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Google published a tool Wednesday called Browser Size that lets Web developers gauge how much of their pages are visible in people's browsers.

With its own analysis, the search giant found that a lot of people couldn't see the download button for Google Earth because they had to scroll before it would show in their browser. Revamping the page increased download rates 10 percent, according to a blog post by Browser Size team member Arthur Blume.

The tool loads a Web page behind a pastel overlay that indicates what fraction of people can see a particular point on the Web page. The upper left is of course 100 percent, but when the point is farther down or toward the right, fewer and fewer can see it. The overlay statistics are based on a fraction of the people who visit the Google.com home page, said programmer Bruno Bowden.

"For example, if an important button is in the 80 percent region it means that 20 percent of users have to scroll in order to see it," Bowden said.

I'm intrigued by this sort of data. It's interesting to see the jump between old-style screens with a 4:3 aspect ratio and newer HD-style models that usually are in a wider 16:10 proportion. I'd be particularly curious to see how the overlay changes from one Web page to another--for example, I'd imagine gaming site visitors have bigger screens than mainstream Web pages.

Here's a hint if you're reading this on a laptop with a modest screen size: to see more of the Brower Size overlay, try pressing Ctrl-minus to zoom out.

I spend a lot of time looking at Web pages and have no particular fondness for scrolling. I therefore appreciate various efforts to maximize browser real estate devoted to actual Web content. Perhaps Google's tool will help on the Web design end, too, helping justify redesigns to put the good stuff in plain sight.

Google's browser has passed Safari in terms of worldwide browser usage--at least by one measurement.

NetApplications' measurements of browser usage share, which track which browsers individuals use based on visits to the company's network of Web sites, gave Chrome the third-place spot after No. 1 Internet Explorer and No. 2 Firefox for the week of December 6 through 12, according to a Computerworld story Tuesday. Chrome had 4.4 percent share to Safari's 4.37 percent.

Google released beta versions of Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux on December 8. Earlier, only developer channel versions had been available. Google plans to release the "stable" versions January 12, according to the Chromium development calendar.

Take these usage share numbers with a grain of salt. Even though 0.03 percentage points still is a lot of people in the real world, it is a small fraction, and a change in Net Applications' assumptions in August led to share changes two orders of magnitude more dramatic. Weekly statistics also vary: Although Firefox cleared 25 percent share in one week of November, it averaged only 24.72 percent for the overall month.

I've asked various browser makers about how trustworthy they view NetApplications' statistics to be. The answers generally are favorable but not ringing endorsements.

Regardless of the precise details, though, the Chrome trajectory is upward: its November usage share was 3.93 percent to Safari's 4.36 percent.

And although Google relied on word of mouth for promoting its original online search product, it's taking a more active role with Chrome. The latest example: a "Chrome for Christmas" site that lets people send invitations to download Chrome.

Firefox proved that a browser not bundled with an operating system can be successful, and Chrome could show the idea isn't a fluke if its growth continues.

The Google phone may use what is probably the fastest smartphone chip on the planet and could become the first non-Windows smartphone to tap into this kind of processing power.

Conspicious among the Google phone's leaked specifications is the Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm. Snapdragon is the first gigahertz-class ARM-based processor to be used in smartphones. (In current implementations, Snapdragon runs at 1GHz.)

And the Google phone (aka, Nexus One) would--if it becomes an actual product--have some interesting company, though both of the rival phones that use the chip are in the Windows Mobile camp: the Toshiba TG01 and HTC HD2.

Interestingly, all of these phones have, relatively speaking, large screens: more than four inches in diagonal size. The Google phone will also add high-resolution (based on an OLED touchscreen) to that.

What's the big picture on all of this? Smartphones are getting larger and more like small tablets (or "media pads"--which is really a more apt description) and their functionality is becoming more akin to personal computers. So, faster processors are necessary (let's not forget Nvidia's Tegra chip or Texas Instrument's OMAP processor) to handle the increasing hardware and software workloads.

