If you’ve always wanted to talk to your browser, the magic Google genie has just granted your wish. Chrome 11 comes with a new feature that converts your mellifluous voice into surprisingly accurate text in the browser, and we’ve got a quick guide on how to use it.

Originally posted at The Download Blog

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Four months after announcing it was seeking a buyer, Yahoo-owned social-bookmarking service Delicious says it’s been picked up by company started by YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

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A report claims Apple bought the iCloud.com domain from Sweden-based Xcerion. However, neither company has confirmed it.

Originally posted at The Digital Home

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Having a hard time keep track of your Groupon, Living Social, RetailMeNot, retailer, and manufacturer deals? ChoozOn wraps them all up for you.

Originally posted at Rafe’s Radar

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Latest version of Google Chrome can hear what you’ve got to say. Chrome 11 introduces new feature that converts your speech to HTML, which has potential to be massive boon to people who want translations on the fly.

Originally posted at The Download Blog

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Firefox’s graphics and JavaScript performance should improve with new Mozilla projects. Don’t expect results by Firefox 5’s June release, though.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

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Flash Player’s ability to store data could subvert people’s attempts to clear out browser cookies. Now Chrome is getting an option to clear Flash data, too.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

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A start-up hoping to capitalize on the arrival of Web applications is releasing a major update to its tools for building those apps.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

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Tungle.me service allows schedules to be synchronized across calendar platforms including Google, Outlook, Apple iCal, and Lotus Notes, and also plugs into social networks.

Originally posted at News - Digital Media

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With just a few tweaks to your Facebook News Feed settings, you can view more activities from friends whom you care about, and hide annoying posts from friends whom you don’t.

Originally posted at Crave

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Company isn’t quite sure when it will go public, but it’s looking to hire a chief financial officer with experience filing for an IPO.

Originally posted at The Digital Home

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Placefav is a social-bookmarking service for places. It was pitched to me as a cross between the currently defunctMuxtape and Delicious. A better thing to compare it to is the list-making feature on reviews service Yelp.

The ultimate aim is to pass your list along to someone else as a self-contained city guide. Things like this are useful when somebody asks you for a list of places or things to do if they’re visiting your hometown, or a vacation spot you might have a little extra local knowledge of. The site also offers the option to favorite other users and explore the lists of people nearby.

Like Muxtape, Placefav limits you to just a dozen spots for your favorite places. You can customize the colors, and if you’ve put in the addresses there are quick links for pop-out Google Maps. If you don’t know the address it will do its best to guess the address of a place based on the name and city it’s in. The entire list is self contained with its own vanity URL and can be accessed fairly quickly on mobile phones. Creator Kyle Bragger tells me he’s hoping to build an iPhone application that makes use of the device’s GPS to make entry and browsing a little faster.

Coming in later versions will be the option to make even larger lists and simply e-mail your places and have the service add it to a new or existing list. Bragger also hopes to include SMS support once he’s got the e-mail squared away. You can check out the list I made by clicking the screenshot below.

Compiled here is a list of food joints I put together in a few minutes. Each one has a map and any related photos pulled from the Web. Like Muxtape you can only put together a dozen places and each list you make has its own vanity URL.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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Google's Chrome gets a 78 out of 100 on the Acid3 test

Google’s Chrome browser is outperforming the latest “stable” builds of both Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7 in the popular Acid3 test. The Acid test, for those who do not know, tests how well a browser complies with a given set of Web standards. While all three browsers pass the Acid2 test, Chrome currently clocks in at 78 out of 100 on Acid3, while Firefox and IE7 stand at 71 and 14 respectively. The only release quality build to beat Chrome is Opera, which scores an 83.

Even though Google has the stable builds edged out, we have to remember that Chrome is still in development, where it is topped by a number of other “unstable,” development builds, including Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 (85), Opera (91), and Safari 4 (100). It is interesting that the Safari 4 Developer Preview performs so much better than Chrome, given that they are both built on Apple’s WebKit framework.

Whenever a new browser or an update to a browser is released, one of the first things that techies tend to look at is how it fares on the Acid test. The latest iteration of the test, Acid3, is the hardest yet and no “stable” browser builds have achieved a 100 out of 100 on the test, although the Safari 4 Developer Preview has.

Passing the Acid3 test is an important goal for browser developers and it’s great to see that Chrome is performing so well on its first attempt.

Update:
A reader, Benjamin, writes in saying that under Vista SP1, Chrome shows scores ranging from 74 to 79 on the Acid3 test. Running it again right now, the test showed a score of a 79. Some of the initial variability could have been due to the servers for the Acid3 test being hammered as a result of Chrome’s release.

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This should, in no way, be considered an official review–see CNET and CNET News for the proper shebang. I’ve just been using Chrome for a few hours and thought I’d dash off some quick thoughts.

