The web browser is undeniably the most important piece of software on your computer. These days much of what you do with your computer happens in your browser. Today, Google Chrome leaves beta on Mac and Linux. Just in time! I recently made Google Chrome (beta by then) my default browser. So, that made me feel better about my decision.

How about you? Which browser do you prefer/use?

You can now download Chrome from google.com/chrome.

I mean, having an Android overdose was expected today, but this?! Oh, I bet this day made some Apple fanboys jealous. So, the second day at the Google I/O 2010 was about 2 things; Android and Google TV. This time, live-blogging and live-waving was not enough so Matt Cutts started live-buzzing here along with the event.

Android

Yes, Froyo is out. Android Gingerbread release currently planned for Q4, 2010. Froyo release includes major updates to these areas:

• Speed
• APIs and Services
• Browser
• Android Market

Three of the most striking changes there include over-the-air application installation, remote music streaming and the ability to turn your Android phone into a portable Wi-Fi hotspot.

Except for that, Android 2.2 aims towards improved overall performance that includes (and is not limited to):

• Performance of the browser that has been enhanced using the V8 engine, which enables faster loading of JavaScript-heavy pages.
• Dalvik VM performance boost: 2x-5x performance speedup for CPU-heavy code over Android 2.1 with Dalvik JIT.

Google TV

Google TV is the second big thing revealed on the second day at the Google I/O this year.

Google TV is a new experience made for television that combines the TV you know and love with the freedom and power of the Internet.

If you ask me, the closest thing to Google TV is Boxee box. Have you tried Boxee?

As expected, Google I/O keynote was thrilling. Google made some major announcements regarding the future of the web. The event began at 9 a.m. PDT, that is around 7 p.m. here in Greece. The keynote started with VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra taking the stage followed by VP of Product Management Sundar Pichai. It was all about HTML5 and open standards.

First and foremost, the VP8 codec. Last summer Google acquired On2 for its video compression technology. Today, Google announced VP8 codec as part of a new project named WebM. By the way, VP8 is now open-source.

The WebM project is dedicated to developing a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone.

One of the most important things about this is that the WebM launch is supported by Mozilla, Opera, Google and more than forty other publishers, software and hardware vendors! Read more here.

…including Microsoft!

In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows.

What’s Great About WebM

• Very high quality video
• Great video playback performance, even on older computers
• 100% free and open to everyone
• Supported on popular video sites like YouTube

Later on, Adobe shared some HTML5 love on the stage.

The keynote continued with the Chrome Web Store. The Chrome Web Store opens later this year.

Users will be able to discover a broad range of amazing web apps while developers will be able to reach millions of new users.

Next was Wave. Google Wave has been opened up to everyone as of today (also part of Google Apps as of today).

The keynote ended with an extensive reference to App Engine, GWT and some great things coming from Google + VMWare.

VMWare has been working with Google to bring an open-source layer for the cloud

You can watch the Google I/O 2010 Keynote online here.

I am guessing Day 2 will be all about Android. Woo hoo!

P.S. By the time I am writing this Google Buzz APIs come into play. Take a look here.

So, Square has arrived at another phase of rollout these days. It is now available to everyone who is interested in mobile payments. You should know that it works on the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, and Android devices.

In case you are not familiar with Square, Square is an application that allows anyone to accept payment cards using their mobile device. This is done with a tiny card reader that plugs into the headphone jack on the device. Unfortunately, Square is unavailable outside U.S. for the time being.

Square intends to bring immediacy, transparency, and approachability to the financial world. We want to enable all people to accept payments instantly, with access to all the information they need, in a way that feels amazing and engaging.  When you think about it, paying someone is just another form of communication, an exchange of value that deserves to have the same design and product considerations that every social service prides itself on maintaining.

Square is, in my opinion, a very interesting and innovative technology and I am really looking forward to see how this turns out. Have you tried Square? What do you think?

You can follow @Square on Twitter.

Do you recall the Native Client technology revealed last fall by Google? Well, today Google released a developer preview of the Native Client SDK.

Native Client is an open-source technology for running native code in web applications, with the goal of maintaining the browser neutrality, OS portability, and safety that people expect from web apps.

With the Native Client SDK -which is available under Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux- you can build web apps that seamlessly use native C/C++ code to perform high-performance computation, render 2D/3D graphics, play audio, and respond to mouse and keyboard events. If you are interested in building Native Client apps, visit code.google.com/p/nativeclient-sdk.

Check out the Getting Started guide for more instructions for building and running the examples.

Last year, Mozilla introduced this nice tool that helped Firefox users keep their plugins up-to-date. Today, Mozilla announced the expansion of this plugin check coverage to work with Safari 4, Chrome 4, and Opera 10.5.

Outdated plugins are a major source of security and stability risk for web users, and some studies have put the proportion of users with older versions as high as 80%.

Just visit mozilla.com/plugincheck/ to run a plugin check for your browser.

You should also check out SecBrowsing, another powerful tool that helps you keep your browser and plugins up-to-date. If you are using Google Chrome, there is a SecBrowsing extension that alerts you if plugins are out-of-date.

diaspora (origin: Greek, διασπορά – “a scattering [of seeds]“) is a project which is mainly about privacy and social networks. As it states itself, diaspora is the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network.

Diaspora aims to be a distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, will let us connect without surrendering our privacy. We call these computers ‘seeds’. A seed is owned by you, hosted by you, or on a rented server. Once it has been set up, the seed will aggregate all of your information: your facebook profile, tweets, anything. We are designing an easily extendable plugin framework for Diaspora, so that whenever newfangled content gets invented, it will be automagically integrated into every seed.

diaspora is the birth child of four NYU computer science students: Daniel Grippi, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, Raphael Sofaer and Maxwell Salzberg. It is currently hosted on Kickstarter and the software will be released at the end of the summer under aGPL (Affero General Public License).

Here are some key features coming to diaspora this summer:

• Full-fledged communications between Seeds (Diaspora instances)
• Complete PGP encryption
• External Service Scraping of most major services (reclaim your data)
• Version 1 of Diaspora’s API with documentation
• Public GitHub repository of all Diaspora code

Privacy

Since the start of this year, a lot of stuff has been going on around privacy on the web. I think that privacy is an integral part of the web as we know it and this is why I believe diaspora is so important right now. Especially now that social networks are even more centralized. I really liked it when I read this regarding diaspora.

We believe that privacy and connectedness do not have to be mutually exclusive.

ReadWriteWeb refers to diaspora as an ambitious undertaking to build an “anti-Facebook”. Though I am not sure if diaspora will ever manage to be a successful “anti-Facebook”, I am curious to see what will happen to this initiative by the end of this year.

Read more about diaspora here.

365 days ago Google reached out its venture capital arm, Google Ventures. A year later Google unveils more information about Google Ventures.

You can now find out more about the people that make up the growing Google Ventures team as well as information on the 10 currently announced portfolio companies.

The 10 portfolio companies announced there include:

• Adimab
• Corduro
• English Central
• OpenCandy
• Pixazza
• Recorded Future
• SCVNGR
• Silver Spring Networks
• VigLink
• V-Vehicle

All the companies mentioned above are quite interesting. However, there is one that in my opinion really stands out, Recorded Future.

Recorded Future is a new type of search engine which allows you to explore temporal information about people, companies, locations and events that take place in relation to these entities. Interested in what led up to the General Motors bankruptcy or what will happen to Apple next month? Or perhaps you want to know where Hu Jintao traveled recently, and where he plans to travel in the future.

So, what do you want to know about the future?

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