OStatic

Despite the fact that IE6 is supposed to be deader than dead, it doesn't mean that people have stopped using it. Microsoft has struggled to persuade its users to upgrade to later versions, while Firefox has had rapid success in driving 3.6 upgrades. But both browsers take a backseat to Chrome.

According to Royal Pingdom, Google Chrome is relatively close to a 100% success rate in pushing users to new versions of Chrome. The difference? Google doesn't ask users whether they want to upgrade or not.

For several months now, Google's Chrome browser has been posting larger market share gains, by percentage growth, than open source rivals. From February to March, preliminary Net Applications data showed that it jumped from 5.6 percent share to 6.1 opercent share. By contrast, Firefox rose from 24.2 percent to 24.5 percent over the sam period, and Safari rose from 4.5 percent to 4.7 percent.

Chrome has also been in the news in the wake of Google's and Adobe's partnership focused on building Flash Player 10.1 into the browser. Especially with Google's Chrome OS due to arrive later this year, there are good reasons to believe that Chrome could represent serious market share competition for Firefox.

Google Chrome is quickly becoming the preferred browser choice for the FOSS community but, like many open source projects we love, the real fun starts when we can tweak something into suiting our exact needs. There are loads of extensions available for Chrome these days -- some open source, some not. Let's take a look at a few of our favorites.

Lazarus: Form Recovery - Ever start to fill out a long web-form only to have it time out before you're finished? This extension autosaves everything you type in online text boxes for speedy recovery if the site times out or your browser crashes. Download this little gem, let in run in the background. Simply click the Lazarus icon the next time your text accidentally vanishes, choose the correct text from the drop-down menu, and the text will reappear instantly.

The Mozilla Labs Test Pilot program is studying the way users interact with the browser's menu bar. The Firefox user experience (UX) team is considering major changes of the menu bar design, at least for versions of Firefox running on modern versions of Windows.

Mozilla Test Pilot is a Mozilla Labs project to collect structured user feedback from Firefox and other Moz Labs technologies. Users work with the program by installing the Test Pilot extension and then users have the option of participating in tests like the Menu Item Usage Study. All tests require user approval and data is anonymized before being sent to Mozilla.

Google Chrome has been dominating the headlines this week, but what might have escaped notice is Google taking a crack at the tubes of the Internet itself. As part of Google's let's make the Web faster initiative, it is working on SPDY (pronounced speedy ), a protocol that's supposed to improve on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

SPDY's goals are to reduce page load time by 50%, make it easy to deploy, and ensure that there's no need for content changes. Changes would be required on the client end and the server end, but the content itself would require no change.