If the trends established thus far this year continue, Chrome will come close to matching Firefox’s usage share in November, then pass its rival in December, when Chrome will account for approximately 26.6% of all browsers and Firefox will have a 25.3% share.

Those numbers are eerily close to the stats at Technologizer for the past month: 26.05 percent of you have used Chrome to visit us, and 25.06 percent have used Firefox. Chrome is already the top browser amongst youse guys: Safari is #3 at 20.31 percent, and IE is #4 at 19.07 percent. (We’re small enough that there’s plenty of flux in the rankings; things could be different next month.)

As Gregg points out, StatCounter isn’t the only company that tracks browser usage, and NetApplications, another big player, shows Chrome further behind Firefox. But no matter which numbers you look at, you’ll probably come to the conclusion that Chrome will pass Firefox at some point, absent some major change in market dynamics.

When it happens–if it happens–Chrome will have earned the honor: Overall, it’s a really neat browser, and the one I use most often. But I’ll still feel a twinge of sadness. The story of how Firefox reignited browser competition is one of the most delightful, inspiring ones in all of PC history, and it’s more fun to root for Mozilla’s army of volunteers than for Google. The good news is that competition in the browser market is so vibrant that anything could happen–and an outstanding version of Firefox could steal market share back from Chrome.

Google's Johanna Wright shows off the new Search by Image feature.

“I don’t need ten blue links — just give me the answer!”–Bing Search Blog post, October 2010

“Yahoo Vows Death to the ’10 Blue Links’”–IDG News article, May 2009

It’s funny: Google’s competitors spend a lot of time explaining that “ten blue links”–the traditional search results that we’ve known since the dawn of search engines–are annoying and/or obsolete. But I haven’t noticed any consumer uprising over them, or a mass exodus from search engines that use them. Actually, I suspect that any company that rails against “ten blue links” would cheerfully swap places with Google if it had the chance, dependent on blue links though Google may be.

And at Google’s Inside Search event today, thee was lots of news–but the company didn’t seem to be on a mission to deemphasize traditional results pages. Instead, most of the news was about making the blue links more useful–getting you to them more quickly, in more ways, then letting you get past them and onto a Web page that provides the information (Google would probably say “knowledge” rather than “information” which you’re looking for.

The morning’s announcements included recaps of recent Google search improvements, plus some new ones:

• Instant Pages is a new feature in Chrome which loads the first result in a Google search in the background before you click on it, so it loads almost instantly if you do click on it–even if it’s a page that normally takes several seconds to render. (You can get it in Chrome’s Dev version now, or in the next beta, or in non-beta Chrome this summer.)
• Search by Image lets users of Google.com’s desktop version drag and drop an image into the search field, then get results that relate to it. Google’s demo involved a snapshot of a Greek island which the search engine’s image-recognition technology was able to identify. (It should show up in the next couple of days.)
• Voice Search, a feature of Android and Google’s iPhone app that lets you speak a query rather than typing it, will be available in Chrome as well. (It’ll roll out over the next week.)
• Google Images will get the Google Instant feature which starts displaying results as you type. (This one will arrive over the next couple of months, but you can turn it on in Google Labs now.)
• Google.com’s mobile version has some new features, including icons on the home page for items such as “Restaurants” and “Coffee” that take you directly to blue links coupled with an interactive map, and a query “builder” that lets you construct searches based on Google’s suggestions as you type. (I confess that I don’t completely understand how this second feature works even after seeing it demoed and trying it for myself.)

That’s a lot of new functionality to chew on, not all of which is available quite yet. And some of it will require Chrome, at least for now, although Google says it’s using open standards that would let other browsers implement these features, and that it plans to roll some of the new functionality into Google Toolbar.

Almost none of what the company announced today is about eliminating blue links; at most, it’s about supplementing links with additional useful info, as Google Mobile is now doing with its links-and-map view. In that respect, it strikes me as being both extremely ambitious and rather traditional.

As usual at Google events, the spokespeople on stage said (over and over) that Google is obsessed with speed–and in one way or another, everything they showed off today was about making searching faster. It says that it benchmarks how long searches take down to the millisecond, and that the new improvements can shave several seconds off a search, resulting in happier users and a happier Google.

