ReadWriteWeb

According to a post on the Mozilla Add-Ons Blog, 85% of Firefox 4 users have at least one add-on installed. The average user has five add-ons installed. The figure doesn't include the Personas feature and excludes add-ons bundled with other software that users haven't actively chosen to install.

"We previously estimated that at least a third of Firefox users had chosen to install an add-on, but knew the number was higher than that," wrote Justin Scott, the product manager for add-ons at Mozilla.

The Chromebook is ready for the Web, but is the Web ready for the Chromebook? This is the fundamental question you must ask yourself before deciding to fork over $400 to $500 dollars for one of the new Google Chrome-powered notebook computers, available as of today. The Chromebook, with initial hardware coming from manufacturers like Samsung and Acer, is a vision of the future of computing where everything is done online, in a Web browser. The operating system it runs has no desktop, no way to install apps to a hard drive and no local folders to store all your personal files. It is a Web browser, and just a Web browser.

And it is pure Google.

Google released a new version of its Web browser Google Chrome to its stable channel today, the main channel favored by many, if not most, of Chrome's 160 million users. The updated version offers improvements in security and stability, says Google, most of which will function behind-the-scenes for a better browsing experience.

However, improvements to the browser's graphics capabilities will be more noticeable to users. With added support for hardware-accelerated 3D CSS, Web applications using 3D effects will be "snazzier," Google says. So, what does that mean?

Firefox 4 is gaining in the global browser wars. It has eclipsed version 3.6 for the first time and now is the third most-used browser in the world, behind Internet Explorer 8 and Google Chrome 11, according to StatCounter Global.

If you put add all versions of all the browsers together, IE is still the global leader with 43.9%, of which 4.6% is IE 9. Firefox is second with 29.3%. Chrome has experienced the most growth, going from 8.6% in 2010 to 19.4% in 2011. Yet, given the different stats you see from different sources, the precise numbers in the browser market are hard to determine. See the charts below.

Since Google's official unveiling of the Chrome Web Store six months ago, the company has been on a mission to redefine our perception of what constitutes an operating system, a browser and a program, blurring the lines between each. In Google's world, an OS is a browser and a program - one of those hefty pieces of compiled code we used to download or (gasp!) install from a CD - is now a Web app.

Indeed, even the tiniest, incremental changes point clearly in this direction as word comes that the next version of Google's Chrome browser will give users the ability to kill that final remnant of the fact that they're actually using the Web - the address bar.

Last summer, Google showcased the capabilities of HTML5 and the Chrome browser with an interactive short film "The Wilderness Downtown." Based on the Arcade Fire Song "We Used to Wait," the project was at once deeply nostalgic and technologically forward-looking. On stage at Google IO last week, the Creative Lab Team revealed their next music project, again directed by Chris Milk.

It's Day Two at Google IO, Google's annual developer conference, and we're at Moscone Center ready to live-blog this morning's keynote.

Yesterday's keynote featured announcements about Android, Google Music, and Google movie-rentals, as well as news about extending the developer platform to include hardware via Google's Open Accessory API and Accessory Developer Kit.

What we didn't hear about was anything relating to Google's Chrome OS, and we're anticipating that will be the focus of today's keynote. Rumors are that Google will announce a $20/month Chrome notebook rental program aimed at students, but we're sure Google has more for us in store.

Google will begin renting laptop computers for $20 per month, a senior Google executive told Forbes. The laptops will run Google's Chrome OS, a computer operating system that does away with local storage and applications in favor of a Web browser...and only a Web browser. The browser, of course, is Google Chrome. Initially, the $20/month laptop package will only be offered to students, the report states, but it is surely a precursor to Google's greater ambitions, in both educational institutions and the enterprise.

Google has launched a test extension for its Chrome Web browser and browser-based Chrome OS computer operating system which seems to solve the problem of easily moving photos from a camera to online services like Google's Picasa. This is more of challenge for Google's so-called "cloud" operating system, Chrome OS, which is little more than a Web browser running on a notebook computer.

The new extension called "Picasa Uploader" appeared only days ago, just ahead of the start of Google's developer conference, Google I/O, which begins tomorrow in San Francisco. Will the extension launch at that time? How will it work? We don't know yet, but the possibilities are intriguing.

Google introduced a new way this week for developers to use geospatial data through its Chrome Experiments initiative.

The new project is called Web GL Globe, an open visualization platform for geographic data that runs in Web GL-enabled browsers like Google Chrome. According to Wikipedia, Web-GL is a "Web-based graphics library that extends the capability of the JavaScript programming language to allow it to generate interactive 3D graphics within any compatible web browser."