Google seems to be getting ready for a head-on battle with market leader Microsoft by drawing up plans to launch it’s own Operating System which they are referring to as Chrome OS. The operating system is being billed as a next generation OS catering to the needs of the modern times. It will be an open source OS and will be built upon the Linux kernel.

Microsoft could easily create issues if it sticks to it’s guns stating many times in the past that Linux uses some of it’s proprietary technologies. Let’s see where this goes. By the way, take a look at the features of the future Chrome OS from Google.

Google has decided to move it’s chief products like Gmail out of beta. It’s being done to promote the efficient products with prospective corporate clients. With competition heating up, drop in ads sales, and a stagnating slowdown all around us, the company has definitely taken a positive step.

I am happy that Gmail and other products like Google Docs and Spreadsheets will finally be out of Beta!

Google Adsense has added a new feature called, “Adsense for Domains”. By using this feature, users can park their domains at Google with Adsense displaying ads and the publisher earning money on his domain (which he is yet to use).

Domains are subject to approval from Google. So, publishers who are looking to earn those extra bucks on their unused domains can now do it using Adsense.

I will use the service myself. Let us see how effective it will be.

Well, a new feature introduced by the Gmail team lets users set themes on their Gmail Inbox. Yep, you can read the official blog entry on the Gmail Themes feature to know more. It is similar to what Google already offers on personalized Google pages.

You can select from a variety of themes or skins for your own personal Gmail experience. Let’s see what’s up next from them.

On another development stemming from Google, Lively : the online virtual reality service (similar to SecondLife) will be shut down by the first half of next year. Not, a very pleasant news but I guess Google has decided to close down the service to concentrate more on search related avenues. My view is that due to the economic downturn affecting everyone, Google has started feeling the heat with it’s ad revenues dwindling (and that affects me too as I run Google ads on my site!). In order to concentrate on it’s “core” businesses, Google has taken this decision.

Well, I got the chrome today and so must have many of you out there. I am just finished installing it on my laptop (it is a web installer) and have imported settings from Firefox. As I write this post from Chrome itself, I feel the browser needs a lot of testing before we come to any kind of conclusion.

As for the Fox fans, there’s nothing called plugins in Chrome (for that added functionality) so do not waste time in finding similarities between the two browsers.

I must mention here that my days with IE8 Beta2 are really great. Microsoft has really done a great makeover of it’s browser. What with all the new functionalities and all. This time IE8 has really taken the lead with innovation (with Chrome following it in some features).

Choose your browser carefully while I still stick to my Fox and test the rest.

Ever since Google announced (by mistake I guess) that they are launching there own browser called Chrome, there’s been a lot of buzz. It was expected to be launched on 2nd September 2008, Tuesday (yeah you tell me when Tuesday will come??? Of course, today is tuesday!).

I tried searching for a download link for Chrome on Google, and found out that there was in fact a website for Chrome at (http://gears.google.com/chrome) (don’t bother following that link, it’s dead). Apparently, after the Chrome comic book leak posted at Blogoscoped.com, Google took the Chrome site down and postponed the launch to 3rd of September.

All this has caused a lot of chromefusion, oops!, I mean confusion. So, I finally decided that in the end I should sit back and wait for the link to appear and for the browser to be made available for download on major sites like Download.com and Softpedia.com before I go hunting for it. Or maybe, I will try it one more time tomorrow??

I don’t know. But, whatever happens I love Firefox and plan to stick with it.

So, Google has finally made public it’s browser called Chrome :

As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

Well, a band of former Google executives have put together a cuil (pronounced ‘COOL’ ) search engine. Or atleast that’s what they have thought of it themselves.

So, what does it have for us? Well, we have to test the results from this new search engine and check it out. I might test it for a couple of days from now and then match the results to that from Google’s own engine.

Many of you might already know that Google purchased Feedburner last year. Well, it was about time that we all started noticing some changes on Feedburner. Well, looks like our wait’s over.

Google has announced that they are retiring Adsense Referral Ads by the end of August 2008. This is what they have to say:

During the last week of August, the AdSense referrals feature will be retired for both AdWords advertiser products and Google products. After careful consideration, we believe that we can best serve our advertisers and publishers through two alternative offerings, AdSense for content and DoubleClick Performics Affiliate.

So, it’s curtains for the beloved referral ads. This comes in the wake of Google acquiring DoubleClick. I am sure gonna miss those referral ads. They were a great feature from Google Adsense. Anyway, if you too are gonna miss them, the closest recommendation from Google for addicts like us is this:

If you’d prefer to manually select the ads that appear on your website in the future, we encourage you to check out DoubleClick Performics Affiliate

So, hurry up and replace the referral ads on your sites with regular Adsense ads to minimize loss of revenue. If you have any questions out of sheer panic, then head over to this post on the Adsense Blog that talks about a lot of “sheer panic” questions and the right reply to them is listed.

If you love a website or if you visit a website quite often and are wondering when it will get Gears enabled, then you don’t really need to wait that long. Even if your favorite website is eons away from integrating Google Gears into their web application, fear not. GreaseMonkey to the rescue!

In this article over at the Tutorial Center at Google Gears, it is very neatly indicated as to how you can inject Gears script into your favorite website using GreaseMonkey.

They have even given us an example as to how to enable Wikipedia to work offline.

So, the next time you visit your favorite website, try to get it Gears Enabled.