Of course, it said similar things about Google Instant when it announced it last year. If Google watched me search and timed how long it took, I don’t dispute that Instant might be speeding things up, but I’ve never quite warmed up to it: it still makes me feel a bit as if I’m being smacked in the face with search results (some of which are irrelevant ) before I’m ready to look at them. Speed in other words, is unquestionably essential–but I’m not so sure that it automatically translates into a better experience.

I was still impressed overall by what Google showed off today, and I’m looking forward to trying it and writing about it as it rolls out. More thoughts to come…

The free alternative iPad browser, which launches in the App Store today, mimics the Chrome aesthetic. Tabs appear at the top of the screen, and a single bar handles web addresses and searches, just like Chrome’s omnibar. There’s even a star-shaped bookmark button to the right of the URL bar, just like Chrome.

Chrome flattery aside, iChromy’s greatest asset is stability. When tab overload threatens to crash the browser, iChromy quietly shifts memory away from background tabs that you haven’t opened in a while. These pages reload when you access them again, but it’s a small price to pay for having lots of open tabs with minimal crashes. I’ve been playing with a preview version of iChromy on an original iPad for a few days, and it’s far better at avoiding crashes than my previous iPad browser of choice, Atomic Web Browser.

Otherwise, iChromy is a no-frills browser. It lacks many of Atomic’s powerful features, such as Dropbox connectivity, private browsing, full-screen browsing, swipe gestures, multiple search sources, find in page, adjustable font sizes and user agent controls. Even some of Safari’s basic features are missing. You can’t print from iChromy, nor can you set an app as a home screen icon. If you’re looking for a feature-rich iPad browser, iChromy isn’t it.

But truth be told, I didn’t miss the majority of those features when using iChromy. My main gripes come from little frustrations that don’t exist in other iPad browsers: The virtual URL keyboard lacks a dedicated “.com” button. You can’t tap the top of the screen to jump to the top of a web page. There are no suggested search results as you type. These nuisances slow down the experience in an otherwise nimble browser.

On the bright side, iChromy does have built-in sharing with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and others. You can easily send pages to Instapaper or store them in an offline reading list, and there’s even a handy “copy” button for snagging URLs.

Although iChromy is free, Diigo hopes some users will invest in its premium web services, which store bookmarks, highlights and web page screenshots online. iChromy, of course, has the ability to send web pages to Diigo. The company later plans to offer a “pro” version of iChromy with advanced features.

Though it lacks frills and has a few frustrations, iChromy is yet another capable web browser that far surpasses the functionality of iPad Safari while conquering the stability issues that plague other tabbed iPad browsers. And to paraphrase Google, it’s free and installs in minutes. Give it a try.

As ConceivablyTech points out, the latest Chrome Canary build — an early-stage version that precedes developer and beta versions — includes the ability to hide the URL bar. To turn on this feature, enter “about:flags” in the URL bar, enable “Compact Navigation,” relaunch the browser, right-click any tab and click “Hide the toolbar.” (Don’t be shy; you can install Canary side-by-side with other Chrome versions.)

Once you do this, the URL bar will disappear, providing an extra 30 pixels of room to browse. The forward button, back button and tools icon nest within the same strip of space as open tabs. Clicking an open tab creates a drop-down URL and search bar that’s much shorter than screen width.

I’m not ready to decide whether a hidden URL bar is something I’d like, but this implementation already needs one major change: When you open a new tab, the cursor automatically moves to the URL field, but it doesn’t do this when you click on an existing tab. I want the ability to click on an open tab and immediately start typing a search or web address when the omnibar drops down.

Users who are concerned about security may not like this option anyway, because it can obscure a site’s security credentials. The URL bar briefly appears when you click a link, but not when you open that link in a background tab. I also wonder how Google feels about the hidden omnibar. Keeping the bar in view, I imagine, would encourage the user to conduct more web searches, which is the whole point of Chrome to begin with.