Sort of sounds like the old PC mantra. Bigger, better, faster. Bigger storage/memory capacities, better (increasingly sophisticated) operating systems, and faster processors. Which is why Intel is sprinting as fast it can to get its "x86" PC architecture into smartphones. But this market is going to be a hard one to crack for Intel, no matter how much it wows device makers with its technology and marketing clout.

Look no further than Microsoft for proof. Despite its size and status, it is currently losing the smartphone (Windows Mobile) mindshare (and market share) battle to the Apple iPhone. And prospects won't improve with the emergence of devices--such as the Motorola Droid and Google Phone--based on Google's Android operating system, not to mention other popular platforms such as the BlackBerry.

The bottom line is that silicon competition will be varied and vigorous in the smartphone market--unlike the PC space. Which makes the unveiling of every new major smartphone all the more interesting.

Updated on December 15 at 2:20 p.m. PST: adding changes to reflect that it is not yet officially known whether a Google-branded phone would be a commercial product--though a number of reports claim such a phone will be sold next year.

Just as Microsoft advanced the state of the art for programming on Windows, Google is trying to do the same with Web-based software. Its latest move: the release of Google Web Toolkit 2.0.

GWT translates software written in the Java programming language into the JavaScript code that browsers can run natively. The technology is designed to produce fast-executing JavaScript and ease the pains of incompatibilities among different browsers.

Google Web Toolkit, released Tuesday night at a Google Campfire One developer event, fits in with the company's general push to make the Web a more powerful foundation for applications, not just static Web sites. The financial reasoning the company offers boils down to this: more use of the Web means more searching on Google and more search advertising revenue.

GWT is an open-source tool. Among the newer Web sites Google built with it are Wave, Orkut, and the AdWords interface.

"We've been working with those teams in applied R&D in the last year to evolve to meet their needs," said GWT product manager Andrew Bowers. Specifically, he mentioned three new features in the refurbished GWT:

• Speed Tracer, a Chrome browser extension that graphs a Web application's sluggishness over time.

The tool is designed to help Web developers find problems in the complex interactions of JavaScript, the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) that's assuming new duties in describing a Web page, and the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that handle formatting chores. "As more functionality moves from standard JavaScript into HTML and CSS, a lot of things are moving to native functionality, it gets harder to find performance problems," Bowers said.

• "Code-splitting" technology to break Web applications up into urgent sections that must be downloaded immediately and the other parts that can be sent at a more leisurely pace.

Bowers likened the incremental application download feature to streaming video, where people can start watching the video before the full movie has been downloaded. The feature was developed with the Google Wave team, he added.

• Coming from work with the AdWords team is UiBinder, which lets programmers separate an application's user-interface code from the program logic that actually does the thinking. The result: user interface designers can be given free reign without the logic programmers worrying about everything breaking, Bowers said.

Google also has used GWT to develop Google Health and iPhone Web applications such as Google Latitude and Gmail.

But GWT isn't universal at Google. Google Docs and Gmail, for example, rely on JavaScript but don't use GWT. Some of those projects grew from code bases that predate GWT, Bowers said.

But Google is working pretty hard on another JavaScript programming tool called Closure, which has its own compiler to produce fast JavaScript. It's another open-source project, and not just a historical artifact.

Different strokes for different folks, said Bruce Johnson, GWT's technical lead of the different tools.

"Probably Closure is going to be more targeted at someone who wants to write JavaScript to begin with," Johnson said. "GWT is for Java developers or people who see additional benefits to programming that way."

It appears that the Google Goggles search-by-sight tool could soon work not just with mobile phones, but through Google's Chrome browser, too.

"I am working on a 20 percent project to facilitate the input of Web image searching," Google programmer Xiuduan Fang said in a post Tuesday to the Chrome Extensions mailing list titled "Chrome extension for Web Goggles. The 20 percent figure refers to a Google program that permits engineers to devote a fifth of their time to projects of their own choosing.

"We would like to have some browser extensions so that the user can drag a Web image and drop it in an input box on the toolbar...The search results of the image will be shown," Fang said, then asking for advice on how to write it up for Chrome. The original message isn't online, though a response with some pointers is.

