Internet Explorer 8 release candidate 1 which was released last week is getting a lots attention and might pose competition to Google Chrome, the browser which is supposed to get IE users to switch to Chrome.

Both the browsers now have 1% market share and considering IE 8 was released last week it do doing very well. The attention might be due to web developers the world over downloading IE8 to get their sites up to spec before users start switching from IE7 en masse. Likewise, Windows 7 comes with IE8 installed by default, so Microsoft’s recent Windows 7 Beta push can’t be hurting those numbers, either.

One very good feature of Google’s Chrome is the page which you get when you open a new tab which gives  thumbnail previews of Most Visited, Recent Bookmarks and Recently closed tabs.

You can now get this page in Firefox if you install the new Google Toolbar 5 beta.

When you open a new tab, Google Toolbar can preload it with useful information. With one click, you can get to the web resources you use most often.

Links to websites you visit the most

Chances are you visit some websites on a regular basis. The Google new tab page provides up to nine image thumbnails and links for those websites automatically.

Click a thumbnail to open a website, or right-click it to access options to open it in another new tab or in a new window. Thumbnails won’t display until Toolbar has saved at least three thumbnails.

Recently saved websites

Up to nine most recently created Google bookmarks and browser bookmarks appear on the page for easy access.

Recently closed tabs

Links to tabs that you’ve closed within the past five minutes are stored in case you accidentally close something. Up to three links are displayed.

Some other features of the toolbar are -

You can read about all the features here.

The Chrome team is working to bring it’s browser Chrome 2.0 to Mac and Linux before June this year. You can see the developments in Mac here and here. You’ll need XCode 3.1 and gclient. Chrome won’t run on OS X 10.4 and that PowerPC support currently is not planned.

And the Linux pages states -

There is no working Chromium-based browser on Linux. All you can build are some unit tests and a program used for testing the way the browser will render pages.

Mozilla is planning to integrate Prism like features into future release of Firefox. Google Chrome has Google gears integrated into it which allows users to turn web apps into desktop apps and use some of them offline.

Although there are Prism add-on for Firefox, this integrated feature is supposed to provide more functionality.

When you visit a web-based application, you’d be able to click a button to turn it into a desktop app. This would create a desktop shortcut to the application and users would be able to open a window showing just that app. For certain applications, like the Flickr Uploader or Zoho Docs, Firefox might allow you to drag and drop files to upload or create file associations in your operating system so that every time you click on a Word document, for example, Zoho Docs would be opened instead of Microsoft Word. If you use Gmail a lot – after so many uses, Firefox may suggest to you, “Would you like to make Gmail a desktop application?” or “Would you like to add Gmail to your Quick Launch bar?”.

As expected Google Chrome is now the default browser in Google Pack. Firefox bundled with Google Toolbar is still available, but you need to explicitly select it. This means new users will will go in with Google Chrome more. Before the launch of it’s own browser Goggle was promoting Firefox heavily but things are changing fast and it’s going to cause some problems to Firefox. Google’s official alternative to Internet Explorer is now Chrome.

Consider the situation – you use both Firefox and Chrome and have dozens of bookmarks in them but can’t get all of them in a single browser, what do you do? Well  Transmute will help you achieve that. Transmute can format your bookmarks for any of the major browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Chromium and Opera.

It easy to use, as it basically does all the conversion itself. There are a few options available to make sure that the integrity of your bookmarks is maintained. First, you can back up your bookmarks before you try to convert them. Then, to make sure the existing bookmarks in your target browser don’t get deleted, you can add incoming bookmarks instead of overwriting what’s already there.

The simple but powerful application, also available as a no-install portable folder, supports nearly every major browser for Windows—Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Safari, and, of course, Internet Explorer and Firefox. You can set Transmute to export bookmarks to a particular folder, with or without timestamp dates, and have it create its own backup files in case things get messy.

You can get Transmute here.

Bookmarks Manager

Google has released an update of Chrome browser to those signed up for "developer". The update adds some features to the browser,  most of them already standard in other browsers. First, and most anticipated, is a stand-alone bookmark manager, which offers simple tree-nesting views of your bookmarks, and lets you edit and rename your bookmarks. The "privacy" options have been updated as well, to give users more control over what gets suggested and saved by Chrome, and blocked pop-ups now nest in the lower-right corner, with a number to indicate multiple windows. Windows users using a standard beta installation of Chrome won’t see the update, but you can subscribe to the Dev channel in Chrome to get the 0.4 update.

Chrome for Linux

Not exactly but a test shell is now working on Linux. And test shell is according to Aaron Boodman, who works on Chrome and Gears and spotlighted the Linux accomplishment – "The test shell is a very simple browser that the Chromium development team uses for testing our integration with WebKit," the engine that decodes HTML to render a Web page in the browser. "It is the first step of porting Chromium to a new platform."

But the browser is in a pretty raw state the "enter" key doesn’t work,Web pages don’t render correctly, and the browser doesn’t have a real  UI. V8 the JavaScript engine, however, is still working.