If the hidden URL bar does make it into a stable version of Chrome, it’ll almost certainly be an optional feature. It could, however, play a big role in a touch-screen version of Chrome OS, which is supposedly in development.

Chrome feels like Google’s natural platform — all web, only the web. Android feels like an independent Google subsidiary.

There are plenty of arguments for auto-updates of the type seen in Chrome. For one thing, they’re a good way to stomp out security vulnerabilities as quickly as possible, as widely as possible, once they’re discovered. But they also make it harder for anyone who’d rather decide for himself or herself when to move to a new version of the browser. (For the record, it’s possible to shut off auto-updating, although it’s not exactly obvious how to do it.) Basically, Google appears to think that everyone should use the current version of Chrome (except for bleeding-edge types: they should use the current beta). It’s not going to make things easy for those of us who’d prefer to opt out.

That philosophy–do it our way, not your way–seems to be in tune with the times. Folks who dislike the iPhone often squawk about how it forces you to accept Apple’s way of doing things. They’re right: there are very few features for tweaking the user interface, a fact that even annoys some people (such as me) who mostly like the iPhone. But it’s not like Android is as customizable as it should be, either. It’s nowhere near as tweakable as my old Windows Mobile phones or even-older PalmPilots.

On the iPad, I can think of only one major point where Apple lets you make a decision about the device’s user interface: you can choose to make the slider on its side either a mute switch or an orientation lock. Whoop-de-doo!

The increasing importance of cloud-based services plays a role here, too. It’s not that they’re inherently untweakable–Gmail, for instance, has scads of options (even though it doesn’t have all the ones I’d like to see). But Web services as a class aren’t as easy to mold to your own tastes as the desktop apps they replace, and they auto-update you to the newest versions pretty much by definition.

This isn’t all that new a trend. For instance, when Microsoft introduced the all-new (and in many ways nifty) Ribbon user interface in Office 2007, there was no way to customize the tabs and menus–and it broke many existing Office customizations, driving some of Microsoft’s most loyal customers bonkers. It was only three years later, in Office 2010, that the suite got back the customization options it had lost.

There’s no conspiracy here. One reason why new stuff isn’t as customizable as old stuff is because it’s, well, new: extensive options for changing things around are rarely among the first features a company implements. As time goes on, I suspect that even Apple’s products will provide at least a few more tools for personalization. But Chrome, the iPhone, Android handsets, the iPad, and Office all feel like they’re trying harder to cater to beginners who don’t want to fine-tune things (or who might mess things up if they did) than to those of us who know what we want from products and don’t want to be force-fed a particular way of doing things.

So for the time being, I do feel sometimes like my world is being dumbed down around me. Years ago, I used to shake my head at grizzled PC veterans who carped that Windows or the Mac were for clueless newbies, not the sophisticated types who could make a DOS computer jump through hoops. I go through bouts of similar crankiness myself now. And I’d like to see more evidence that major purveyors of software and services aren’t pushing us towards a one-size-fits-all future.

[NOTE: This story was republished Technologizer's T-Week newsletter--go here to sign up to receive it. You'll get original stuff that won't show up on the site until later, if at all.]

Firefox 4′s success is evidence of the fact that consumers are still looking past Microsoft when it comes to browsers. According to NetApplications, Internet Explorer’s market share is now down to 57 percent. IE has been on a consistent decline for the past several years, and the upstart success of Chrome (which now has 11 percent of the market), and Firefox (at about 22 percent), show that consumers are ready for life post-Microsoft.

IE9 won’t turn Microsoft’s fortunes around in browsers, and neither Microsoft’s woes nor Mozilla’s alleged certain death have anything to do with Web app support (reading the Firefox roadmap answers that critique, which I covered here, and check out Jared’s story on the Mozilla Web Apps platform). The challenge is called tablets.

While some of us in the tech blogosphere have poked a little fun at Steve Jobs’ “post-PC” comments, he’s on to something. With tablets now a legitimate force, it is only a matter of time before these devices begin to affect market share. How else do you think Safari has been able to grow its market share so quickly? I highly doubt that many are downloading Safari for Windows, frankly.