Google Goggles currently is available as an application for phones running Google's Android operating system, but Google is working to release other versions, too. A Web browser interface would expand the service's availability beyond phones. Though there are plenty of situations where you might want to point your phone at a subject while out and about, there also are plenty of images on the Web that might provoke further inquiry.

The Goggles feature works by comparing an uploaded image to a database of billions Google has collected and analyzed. It can recognize landmarks and read the text of wine labels, among other things, but until Google works out privacy controls it doesn't make use of its ability to recognize faces. The effort is part of Google's unending effort to expand the scope and utility of its search service.

The new beta version of Google's Chrome browser adds support for extensions, though at present with some limits on user interface choices for programmers.

Two key pieces of Google's effort to make Chrome a more competitive browser fell into place on Tuesday as Google released beta versions of the browser for Mac OS X and Linux.

Tuesday's software release is a version of Chrome that had previously been available only as developer preview software for Mac and Linux machines. "It took longer than we expected, but we hope the wait was worth it," product manager Brian Rakowski said in a blog post.

Macs are widely used, if not as common as Windows machines, and there's been some demand in tech circles for the Mac version of Chrome. Linux, while less widely used among ordinary computer users, has importance of its own: it's the foundation for Chrome OS. That's the browser-based operating system Google hopes will be popular on Netbooks starting next year.

According to the Chromium development calendar, the beta versions are scheduled to graduate to the next level of maturity, "stable," on January 12. Chrome for Windows graduated out of beta almost exactly a year ago.

Google doesn't emphasize product version numbers in the project, instead automatically delivering updates behind the scenes to the browser that take effect when it's restarted. But it does use version milestones to keep track of development internally.

The biggest new feature of Chrome 4.0 is support for extensions, which let people customize the browser. In the Mozilla world, they're called add-ons, and they've been a big part of Firefox's success.

Extensions aren't useful, though, unless people can find them. Google on Tuesday also launched a Chrome extensions gallery page.

There are more than 300 extensions available for Chrome, extensions programmers Aaron Boodman and Erik Kay said in a blog post.

However, extensions on the Mac aren't yet available, though they had been for a time in the developer-preview version. "Extensions aren't quite beta-quality on Mac yet, but you will be able to preview them on a developer channel soon," Rakowski said.

Also on the Chrome for Mac to-do list: a bookmark manager, PDF viewing in the browser, bookmark synchronization, 64-bit support, and my personal favorite differentiator of Firefox 3.6 on the Mac, full-screen support.

Why try Chrome?
For those of you new to Chrome, here's a brief version of why it's my default browser on both Windows and, as of about a month ago, Mac OS X. Your preferences and needs may vary, of course, and I still use Firefox every day, too.

• Speed. It's fast to start up, though not quite as snappy as it once was now that it's not so bare-bones, and rivals are making progress. It's also fast loading Web pages and running JavaScript programs on them.

• Tabs. I spawn innumerable new tabs all day long, and when it takes a long time (I'm looking at you, Internet Explorer), I get infuriated. I also like the order in which new tabs arrive, a style Firefox is mimicking.

• The omnibox. It's a single bar that merges the utility of an address bar and search bar. I hit Ctrl-L (on Windows) or Command-L (on Mac) to pop my cursor up there, and start typing. One nice--if somewhat obscure--feature is fast site search on some domains, so for example I can type A, M, tab, and up pops an Amazon.com icon; what I type afterward is entered as a search on Amazon. That conveniently gets me straight to the search results so I don't have to see yet another Kindle ad.

• A minimal user interface. When browsing, I like my user interface to step aside and make way for the Web page. Scrolling was a wonderful innovation in computers a few decades ago, but I like to avoid it when I can. Chrome puts tabs in the real estate ordinarily devoted to a program's title bar and shuffles the menu controls off to the right of that tab strip (though the Mac version gets a regular menu bar).

Another potential perk: avant-garde Web technology, including WebGL and O3D for accelerated 3D graphics and Native Client for speeding up Web apps with direct access to a processor, are being built into Chrome. Another such Google project, Gears, is already built into Chrome--though Gears doesn't work on Mac OS X 10.6.

