The EC might be content with Microsoft's browser ballot screen, but that's not stopping Google from getting OEMs to turn away from Internet Explorer on their own.

Google already has deals with several OEMs to include their software, of course. They've been shipping Google Desktop on OEM pcs for quite some time now, and their plans to drop Google Chrome on new users have come to fruition as well.

As you can see, I unboxed a new Sony Vaio laptop running Windows 7 yesterday. Nestled amongst the other desktop icons was the tri-color Chrome orb.
Not only was Chrome pre-pinned to the Windows 7 taskbar, but a quick look at the internet options on the laptop revealed sad news for Internet Explorer: it had been bumped from default web browsing duties.

If we weren't already in the middle of an all-out browser war, the introduction of Google Chrome as the preinstalled default on Windows PCs could well set things off.

Nothing is more frustrating when reading about a hot, new app or service only to learn that it's not available in your area. Yes, geotarding sucks - there's no denying that. It's keeping most of us from getting to use awesomeness like Hulu, Spotify, and Google Voice.

In the case of the latter, however, it looks as though there might be light at the end of the tunnel. Business Week recently got a peek at a letter Google submitted to the FCC with regards to the blocking of certain rural and "red light district" phone numbers.

While the original letter included "formatting errors" and has since been replaced with a heavily redacted public version, BW's Arik Hesseldahl reports finding good news for those of you outside the US waiting for Google Voice.

Hesseldahl states that the letter reveals Google has working agreements with several "international service providers for inputs to Google Voice." At least the groundwork is in place, but there's no telling how long we'll have to wait. The letter goes on to say none of those services have launched as of yet.

So, how about it, Google? When does the rest world get to take Voice for a spin?

Google sure knows how to time its innovations. Just in time for the holiday rush, Google have a new search tool -- but not for shoppers like you or I, at least not directly. No, this one's for businesses themselves; it's an enterprise product that straps onto existing online shops! (Sorry, I like anything that sounds vaguely Star Trekkie.)

Citing the ol' chestnut that most visitors spend on average just eight seconds before deciding if it's the right site for them or not, Google's Commerce Search replaces any kind of built-in search engine that an e-commerce shop might already have installed. Rather than hosted locally, it's hosted up in the big Google cloud, so as business gradually increases in the weeks up until Christmas, the Commerce Search will remain quick and snappy, not buckling under the increased load!

And as you all know, Google prides itself on the accuracy of its results -- so being able to search a shop quickly and reliably for the gift you want can only be a good thing for us this Christmas.

There's a lot more info over on the Google Blog itself, so go take a look.

Hot on the heels of my roundup of 15+ great extensions for Google Chrome, I've already found some more that deserve to be mentioned. First on the list: ChromedBird.

You probably guessed from the name, but yes, it's a minimal Twitter client which you can access from Chrome's main toolbar. It hides inside a little birdie button until you want to check your stream or post an update.

ChromedBird displays the last 5 tweets in your stream and allows you to post updates - and that's it. Links you paste into your updates are automatically shortened using bit.ly. Sure, it's a pretty stripped-down Twitter experience, but it's still nice to have close at hand when browsing with Chrome.

ChromeBird is a little buggy, but it's a very early build. I'll turn a blind eye, since we only get extension support in somewhat buggy dev builds (click here to download) of Chrome (or Chromium) right now anyway.

You can find the ChromedBird .crx over at ChromeExtensions.

We recently told you about an Adobe AIR-based Google Voice client with a pretty small featureset. It puts your SMS and voicemail messages close at hand on your desktop, but that's all it does.

If you're on a Mac, though, you can do a bit better. Voice Mac is a Google Voice client with a threaded SMS view, voicemail downloading, and the ability to make calls and send texts, and Address Book integration.

Voice Mac is certainly not gorgeous, but it has a ton of functionality.

There's an SMS and voicemail/call history browser, and it also has a built-in reverse phone lookup, so you can try to figure out who any mystery calls are from. If you don't use your Voice account frequently, the web interface might be fine for you, but if you're a Voice addict - especially one who uses SMS constantly - Voice Mac is worth a download.


