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Somewhere along the line, Microsoft went from being the 800-pound gorilla in the browser market to begging users to switch back to Internet Explorer. Now, Microsoft is running a "where's the love?" campaign to offer "free stuff" for users who download IE9. After all these years, hasn't Microsoft learned yet that it can't buy love? Is the company capable of competing on features at all?

Today's beta release of Chrome enables users to sync different accounts across multiple computers. This allows more than one person to sign into Chrome on a shared computer and have access to all their browser data. It also enables one person to have different Chrome profiles with different email addresses, e.g. work and personal, that can all be accessed from any computer by logging in.

Chrome currently syncs bookmarks, extensions, passwords and other personalized settings to the user's Google account. Signing into Chrome from anywhere, on any computer, will bring up the user's browser, just like at home. But the current stable release only allows one account. Today's beta makes it possible to use multiple Chrome accounts on any copy of the browser.

In the new stable release of its Chrome browser, Google has ramped up the importance of Web apps on the desktop. The New Tab page is now a Web app launcher with big, friendly icons. The new look was added to the beta channel last month. The Chrome Web Store was also renovated. It's now a "wall of images" that shows app info with one click.

Google recently implemented new technologies in Chrome enabling Web apps to securely execute low-level code in the browser, blurring the line between Web and native apps. Google wants Web apps everywhere, and today's Chrome release is full of new ways to promote them.

Chrome Extension developers that want to add synthesized speech to extensions and Chrome-packaged apps are in luck. Google announced a new Text-to-Speech API for Chrome extensions yesterday, with examples and two sample voices.

According to Google engineer Dominic Mazzoni, a few hacks have enabled text-to-speech already. This involves tricks like sending text to a remote server and returning an MP3 that's played back with HTML5 audio. Smart approach in lieu of an official way to do it, but now Google has an easier (and less bandwidth-intensive) way.

Microsoft launched a website today designed to give users a detailed look at how secure their browser is. The site, called Your Browser Matters, automatically detects the visitor's browser and returns a browser security score on a scale of four points.

Not suprisingly, Microsoft's own Internet Explorer 9 gets a perfect score. The latest stable releases of Firefox and Chrome, however, each score 2.5 and 2 points, respectively. Other browsers like Safari are not able to be analyzed by the site, which returns a message saying "We can't give you a score for your browser." Presumably, the domain yourbrowsermattersunlessyoureamacuser.com was too long to be marketable.

Google's Chrome Web browser could become the second most popular browser on the market before the end of the year, according to data from StatCounter, a Web analytics company. The three-year-old browser would knock Firefox from the second place slot behind Internet Explorer.

The coup would be quite an achievement for Chrome, which was just released in 2008 and has been growing rapidly ever since. By comparison, Firefox was first launched in 2004 and took much longer to attract significant market share.

The accelerated Firefox release cycle may be great for many users, but enterprise IT folks were not thrilled. To their credit, the folks at Mozilla eventually took the complaints seriously and founded a working group to address enterprise desktop needs. However, it seems clear that the Extended Support Releases (ESRs) will be second-class citizens.

The working group has made progress and come up with a proposal that would provide an ESR for Firefox. If it's accepted, ESR's will have life cycle of nearly one year, and a 12 week overlap between the ESR releases.

The Google Chrome team announced a new beta version today with some significant interface changes. The New Tab page - where users launch most visited sites, Chrome Web apps and bookmarks - now displays one grid of icons that can be rearranged by dragging and dropping. The user navigates between the sections by clicking a narrow bar along the bottom or arrows on either side.

The New Tab page in the current stable release of Chrome displays large click targets as well, but all three sections are on the page, and the other two collapse into narrow strips while one is displayed. The new design is much easier to navigate. It would also work great on a tablet. Just saying.

Google just shipped a new stable release of the Chrome browser that includes two new technologies: Native Client, which allows execution of C and C++ code within the browser, and the Web Audio API, which brings advanced audio capabilities to JavaScript. These features were released in the beta channel in August.

The update also contains some long-awaited improvements for users of Mac OS X Lion, which did not get along well with Chrome previously. In addition to fixing "many crash bugs" and adding "some all-around visual polish," this release adds Lion's new scrollbars and support for its full-screen mode.

After a Google memo telling Google developers to 'target Chrome-only' hit Reddit yesterday, the discussions taking place online have ranged from monopoly fears to meh. Internally we're rather divided ourselves. What do you think? Is Google being anti-competitive by prioritizing Chrome for Google products?

We asked this question earlier and you answered. We culled your responses from Twitter and Facebook and used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.