First: It is fast as you-know-what. It feels super-responsive, so much so that I first thought it must be a trick. The tabs almost seem to click themselves; the autocomplete is so speedy that I thought it was reading my mind. After download and launch, it pulled in not only my bookmarks but, apparently, also my Awesome Bar history. Once I loaded it up and typed “T,” Twitter.com was almost already loaded in the tab. It was slightly terrifying, actually. One note: Chrome did not import my Firefox Live Bookmarks–the RSS feeds that appear in a drop-down from the menu bar, and it sadly doesn’t have this as a feature at all.

The “tabs-on-top” interface is actually a tiny bit off-putting at first. I’m so used to tabs being below the URL bar that I initially felt confused about which ones I had opened. Also, there are no traditional menus for…well, anything. There’s almost no text whatsoever at the top of the browser window. No File, Edit, View, Tools, etc. You’ve got a wrench for the very minimal selection of customization settings and a button to the left of that where you access the menu items you normally find in “File,” “Edit,” and “Tools,” along with a Developer option where you’ll find Chrome’s Windows-style Task manager (and a JavaScript debugger and console, which I think I might really need…see below).

There’s not even a separate search bar; you conduct everything from the URL bar. I did discover that the Ctrl-K keyboard shortcut that normally puts your cursor in the search bar in Firefox adds a little question mark to the Chrome URL bar, so the browser knows for sure that you’re conducting a search. But it’s not really necessary. If you type anything but a URL into the URL bar, Chrome does a search. I like it, but it takes a little getting used to.

Now for the negatives. In my short use, I found that Chrome’s got some problems playing nice with JavaScript–or at least, I’m assuming that’s the problem. A Safari user told me he’s encountered some of the same issues I had, so I suspect it’s related to the open-source WebKit on which both browsers are based (and some quick searching seems to bear that out).

Among the issues I ran into today: I attempted to sign up for Hallmark.com to send an e-card. The site launches its sign-in window as a JavaScript pop-up. Once I’d registered and tried to sign in via the pop-up, the window got caught in an infinite refresh loop. I couldn’t keep my cursor in the text field or type. Sorry, Hallmark! On Facebook, as I attempted to page through an album, I got about eight photos in, and then, as I clicked Next, the page would display the next photo, then immediately jump back to the previous one, and it wouldn’t progress any more than that. Finally, as I attempted to sign in to Hipster Cards (I need to send an e-card today!), that site’s online form failed me at the Captcha field: every time I tried to click in it, the cursor leaped out and plopped itself back in the “First name” field. Firefox to the rescue.

I thought maybe Chrome was trying to tell me something about the e-card sites, but then, as I searched for an answer to the WebKit/JavaScript problem, I got this error on a result page:

So, that’s pretty terrifying, and I guess as security features go, it’s hard to miss. Hopefully it’s not a false positive. In any case, like I said, I haven’t done exhaustive testing on Chrome, and I haven’t yet tested it with Google Docs or other Web-based Google apps. But at first blush, I like the speed, but it’s certainly not ready to be my daily browser. At least not if my mom ever hopes to get an anniversary e-card.

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Aiming to react quickly to Google’s Chrome announcement, Microsoft focused on how Chrome stacks up against Internet Explorer.

“The browser landscape is highly competitive, but people will choose Internet Explorer 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips, respects their personal choices about how they want to browse and, more than any other browsing technology, puts them in control of their personal data online,” Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch said in a statement.

Just last week, Microsoft released the second public beta for its IE 8 browser.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Hopefully for Redmond, though, it recognizes this as far more than an attack on Internet Explorer 8. Google was already a big supporter and partner of Mozilla. If it really just wanted a better browser, it would have just stepped up its investment in Firefox.

In Google’s own words, Chrome is as much about being a platform for Web applications as it is a means for viewing Web pages.

“What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for Web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build,” Google said on the company’s official blog.

Although today one needs Windows to run Chrome (Mac and Linux versions are coming soon), it is not hard to see how Chrome is a threat to Microsoft’s operating system dominance.

Imagine, in the not too distant future, a Linux-based machine with Chrome and lots of Chrome apps. Hmm…That’s starting to sound like a pretty big threat to Microsoft indeed.

That said, people have predicted the browser would overtake the operating system since the Netscape days and the OS has remained important. The key question for Microsoft is can it create enough experiences that are better outside of a browser/Web app engine to maintain the OS as not just relevant, but worth an extra $100 in the cost of a PC.

The competition, though, is not limited to PCs. A more competitive browser-as-platform from Google could mean more headaches for Microsoft on the mobile front as well. Microsoft is already playing catch-up in the mobile browser arena as it tries to take on the iPhone’s Safari browser. Microsoft has promised to have a version of Internet Explorer 6 on Windows Mobile by year’s end, but it is unclear how close that will get the company to its already existing competition, let alone new entrants.

Click here for full coverage of the Google Chrome launch.

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