We've posted our first impressions of Google Chrome, and after extended use most of them have held up. Chrome is fast, feature-rich and stable, not to mention highly usable. But Google's in-house innovations (the multi-threaded engine, Javascript handling and task manager, mainly) make up a tiny portion of the user experience. The rest of the interface features, usage mechanics and touted features have clear and very public parentage—in one of Chrome's four largest competitors.

Now, that's not to say that Google has explicitly "stolen" anything from IE, Firefox, Opera or Safari. They have, as of now, acknowledged that they owe a great debt to some of the other large players in the browser market. After all, they're using Safari's WebKit engine, receive billions of revenue-pumping referrals from Firefox's Google search bar, and have open-sourced much of Chrome. For most users, though, these gestures and acknowledgments will go unnoticed, and features previously incorporated into other popular browsers will be seen first on Google's. I've put together a list of some of Chrome's most interesting features, including the mainstream browsers that "inspired" them.

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Three of the best mobile browsers that act like grown up ones are Mobile Safari, Skyfire and Opera Mobile 9.5. Even though the latter two (both for Windows Mobile) are still betas, Laptop Mag decided to toss them all into a race anyway, seeing which could deliver piping hot content the fastest. They ran Opera and Skyfire on an AT&T HTC Tilt, so everyone was surfing on the same 3G network with beefy hardware. Spoiler: Skyfire delivered pages in one third of the time it took Safari or Opera. It's because Skyfire cheats.

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The iPhone 2.0 software might be shakier than a true believer's legs in the presence of Steve himself, but there's at least one benefit (besides the app goodness): Mobile Safari 2.0 is much zoomier. John Gruber ran the benchmarks, comparing them against historical ones, and found that it runs at least 1.7 times faster than before, if not faster (depending on the test). Check out all the numbers over there, if you care about the details, and not just the zip zip away. [Daring Fireball via Ars]

Much like the way Safari has handled Quicktime videos on former versions of the firmware, the new 2.0 release now allows you to watch embedded YouTube content with your iPhone or iPod Touch, albeit via the YouTube app. Navigate to a page with embedded YouTube content and press play, then watch as Safari hands off the video duties to the YouTube player which then plays the video in H.264. Really, that's better than watching it embedded, and makes the handheld Web browsing world that much closer to its desktop rival.

Just a quick note for you iPhone 2.0 users regarding entering domain names. In the original firmware there was a handy ".com" button when entering URLs, but you had to manually type ".org" and ".net" and ".co.uk" and other domain suffixes. While it wasn't a total pain in the arse it was still rather annoying. Now, though, you simply hold down the ".com" button and presto, you're offered the above mentioned options as one-click entries. No, you can't assign your own just yet, but we see that as a feature in the future. Why this was a priority on Apple's iPhone to-do list and cut-and-paste wasn't is puzzling, but we're still glad it's there. [TUAW]

Google's brand new Gtalk webapp for the iPhone is as crappy as I expected it would be. It has a nice design, and sending messages was easy, but at the end of the day it's still running in Safari—which means if you get a call you are signed out of chat. And unlike other web-based IM apps, Gtalk doesn't work in the background, so interruptions as simple as going to the home screen sign you out too. Also, there are no preference settings, so you are stuck looking at your whole contact list, online and off. Gtalk's AIM support is also curiously absent from this release. In short, this program sucks. If you're looking for a solid IM solution before the App store opens, I strongly recommend Agile Mobile's AM client recently released on Installer, which I've been playing around with.

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Ever since Steve Jobs showed the speedy new iPhone 3G in a browser faceoff against the Nokia N95 at WWDC, users on Howard Forums have been crying foul. They say His Steveness's test of loading the National Geographic homepage was bogus because the N95's browser uses Flash, a feature that the iPhone's Safari lacks. We ran our own tests of the N95 browser with Flash turned off in New York and San Francisco, and found some interesting results: The N95 is often slower than was demoed at WWDC. But much, much faster with the free Opera browser with it's images optimised server-side.

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Samsung has presented their L870 Symbian-based smartphone at the S60 Summit 2008, which has started today in Barcelona. Some blogs are speculating that it includes Apple's Safari, even while neither Samsung's own press release, nor Apple or Nokia or anyone at the S60 organisation have said it is actually the Apple Safari running on Symbian 9.3. Update: Intomobile confirms that it's the latest S60s WebKit-based browser, as expected. In fact, Nokia is using the summit to push the latest version of their S60 web browser and services.

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The idea behind AppleCore LLCs aTV Flash Drive is that users can reflash their Apple TV and add all sorts of cool and useful functionality without having to waste time scrounging around the internet looking for hacks. According to the product website, all you need to do is install the drive and it will do the rest—without voiding your warranty. But what sort of features will it add?

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Usually, Zinio charges five bucks a pop for single digital issues of magazines like Men's Health, Popular Mechanics, Playboy, Penthouse and other classy rags. But on the iPhone, at least for now, you can read them from cover-to-cover for free, if you direct your browser to zinio.com/iphone. Yep, even Playboy. If you're on an actual computer, you can also change your user agent in Safari to mimic the iPhone's, and we've confirmed it'll work just as well. (BTW, the pics are desktop size, not iPhone puny.) No telling how long it'll last though, so you get your licks (or other verbs) in while you can. [iSmashPhone, Thanks Mike!]

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