So by now most of us have learned that Google finally is entering the browser market, with Google Chrome, an open source browser that promises a lot, but is yet to be released. It is due today, Tuesday, for in a beta version for Windows only, with Mac and Linux versions on the way. While we wait for something truly substantial on this, here’s some required reading:

• Google Chrome comic book, an explanation of the project
• Official Google Blog post
• Google Blogoscoped broke the story
• TechCrunch story
• Coverage by Om Malik: Why is Google releasing a browser, and Mozilla’s response (they’re not worried yet)
• Techmeme discussion

Personally, while I’m excited about a lot of things in Google Chrome, I’ll keep quiet until the browser is actually available in beta. It sounds good though. One final thought, however. Google went with Webkit (used in Safari), not Mozilla’s Gecko engine. That’s got to hurt…

Mozilla Labs has introduced Ubiquity, a new method of interacting with the World Wide Web - and one that allows you to create mashups and more integrated communications.

We’ll let Aza Raskin from Mozilla Labs explain:

You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed. This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them.

This kind of clunky, time-consuming interaction is common on the Web. Mashups help in some cases but they are static, require Web development skills, and are largely site-centric rather than user-centric.

It’s even worse on mobile devices, where limited capability and fidelity makes this onerous or nearly impossible.

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