These devices will help either Chrome (for Android devices) or Safari (for iOS). As people increase their web use through tablets, it will come at the further expense of Internet Explorer and even Firefox too. Microsoft has no real plans in tablets for at least another year, and that’s going to hurt.

“Redesigning the icon was very much a group effort,” says a post on the Chrome blog, and to my eye, that’s obvious: It looks like it was designed by a committee. Which is true to Google’s personality, I guess–but I prefer the Susan Kare approach.

Release Date:

Google Chrome (Beta): Beta version available; Those using Chrome will be updated soon.

Mozilla Firefox 4.0: Web and mobile browser expected mid-to-late March. [NOTE: A beta version is available.]

Point Goes To: Chrome. It’s available now, and we all know what happens with tentative dates.

Speed:

Google Chrome (Beta): The new browser is 66 percent faster than the previous version using the V8 Benchmark Suite tests.

Mozilla Firefox 4.0: Firefox counters with a six times faster browser than their previous iteration, meaning a 6oo percent faster speed using the V8 Benchmark Suite tests.

Point Goes To: Firefox. Just look at the stats.

User Interface:

Google Chrome (Beta): The browser has been revamped to help the user customize their experience and get to what they need faster. This means:

- The settings interface is a tab in the browser. This makes it look cleaner.

- A search box so you can quickly find whatever you’re trying to fix/manage. Finally, you can search for your settings instead of clicking through and reading through each option.

- Each option page has a URL so you can help others find the same setting.

Mozilla Firefox 4.0: Lots of new stuff here including:

- Top navigation buttons have disappeared, making it look very similar to Chrome. Tabs are right on top now. Bookmarks are now a button on the top right of the page.

- Introducing App Tabs: If you’re someone who uses the same websites (such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.), you might want to try this option. You have the option to make a frequently used website an app tab, which appears as a small square to the left of your normal tabs. The app tabs light up when there is updated content.

- Switch To Tab: Now when you go to type in a new URL, you will have the option to “Switch To Tab.” No more forgetting that you already have that website open in a different window.

- Panorama: Instead of having multiple windows open, each with their own purpose, you can organize your tabs into different groups. Panorama gives you the option to click on that set of tabs and hide the rest (even though they are in the same browser window). This is best for people who use a ton of tabs daily.

Point: Firefox. I like all the new features Firefox has added – especially since I’m a tab freak. Even though a lot of it is just updating to be more like Chrome, there are some added features that Chrome hasn’t implemented. However, Chrome does get props for making searching for settings easier and helping us customize.

Synchronization:

Google Chrome (Beta): You can synchronize passwords across all the internet-capable devices you use that use Google Chrome and encrypt them for added security. Search through Chrome’s now-easy-to-use settings. It should be under the heading “Personal Stuff.” You can also import data from your other browsers with ease.

Mozilla Firefox 4.0: Not only can you synchronize passwords and auto-fill data across your internet-capable devices, you can access the same website that you were looking at on any of your devices.

For example, if you open Yelp.com on your computer and need that information on the go, you can open the Firefox browser on your Android device and opt to look at the sites you were browsing on your computer and vice versa. The new Firefox browser will ship out with new Android devices when it is ready. (iOS users need to download a separate app for this functionality since separate browsers are not allowed.)

Point goes to: Firefox. I do enjoy how easy it is to upload settings into Chrome, but being able to see the same web browser across devices? Very cool.

Updates:

Google Chrome (Beta): It’s so advanced it updates itself and most of its apps (eventually). You can also force an update at any time under the “About Chrome” section.

Mozilla Firefox 4.0: You no longer need to restart Firefox when you update with a new add-on: It automatically installs it for you. This feature only works for new apps, although older add-ons have the option to upgrade to fit this new feature.

Point: Tie. I hate updating and like it when the program can figure it out for itself, but now Firefox is on an almost even playing field with the “no restart necessary” update.

Final Score: Advantage Firefox

I like what Chrome has done, but the new Firefox updates seem to take the best of what the browser can do and improve on it. Which do you prefer?

(This post is republished from our partner Techland.)