[via Lifehacker]

When a few blog sites yesterday happened upon Google's YouTube video of the new Dashboard, they moved quickly to pull it down. Though the original video is still MIA, Google made an official announcement of the new feature on their own blog last night and the video above is now ready for public consumption.

While Dashboard is now live -- you can check yours out at https://www.google.com/dashboard -- what's being talked about by most sites is how this move is all about transparency and privacy controls. Heck, even the official post hits on those points: "In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we've built the Google Dashboard."

The post continues, "Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings."

That's fantastic, and I'm sure it's a big part of the story, but I can't help thinking that there's a tie-in to other Google projects. Perhaps Chrome OS and Android, for example?

Do you hate having to remember different passwords for every site you sign up for? Google sympathizes. They're working on a way to let you keep far fewer passwords in your life on the web. It's actually something that sites like Plaxo and Facebook already do: allowing you to register for a site by sharing information from an existing account (like your Gmail, for example).

The information never gets stored by the new site you're signing up for, so using your existing credentials is both convenient and secure. Plus, you don't get one of those annoying email messages asking you to confirm your account. (Is it just me, or do those things get marked as spam most of the time, anyway?)

Google's working on some code that will let companies offer this service - it's called "hybrid onboarding," technically - to their users. It's not going to have an immediate impact, but I hope this will cause more sites to get on board with hybrid onboarding and ditch the annoying signup processes and endless passwords.

[via AppScout]

... but, in true Google fashion, it's less annoying and invasive! Hooray!

Google keeps rolling out the big guns to their search service -- which is good, as people might've been beginning to think that Google has their attention on other things. But no, Google has their attention on everything. Fingers in every pie.

Today, if you're in a subset of Google's users, you can now choose even more ways to display your search results. You've probably noticed that 'More Options' button in the top left corner -- well now, at the bottom of that list, there are now the following options:

• More text -- you can get a good 50-100 words from each page now, without having to click through!
• Images from the page -- this option shows you a couple of images from each search result. I'm sure there's a good use for this, I just haven't worked it out yet.
• Page previews -- the big one! Now you get a little thumbnail showing you what the target page looks like.

And that's about it. Some of you will have none of the above options -- and if you're like me, I have all of the options on my laptop, but only two of them on my desktop. I have no idea why -- I guess they are all being gradually unfurled.

I'm not quite ready to reveal just how geeky I am, so I'll spare you the massive deluge of Star Trek jokes. My apologies in advance if one or two slip past your shields.

Anyway... Over on the Google Wave Developer Blog they've just announced that they're ready to start implementing the federation of Wave servers. This doesn't mean a whole lot to most of us, only that it means the Borg Collectiv-- er, The Google Wave Team, is plodding ever onwards, driven by its impulse engines towards some kind of epic singularity where all email servers will be wiped out and replaced with Wave servers.

And what a glorious day that will be. But yeah, if you're a developer -- or ISP? -- now's the time to get in there and integrate your experimental Wave server with Google's sandbox! With the open specification and open source nature of Wave it will be interesting to see what other developers are hiding up their sleeves

[On a side note, our great Google Wave invite giveaway was a great success. There should be more news about that later today -- and the lucky winners should start to receive their invites in the next few days!]

The latest Windows version of Google Chrome, version 4.0, is now in beta. It's reportedly a scorching 30% faster than the current release, and it includes a bookmark syncing feature that's been floating around in the developer preview version of the browser for some time.

Activate bookmark syncing on each of your computers, and Chrome will automatically synchronize any changes to your bookmarks across all your machines. It's made possible by the magic of XMPP, which also powers Google Talk. Sound good? Go ahead and download Chrome 4.0 Beta.

This beta version of Chrome is also notable for what it leaves out: extensions support. According to Stephen Shankland at CNET, Google is reworking the extensions interface for Chrome, so that feature is disabled for now. Shankland also tracked down some news on the upcoming Chrome Mac Beta. The team working on it has been instructed to fix all their high-priority bugs by the end of the week, and it looks like getting the Mac version out is near the top of Google's to-do list.