There are things you might miss--the full panoply of Firefox extensions, toolbars from Google or others, print preview. And the "browser not supported" error messages on various Web pages are annoying, though in my experience there's rarely an actual compatibility problem. Overall, I like it.

Is Google spying on me?
If you're worried about what new data Google will be able to harvest on you, I recommend a close read of Google's Chrome privacy page. This doesn't worry me much, but I may be insufficiently paranoid. In my opinion, the biggest thing is that Google stores 2 percent of the data it gathers when people type text into Chrome's combination search and address bar, called the omnibox.

That means Google can see not only what you're searching for (as it would for any Google search), but what Web site addresses you're typing as well. The data is anonymized within 24 hours, Google said.

Also, Chrome has a feature called DNS pre-fetching that tracks down the Internet server addresses on Web pages in anticipation that you'll be clicking links on the page. So Chrome--and Google, too, if you're using Google Public DNS--retrieves this information from the Internet.

Updated at 12:30 p.m. PST and 1:20 p.m.. Added further detail.

On2 Technologies has filed an update with the SEC on its proposed merger with Google, hoping to put to rest some key questions.

On2, which makes video compression software, announced Monday that the update includes certain key highlights about the merger and some frequently asked questions.

On2 agreed on August 5 to be acquired by Google for $106.5 million, a deal already approved by its board of directors. The terms call for each share of On2 to be exchanged for 60 cents worth of Google common stock.

With its board anxious for investors to approve the deal, On2 outlined some of the risks to itself and to shareholders if the acquisition is prevented. On2's merger-related expenses have already exceeded $2 million, an amount it would be responsible for if the deal is stopped, it said. With cash reserves of only $2.2 million, such a debt could certainly hurt the company.

Without Google's acquisition, On2 said it might have to grab additional financing to run its business, which could include the sale of certain assets, the issuing of debt, or the release of even more shares.

On2 also admitted that it's had trouble hiring and retaining skilled, qualified employees, a challenge that might be resolved if employees knew they'd be working for a Google instead. Otherwise, if the merger does not move forward, On2 believes its revenues would be impacted by its failure to attract or keep good employees.

To address any conflicts of interest, On2 said none of the members of its board would serve as directors, officers, or employees of Google or receive any money from Google in connection with the merger.

On2 also released an FAQ, hoping to address any concerns on the part of shareholders. Since the Google offer, the board has received no other offers or inquiries from other firms about an acquisition, the company said. The FAQ also goes into great detail about On2's board and key executives and their involvement in the merger.

On2's board has set a special meeting for December 18 for shareholders to vote on the deal, and is urging them to approve it. Proxy cards have also been sent out. If the majority of stockholders okay the merger and all other conditions are met, then it should become effective within two days after the meeting, said On2. Google has said it plans to make On2's technology part of its own Web platform.

The merger initially triggered some On2 shareholders to file lawsuits against the company in August, alleging that the deal undervalued On2 and that certain provisions prevented On2's board from considering other offers. But those suits were settled on October 26, though are currently awaiting final approval by the court.

Under terms of a memorandum of understanding in the settlement, On2 agreed to provide additional disclosures in its final proxy statement and prospectus. However, On2 said the settlement implied no wrongdoing on its part, there was no monetary damage, and the company would have released the same information in its proxy statement regardless of the lawsuits.

A cable giant becomes an entertainment star, while a search giant gets into the DNS business and a software titan becomes map maker.

Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, is buying a controlling stake in the TV network and movie studio NBC Universal in a deal valued at $37 billion. The deal will make Comcast a major media player with several very profitable cable channels, including USA, CNBC, MSNBC, and Bravo. It will also have control over NBC's broadcast networks and TV stations, its film studio, and its amusement parks.

The deal is likely to be scrutinized by government regulators, namely the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission. A marriage between the nation's largest cable and Internet service provider and one of the nation's three broadcast TV stations could ignite old fights over media ownership, a la carte billing, retransmission consent, and cable prices.
•  Can Comcast-NBC play nice with Hulu?

