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Google Research plays a major role in how the company develops its security practices for its applications.

Ulfar Erlingsson runs security research for Google. He spoke earlier this year at the Google Faculty Summit. In this video he provides an overview of how Google treats the way people interact with apps. In that context, he explores the Chrome Web browser and how its design as a cloud-based app gives it inherent advantages over client-based browsers.

Web apps that rely on features that only modern browsers can offer are becoming a standard feature on the Internet. Sadly, though, the fact that a lot of users don't regularly upgrade their browsers (or that their IT departments don't allow them to upgrade) complicates matters greatly for those developers who want to use the latest and greatest features of modern browser technologies like HTML5. The latest data from Pingdom and StatCounter, however, notes that a surprisingly large number of users (71%) already run the latest official versions of their browser.

The Worldwide Web Consortium has released the results of its first tests to ascertain browsers' conformity to HTML5.

And in a side-by-side comparison of Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome 7, Firefox 4 beta 6, Opera 10.6, and Safari 5.0, the tests found that the most compliant browser currently available is IE9.

The Google Chrome Web Store, an open marketplace for Web applications set to launch sometime this year within Google's Chrome Web browser, has been delayed. Originally believed to be launching this month, a new report finds that the store is not going to arrive until later this year - the week of December 6th, to be precise.

Opera just launched the first alpha version of Opera 11, the company's first version of its desktop browser with support for extensions. As the browser wars continue to heat up, Opera remained one of the few players without a vibrant extension ecosystem. This new version aims to change this and while there are currently only a few extensions for Opera 11, the company promises that adapting existing extensions for Opera should be rather easy for a developers who have already written similar extensions for other browsers.

Despite last month's promising debut of Internet Explorer 9, the world's most popular browser has fallen below 50% for the first time, according to StatCounter.

StatCounter Global Stats, which looks browser market share by browser and not by version, shows Internet Explorer occupying just below 50%, down from nearly 60% a year ago.

Google is celebrating the second anniversary of its Google Chrome browser with the release of new stable and beta versions that have a cleaner and simpler user interface and increased speed and performance.

As the Google Chrome Blog points out, Chrome 6 is years beyond where most imagined browser technology would be when Chrome was first introduced just two years ago.

Google announced a new app and Chrome browser extension this morning called Chrome to Phone. It's a great-looking little system that lets you click one button in your browser and send links, maps, currently selected text, YouTube videos and phone numbers to your Android device running Android 2.2 or later.

Why doesn't every phone in the world offer this? That would sure make sense to me. Dear extension developers, would someone please build this for the iPhone? I'd also love to see Instapaper integration into a service like this, even the equivalent for multimedia like videos. Imagine one click on the desktop browser sending a downloaded video to your phone. That would be cool, but the feature as it's launched today is pretty cool already.

Your choice in Web browser is about to get more interesting as all three of the top browsers on the market today - Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome - prepare and launch updated beta versions, each offering compelling, and in some cases unique, new features.

Although IE's beta launch is still weeks away, the company has detailed its plans for the improved browser, which include additions like hardware acceleration, HTML5 support and a faster JavaScript engine. Firefox, meanwhile, has added multi-touch support for Windows 7, among other things. And Chrome's latest has added form autofill, plus extension and autofill synchronization.

For early adopters and the technologically curious, waiting for the next version of a product can be trying. For those of you running Google's open-source browser Chrome, there has been the Dev channel, where new in-development releases of the browser are offered with bug fixes and new features on a nearly weekly basis. Users who use Dev channel releases get to see the newest features first, but also get to help developers by testing and reporting bugs.

Now, Google has said that "sometimes [...] even a week is too long to wait to get feedback from the field on a change" and it will begin offering an even more on-the-edge build to its users - the "Canary Build".