[via CNET]

We've already mentioned other ways to power up Google Chrome. Before extensions arrived on the developer channel, Userscripts and bookmarklets were your only options. Both are still great ways to add some kick-ass functionality to Chrome. If you're running the stable or beta builds, you may want to stick to them for now.

• 10 handy Userscripts for Google Chrome users
• 15+ handy bookmarklets for Google Chrome (and other browsers, too!)

Now, onto the extensions!

If you have a favorite that I left off, feel free to share it in the comments!
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The story of how NewsGator attempted to corner the market on consumer RSS has taken another strange turn. In an interview with Steven Hodson published on Hodson's Shooting at Bubbles site, Bradbury admits that he is no longer employed by NewsGator, but has retained the full rights to his popular FeedDemon RSS reader. NewsGator continues to offer FeedDemon, and the application is still NewsGator-branded, but the clear implication here is that NewsGator no longer owns the rights to the most popular native Windows RSS feed reader.

It's no secret that NewsGator almost single-minded focus on capturing the lucrative enterprise market allowed its efforts in the consumer space to falter, ultimately leading to NewsGator shutting down their once-popular NewsGator Online feed reader, having conceded the online feed reader battle to Google's upstart Google Reader, which has iterated faster, and performing better than NewsGator's online reader for a few years.

It's unfortunate that NewsGator has given up on this market. While it's certainly true that Google has a powerful and successful product on its hands, there is certainly room in the RSS space for more than one dedicated company. What this means for FeedDemon's Mac equivalent, NetNewsWire remains to be seen, but since NewsGator's current push for more enterprise business relies on the talents of Brent Simmons, NetNewsWire will likely remain a NewsGator property for the foreseeable future.

Whether that is good news or not is anyone's guess.

UPDATE: The previous headline of this post turned out to be incorrect, as Nick Bradbury points out in the comments. The relationship between FeedDemon, NewsGator and Bradbury is a bit confusing, but what he said in the interview was this: "I'm no longer employed by NewsGator. FeedDemon remains a NewsGator-branded product, but I'm 100% in charge of it now, and I'm once again an indie developer. FeedDemon is my sole focus – and my sole source of income." So, NewsGator owns FeedDemon, Bradbury works on FeedDemon, but Bradbury does not work FOR NewsGator any longer.

Bradbury also pointed us to a post by NewsGator's Greg Reinacker, explaining more about where things stand.

Minimalist Gmail is a Firefox plugin that gives you control over whether to hide or show each part of the Gmail interface. You can take out individual buttons and menus and, yes, even ads. There are Greasemonkey scripts that do similar things, but not every Firefox user has delved into userscripting, so this simple add-on makes a nice alternative.

One of the nicest things about Minimalist Gmail is the way it handles chat. You can hide the chatbox, but as long as you're signed into chat, you'll still see new messages if they come in. If you're using other Gmail skins, Minimalist Gmail might be compatible with those, too. It works with my favorite clean Gmail look, Helvetimail.

[via Lifehacker]

If you haven't heard of Google Wave yet -- a) wake up! and b) watch this tech demo. It's long, but if you're a nerd, or someone who uses the Internet a lot, you'll find it more exciting than the latest Harry Potter film. And at only 80 minutes, it's not a potentially-bladder-exploding endurance event, unlike the bespectacled wizard wannabe.

And with that said, the goodies: Download Squad are giving away Google Wave invites. We're going to start giving away invites whenever we have them to give away and today, to get the ball rolling, we've got 20 up for grabs! If things heat up, we'll scrounge under the couch cushions until we find more!

Wave is just starting to pick up steam, with more gadgets and gizmos and robots appearing every day. With reports of Google Wave server federation (the ability for anyone to run a Wave server) coming soon, and the sandbox walls being torn down, now's your chance to get in on the action.