that day may have already arrived for some of today's web users.

To improve browser performance, Mozilla introduced a new JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey in Firefox 3.5. Many of the speed increases in 3.6 can now be attributed to this technology. However, TraceMonkey has to go up against Chrome's own system, V8, which Google optimized earlier this year to give their browser a 30% speed bump.

Of course, we'll need to see some formal tests completed before determining where the browsers stand today, but it's likely going to be a situation where the engines are neck-and-neck in terms of performance. While this aspect to the browser war may go unnoticed by most web surfers, it's the sort of situation where everyone wins. And the prize will be a faster web surfing experience, no matter which browser you choose to use.

"Some folks at Google," as the project team is quaintly described on Google's new What Browser site, were charged with explaining what a browser is and what choices consumers have. They got halfway there; but as far as helping consumers make informed choices, information is still limited to pretty colors and shiny logos.

The cornerstone of the site is this average user-friendly animated video explaining in painfully simple terms what a web browser does. It's not an OS, and it's not a search engine. It was simple enough that my 8-year-old niece didn't have too much of a problem with the post-video comprehension check I gave her.

The site gives equally simple text tutorials on how to change a homepage, a default search engine, and a default browser. Credit must go to the "folks" at Google for making these parts of the site accessible to the average Internet user, something that is difficult for a justifiably biased technology company to do.

Talk Nerdy to Me

The "Under the Hood" section of the site seemed like it might give the geekier among us some food for thought with regard to browser performance. It contained this history lesson of a browser timeline from Wikipedia and a series of diagnostic tests, mostly related to browsers' processing of JavaScript.

We ran the Google-developed V8 Benchmark Suite on four major browsers. It broke Internet Explorer, and returned seemingly arbitrary results of 164, 673, and 1794 for Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, respectively, on a scale of "bigger is better." We ran the WebKit SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark on all four browsers, as well. You can click through to see our results for Chrome, IE, Safari, and Firefox.

Google's Still Got Some 'Splainin' To Do

We also opened the site with Epiphany, and WhatBrowser said it was Firefox 3. When we tried it out on Konqueror, well...

What browser? indeed. We're still waiting to see what result the Google site will return.

Which brings us to our final and most serious criticism. The site features the logos of the five major web browsers: Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Opera. No mention is made of the many other available options nor of their current existence.

The reason we feel these browsers should have been in some way included in Google's browser icebreaker is the same reason we feel there should have been at least some discussion of each browser's corporate affiliations, best uses, and technical capabilities: Out of fairness to the aforementioned casual Internet user who, after looking at this page, might know what his browser is but still won't have a clear idea of whether or why he should consider using other browsers.

I'm primarily a Chrome user, and I love the lightweight interface and speed. But it's not the most reliable for enterprise web-based software such as WebEx and certain other web applications. When I'm testing web apps for work, I very often have to break out one of my standby browsers.

The flip side of that coin is that, since IE is still a dominant figure in the territory, most apps and sites will still perform well enough in Internet Explorer. I can think of just one app I've tested this year that didn't have any IE support.

Some users will care whether or not their browser is open-sourced, or whether or not it's standards-compliant. Some will care much more that it's reliable for using enterprise web-based software. But the glaring absence of this information from Google's presentation shows us that, in the effort to avoid obvious accusations of favoritism, they've neglected a great opportunity to create an informed consumer culture around web browsers.

By presenting just the logos of five browsers, Google has done something to make consumers slightly more aware of their options but nothing to break down the rhetoric- and sentiment-driven attitudes of average users toward technology products.

So, let's have a little conversation about that now: What's your browser of choice, and why? When did you start thinking critically about your browser? What performance or other issues trouble you most? Let us know in the comments.

When Google first launched its themes for Chrome in August, a lot of users were rather underwhelmed by the available selection and quality of the themes. Thanks to the Artist Themes, Chrome now offers a far larger selection of themes and switching themes is as easy as clicking 'Apply theme' on the gallery page.

With Personas, Firefox obviously offers a very similar feature and currently also offers a far wider range of themes than Chrome. Unlike Firefox, however, Google doesn't offer a central repository for themes that were created by users.

Nice Themes, But What About Usability?

The problem with most of these new themes, though, is that while the images are quite nice, they usually just get in the way of usability. When you can barely read the text in your bookmark's bar, for example, it doesn't matter if the theme was designed by Oscar de la Renta, Jeff Koons, or a random Google engineer.

While we wondered if Google was getting ready to make extensions a part of the stable series soon, it now turns out that this feature won't arrive in the stable version of Chrome until version 4.0. If you feel adventurous, you could always switch to the dev channel.

In addition, Google has also added some new features for extension developers, including the ability to "load an extension and pack an extension" more conveniently.

A small ecosystem of Chrome extensions is already growing up around Chrome, even though only a small number of Chrome users are currently able to use them. Once Google enables these extensions for all users, they will be able to use a wide range of them. The absence of extensions has held back a lot of users who may want to use Chrome but rely on certain extensions. Now, however, it looks like it's only a matter of time before all Google Chrome users will be able to tap into this growing extension ecosystem.

Given how stable both the beta and developer channel versions of Chrome on Windows are at this point, we hope that Google will soon upgrade the stable version to the 3.x or 4.x series, as they offer a lot more functionality. The Mac and Linux versions are currently still somewhat unstable, but at least the Mac version has now become quite usable.

This commitment to identity integration, coupled with Chrome's move to cloud-based bookmarking, point to the growth of the borderless social web experience - an experience that has been a long time coming. For years we've asked for social network portability and the freedom to manage our own online relationships. With this rising trend towards browser-based service integration and cloud-based data storage, we're one step closer to realizing that dream.

Additional Opera 10 features include web mail and web feed reader integration and an inline spell-checker for blogs, Twitter and Facebook posts. To find out more info on Opera 10 beta 3 or to install it, visit opera.com/browser/next.

With Weave, Mozilla Labs currently offers a very similar feature, though Weave hasn't made it into the default install of Firefox yet. In the past, Google also offered a synchronization plugin for Firefox, but the company discontinued this service in December 2008.

Link to Chrome OS?

Of course, we can't help but wonder if this work isn't also being done in preparation for the upcoming release of the Google Chrome OS. A lot of the work to get Chrome to sync between different instances is being done at the backend. If Google could get its netbook OS to seamlessly sync with applications on the desktop, then that would be yet another selling point for the Chrome OS.

Privacy?

Chances are that you are already storing your search history on Google's servers. With Chrome's synchronization feature, however, you would also store a complete record of all of your comings and going on other parts of the Internet on Google's servers. Mozilla Weave encrypts your data before it is synced with Mozilla's servers. In today's announcement, the Chrome team did not talk about encryption, though we would be surprised if Google didn't implement client-side encryption as well.

For some users, though, giving even more information to Google - even if it is encrypted - may turn out to be a deal breaker.

Get the Dev Channel Release (if you dare)

For now, only users who have installed Chrome's developer version and are subscribed to the Dev channel will see these new features. The Chrome Dev channel is the most frequently updated, cutting-edge version of Chrome, but these version are also far less stable than those in the more mainstream Beta and Stable channels. If you would like to switch to the Dev channel, instructions for installing this version of Chrome can be found here.