Here’s a lovely… truly lovely video depicting the key differentiators of the Google Chrome browser.

Thankfully reports have come in of a better bookmark manager coming to Google’s Chrome browser. The current offering leaves a lot to be desired when comparing to the features available in the browsers offered by the big players in this arena.

The Download Squad have put together a handy video documenting the features which have started appearing in the Chromium source code. The updates appear to make the manager fit in much better with the rest of the application, with the manager opening in a new tab which items can be drag and dropped to.

We hope that this manager will be moved to the dev, beta and then stable versions of Chrome in the future.

For the second year in a row Google’s Chrome browser has come out on top following the annual Pwn2Own contest at the CanSecWest conference.

The competition revolves around security experts and researches being given hardware, OS and software to try and hack… and if the succeed in doing so they get to keep the kit.

In the browser competition IE, Safari and Opera were all taken quite quickly whilst Chrome proved to be a much more tough competition and after it ended no-one had managed to compromise the browser.

Other pieces of kit to be succesffuly hacked include an iPhone 3GS which gave up little resistance and was compromised in seconds along with a Macbook and a Windows 7 set-up.

Jolicloud, a web based OS based on similar principles as Google’s Chrome have switched their rendering engine from Mozilla’s Prism to Chrome.

The Cloud based OS has customised Chromium (the open source version of Google Chrome) for use in it’s backend which gives it greater HTML5 support for it’s 600+ applications.

The release of Robby (the codename for this release of Jolicloud) does not see Chrome replace Mozilla’s Firefox as the Linux distribution’s default browser however.

If you want to get a Google Chrome OS powered netbook NOW then you have to look no further than the live list of supporting hardware at The Chromium Projects site.

The list is compiled and updated by folk who are using the OS everyday and it supplies information on which netbooks, notebooks and laptops support the Chrome OS and to what degree. They give details on how the hardware supports various key features including WiFi, Ethernet and Suspend/Resume. They also leave caveats and descriptive comments to help people wanting to get their hands on Chrome right now.

The list includes proving heavyweights in the netbook world such as the Asus Eee 100x series which sport  10.1 inch displays and the Dell Mini 10v.

The developer channel of Chrome for Mac now has extensions. This is a big win for those on Macs who are using Chrome as this was really one of the sticking points of many Firefox users (who have Firefox Add ons).

This jumps Chrome up a notch on where it was before and really should start taking the fight to other browsers on Macs (yup that’s all those funky geeky cool-dressed folk drinking Green Tea… oh and those with too much money).

Those wanting extensions for Chrome on Macs should use the develper channel

Of course it should be noted that the Dev Channel can lead to its own instabilities but for us the extensions make usage of Chrome just so much more than it was without them. For a glimpse as to some of the great extensions already available check out the official gallery.

Chrome is end user’s 3rd most popular browser according to the internet statistics firm Net Applications. Although the browser clocked up only 4.63% usage it marked a milestone as it put the newcomer 3rd and infront of Apple’s Safari browser which previously held that position.

Still way out in front was Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer applications but both these parties will be more than just curiously glancing back at the Google browser. It seems that with the mainstream addition of extensions to the browser (comparable in some ways to Firefox’s add-ons) and it’s core underlying speed that huge numbers of users are not only trying Chrome but migrating completely.

So… Firefox, watch your back!

So it looks like as well as Google being very specific about the specs for what hardware will be needed to support the Chrome OS they are also “in bed” with a hardware manufacturers putting together their own google branded Chrome OS powered netbook.

The specs initially leaked over at IB Times seem to say that the machine will be fairly beefy. The rumours point to a 10.1 inch TFT multi touch display (HD ready of course) with an NVIDIA Tegra chipset all powered by an ARM CPU. In terms of connectivity the rumours point to the usual suspects of WiFI, Bluetooth, wired ethernet and 3G. There are also USB slots, a standard 3.5mm headphone sokcet and multi form memory card reader…. oh and a built in webcam. There’ll be 2GB of RAM available and a 64GB SSD storage. We’re not quite sure if this SSD figure is right due to Google mentioning that the OS is mainly to be used with most data being stored in the cloud but perhaps they’ve made advances in this area thanks to HTML 5 offline storage capabilities.

The release time for this is still Q4 2010.

All this is planned to come at a sub $300 cost to the end user and may even come cheaper if bought with a mobile contract in the same way that mobile handsets are subsidised today.

Google have slashed the price of online storage space to just $5 per year for 20 gig of space and you can have 1TB for just $256/year… quite staggering prices we feel.

The announcement was made via the Google Photo blog yesterday evening and claims double the storage for a quarter of the price. Google cited Moore’s Law for the drop in storage costs and said that this along with improvements made by them allowed them to lower the cost to us, the end customers.

The online storage is currently only available to use with Picasa and Google Mail but could this be just the start? Our feelings are that this is the start of moves to allow more and more customer data in the cloud and should allow the cost of hardware running the Google Chrome OS to be cheaper due to the reduced local storage (though with Moore’s law perhaps the price reduction won’t have such a large impact).

Here is a round up of our favourite Google Chrome browser tips and tricks… oh and just to be clear some listed here were farmed from other “top X” lists but these are the ones that we at WhichChrome.com really love and find useful. Oh, just for irony I typed this up in Firefox.. tsk!

• New Incognito Window – with a simple combination keypress of Ctrl+Shift+N you can get a new incognito window opened up… don’t ask us why this is our #1

• View History Page – Chrome includes an in browser history page. Quick access to this can be achieved with Ctrl+H
• Advanced Forward/Back – Clicking on the forward or back button with the right mouse button (or long clicking… thanks to Gina Trapani) will give you an extended history to allow for quick navigation throughout your browsing history.

• Tab to Window – You can easily detach a tab into it’s own window by simply dragging the tab off the tab bar.

• Undo Close Tab – if you want to reinstate a tab you’ve just closed (which you can do with Ctrl+W) then this can be done with Ctrl+Shift+T
• Web App Shortcuts – If you want to have any web application have their own shortcuts (can be on the desktop, in the startmenu or in the quick launch bar (only tried this in windows) the you can create a web app shortcut by clicking on the icon that looks like a piece of paper with a folded corner (like a “new” icon) and then Create Application Shortcuts…. This has the advantage for web apps that they don’t have any of the other browser furniture (address bar etc).  This is really something that we see has led to the idea of the Google Chrome OS.
• Chrome’s Task Manager – Can be used to monitor and manage the tasks associated with Chrome (since each Chrome tab has it’s own process). This can quickly be viewed with Shift+ESC

We hope to add further tips and tricks as we discover them so keep this page in mind for futire ref.