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Google Polishes Chrome

Wow, a busy couple of weeks for Google. Besides leaking news about its new search engine, Google also announced a new beta of the Chrome browser (seems like this has been a pretty long beta for what seems like a clean and solid product). The already fast Chrome is now supposed to be a third faster and now supports HTML 5.

The bigger news, perhaps, is Google's attempt to corner the market on Web video. It already owns YouTube so it has content pretty well in hand. Now it wants to own the back end, as well. To do so, Google is buying On2 Technologies. On2 offers compression software that drives Flash videos, the way most of us view videos. (In fact, I had to bail on Firefox because it doesn't support Flash on Windows 7.) Analysts see On2 as boosting YouTube, as well as improving how the Chrome browser and Chrome OS handle video.

Finally, a note to Google marketers: It makes no sense to use the same name for a browser and an OS. Who came up with this idea, George Foreman?

Posted by Doug Barney on August 12, 2009


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