Google wants to unclog Net's DNS plumbing

The Net giant, ever eager for a faster Internet, debuts its Google Public DNS service. With it, Google could become even more central to the Net.

Microsoft Bing Maps Beta adds much richer images

New enhancements for Bing Maps include a Silverlight-powered Web application that brings very detailed satellite and street-level imagery to Bing, along with other tweaks.
• Bing Maps Beta: Cool, but limited
• Google Earth peers into California's eco-future

More headlines

ComScore: So far, online holiday sales are up

Company releases metrics for Cyber Monday and the holiday season to date. And like statistics from other research firms, the numbers are heartening for retailers.
• Study: Cyber Monday sees strong gains
• Cyber Monday bargain hunters out earlier
• Tools for creating holiday-shopping lists
• Study: Sites to bring in billions in holiday donations

In nod to media, Google News policy limited

Google's "First Click Free" policy allowed Google News and search users to discover news articles behind paywalls, but it was easy to abuse. Now, there are limits.

Fake CDC vaccine e-mail leads to malware

AppRiver warns of scammers preying on public interest in the H1N1 vaccine through an e-mail purporting to come from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
• Microsoft: November security updates are fine

AT&T gives up on Verizon ad lawsuit

AT&T has dismissed its lawsuit against Verizon Wireless for running advertisements it claimed confused customers about its 3G network.
• Verizon nixes holiday ads to continue AT&T-bashing

Microsoft actively urges IE 6 users to upgrade

A shopping video and eBay promotion are part of Microsoft's effort to give IE 6 users a reason to upgrade. The company also is trying to move corporate customers away.
• Dell brings Chrome OS to its Netbook
• Latest Firefox beta gets file-handling feature

Barnes & Noble Nook to hit stores later than expected

B&N says it will have the e-readers in some stores on December 7, a week later than expected, because the company is prioritizing delivery to customers who preordered.
• Spring Design Nook injunction denied, but battle's still on

Psystar ceases sales of Mac clones

Following a settlement agreement with Apple, Psystar's Mac OS-loaded hardware is no longer available on its site.

Michael Jackson tops Google, Yahoo search in 2009

That No. 1 ranking should come as no surprise. Web traffic surged on word of the singer's death in June--so much that Google initially suspected an attack.

Google hosts energy experts amid climate talks

Next week, the international community plans to discuss climate change and green energy, and U.S. energy experts kicked things off at Google's offices.

Also of note

• Google runs a fade pattern on home page
• Mark Zuckerberg's grand missive: The translation
• Defense Dept. pulls software over privacy issues

Google has opened up its gallery for developers to share Chrome extensions, a step that soon should make it easier for people to customize the open-source browser.

Aaron Boodman, a leader of the Chrome extensions effort, announced the move on a mailing list posting Monday, and programmer and "gallery master" Lei Zheng shared details in a blog post.

So far, only uploads are permitted. Google plans to let some testers use the gallery to download extensions, too "in the next few days," Zheng said. "We are making the upload flow available early to make sure that developers have the time to publish their extensions ahead of our full launch."

Extensions, a major asset of the Firefox browser and the headline feature of the upcoming Chrome 4 beta, let people modify the browser more to their liking. With them, the browser itself doesn't have to be bogged down with numerous features and configuration options that most people don't want.

One feature of Google's system is that add-ons are automatically updated on Chrome users' computers once the developer uploads a new version.

For developers, the extensions gallery comes with a set of terms and conditions.

One nugget in the legalese: expect Google to use a rating system, as it does for other sites including Android applications and YouTube videos. It's all part of Google's philosophy of using user data to help automatically manage its Web properties in a way that, the company hopes, will be helpful to those who use its sites.

According to the terms and conditions: "The gallery will allow users to rate products. Along with other factors, product ratings may be used to determine the placement of products on the gallery with higher rated products generally given better placement, subject to Google's right to change placement at Google's sole discretion. For new developers without product history, Google may use or publish performance measurements such as uninstall rates to identify or remove products that are not meeting acceptable standards, as determined by Google."