ReadWriteWeb

Last May Geeks Are Sexy reported that anyone with access to your computer could access passwords stored in Google's Chrome browser with just a few mouse clicks. When the story inexplicably resurfaced in several Twitter posts this morning, it was time to call Google and find out why they hadn't fixed the perceived glitch.

The Geeks Are Sexy post showed how users could find passwords that are saved to for websites that require a log-in in the "Manage Passwords Section" of the "Personal Stuff" tab under " Preferences" in Chrome. The passwords initially appear to be blocked out but can be revealed by clicking on the account and then clicking a "Show" button.

Over the last three years, an average of 85% of the Mozilla Foundation's revenue has come from search engine partnerships, most importantly from deals that enable the Firefox browser to use its search bar to use Google by default. Though Mozilla's relationship with Microsoft's Bing has grown strangely closer over those years, Google - the maker of the competing Chrome browser, which was created using much of Firefox's braintrust - has remained the principal search tool for Firefox. That tool alone, one analyst said last year, may be responsible for just over 9% of all Google searches.

The last partnership extension between Google and Mozilla - a three-year deal renewed in August 2008 - was apparently allowed to expire last month. This led journalists including my friend and colleague at ZDNet, Ed Bott, to wonder whether Mozilla had any kind of Plan B. Today, we're being told that something resembling a Plan B (or C or D) may be in the works.

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.

It's not new to suggest that Google is too big, too influential, or trying to glom onto too many important bits of the Web. But some recent discussions on Reddit and news of Google Dart has raised the question again. Is Google being anti-competitive or threatening the open Web? More precisely, can Google do what makes sense as a business and not be (or be perceived as) anti-competitive?

Google has been working on Native Client (aka NaCl), an SDK that brings C/C++ functionality to browsers since at least last year, and now the latest Google Chrome beta version includes NaCl. NaCl uses an API called "Pepper" that provides HTML5 bindings for C or C++ . (NaCl is the molecular formula for salt. Salt and pepper. Get it?)

Google has also promised to make NaCl available as a plugin for other browsers. What this means is that cloud-based applications may be able to execute code at a desktop level of sophistication, and that Google Chrome OS will soon be able to run these types of applications as well. It's further blurring of the lines between Web/cloud and desktop applications.

In a blog post, Google software engineer James Hawkins revealed that the company is working on a system called Web Intents in which it will enable Chrome users to pipe data between different Web applications much the same way Android users can share data between apps. The idea is to create one API that various Web applications can all use to pass data back and forth without a need for each one to be designed to work with the other apps.

Something called the P2P API can be turned on through the about:flags menu in the latest builds of Chromium, the open source browser that serves as the basis for Google Chrome. The discovery was made by Daniel Cawrey at thechromesource. The description of the option reads: "Enables P2P Pepper API and P2P JavaScript API. The API is under development, and doesn't work yet."

Google has announced this morning that upcoming versions of its browser, Google Chrome, will only support "completely open codec technologies". As Chrome continues to grab a larger and larger share of the browser market, it will have more influence on developers and Google says that it hopes this move will help to push things in the direction of a continually more open Web.

Others, however, disagree that this will push the Web in a more open direction and argue it will simply complicate the already muddled switchover to HTML5.

Google Chrome announced the availability of its new web app store today, which means web applications are easier to ever to access and can leverage HTML5 features like local storage mixed with web pages.

The first one I tried? My trusty Twitter client Tweetdeck. I've said for years that Twitter pays my rent as a journalist, but when I say that - these days that means TweetDeck too. So how does the new TweetDeck for Chrome look? It looks great. It feels great. It is great, if you've got casual Twitter needs. I'll be sticking with the desktop version, myself, but hopefully only for a few more days, as the TweetDeck crew adds features to the Chrome version.

Google unveiled its long-awaited Chrome OS, notebook and Web store today and already we're itching to see what life lived entirely in the cloud is like - not that we're far off as it is. While we don't have our hands on a Chrome OS notebook quite yet, if we did, MOG would be one of the first apps we would install.

MOG has announced a beta release of its music player for the Chrome Web store and we have to admit, we're excited to see one of our favorite cloud-based music players hit the shelves.