As part of the European Union's antitrust agreement with Microsoft , the company will be required next year to show a list of alternatives to Internet Explorer to any Windows user with IE installed as their default browser. Love or hate the government intervention, it's notable to see which browsers are about to get a big boost in user numbers. The EU says increased viability in the browser market will lead to more competition and more innovation. Here are the companies that will get a first crack at new levels of market viability in Europe. Sponsor On the Front Page - The Best Known 5 The first page of the Choice Screen, which users will be presented with when they first turn on their computers or when they click a link for it later, will feature whichever five browsers have the largest market share over the previous 6 months. Microsoft will begin showing the page to users in March, 2010. Right now the top 5 will include, in the order listed on an EU page about the program: Apple Safari - that's right, even for Windows! Google Chrome - so soon. If Chrome can grow so fast, it makes you wonder if government intervention is really needed. Of course, Chrome has been promoted prominently on Google pages. That could become part of the next antitrust issue. Microsoft Internet Explorer - gets better all the time, even with dominant market share. Couldn't the EU just require people to stop using IE 6? Mozilla Firefox - the classic that's most effectively challenged IE. In fact, it's done so pretty effectively. Too bad Chrome now runs circles around its performance. Opera - loved by mobile users, loved by Europeans. Below the Fold - The Smaller Challengers Users will be able to scroll the Choice Screen horizontally and see the next 7 most popular browsers at the time. Here's who the EU lists as those browsers today. AOL - chuckle if you will, but AOL is doing a lot of innovative work with social networks and lifestreaming these days. Maxthon - is a popular browser in China and has its sights set on topping Opera in Europe. K-Meleon - says its a super-fast Windows browser built on Gecko, the same layout engine Firefox uses. Flock - is a Mozilla-powered browser that integrates a whole lot of social features. It's got such a great feature set that we recently asked Why don't you love Flock? Avant Browser - says that it, in fact, is the browser that's the fastest. It includes an inline RSS reader and a number of other interesting features. Sleipnir - is a highly-customizable browser that says it's big in Japan. Slim Browser - a Windows browser focused on automating processes. That's the field, so far! Do you think this move will foster increased innovation? Do you think it's needed? Discuss

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Meet the 12 Lucky Browsers European IE Users Will Be Shown Next Year

In an interview with TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington at LeWeb today, Google's Marissa Mayer discussed some of the new product that Google announced over the last year, including the recent integration of real-time news streams into the default search pages, Google Music Search and Google Wave. Talking about the future of search, Mayer expects that people will soon do searches by talking to their phones, or through services like the newly announced Google Goggles . Sponsor Going Beyond Text While Mayer expects the search market to continue to grow, she also thinks that a lot of additional growth can come from introducing new ways of searching the web. Translation and personalization are also a major issue for Google. Asked about SearchWiki - which Arrington considers a failure - Mayer said that Google wants to morph the user experience a bit, but didn't go into any details. Regarding the Google Goggles and Google's current dependency on text to power its search, Mayer noted that the application looks at more than just location data and image recognition algorithms. Speech recognition, however, is still easier to do for Google than image recognition. Mobile Search Talking about mobile searches, Mayer said that the number of mobile searches doubled last year. Mobile searches make up slightly more than 5% of all of the search queries that Google processes. Chrome and the ChromeOS With regards to Chrome, Mayer noted that Google wants to focus on the user experience with features like the new tab page. She described the ChromeOS as an anti-operating system. In total, Google sees "tens of millions of Chrome users," though characteristically, Mayer did not go into any details. Google and the News Media Google wants to increase users' engagement with news. According to Mayer, if we were to reinvent the news today, it would look very different from what we know today. She cited Google Living Stories as an experiment that tries to reinvent the news for the 21st century. Currently, readers tend to come to articles from Google and only read one article. To increase engagement, Mayer wants to create more personalized services. In addition, she also thinks that newspapers can do a better job at keeping users on their sites. Why, for example, do most sites not offer links to related articles? The Future of News Mayer's vision of the future of news is a personalized stream of news that is portable. The personalization would take into account stories that your friends read, location and a knowledge of the topics a user is interested in. Asked about Rupert Murdoch, Mayer noted that Google partnered with MySpace to aggregate real-time status updates from MySpace users. She hopes that Murdoch will not pull all of his content out of Google. Surprisingly, Mayer didn't completely deny that Google would be willing to pay publishers for their content. Music Search Mayer said that she was happy with Google Music as a start, especially because it includes song lyrics. Mayer sidestepped any discussion about the future of Google's Music search feature. Google and Social Networks Asked about Google Social Search, Mayer noted that search can help social networks by helping users to find experts in their circle of friends. Mayer noted that users are more likely to trust their friends when it comes to certain queries (snow conditions, for example). The perfect search engine would also be able to crawl private updates that a user is credentialed to see. Mayer also noted that Google might be able to help to create an authority ranking system for real-time updates from services like Twitter and Facebook. Google Wave Arrington asked Mayer if users need to be trained better to understand Wave or if Google plans to tweak the experience. Permanent URLs are one of the features that Google plans to add. The fact that Google Wave doesn't have critical mass yet is also hindering the experience. Some teams at Google are currently using Wave for their internal communication. Mayer did not make any announcement regarding the future of Wave. Discuss

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Marissa Mayer Talks About Wave, Music Search and the Future of News

The Google Chrome team released a beta version of its Mac browser this morning and opened up an official gallery of browser extensions . That's exciting news because the addition of more than 300 extensions, combined with blazing speed and good stability, makes Chrome the best browser on the market today. We got a chance to talk with Nick Baum, Product Manager and Brian Rakowski, Director of Product Management at Google Chrome this afternoon and they shared a number of interesting tidbits with us about the nature and future of extensions in Chrome. Sponsor Chrome was released more than a year ago and users have been clamoring for extensions ever since. Rakowski and Baum said that a request for extensions was bug #18 filed in the browser's bug tracking system - it's something that Firefox has conditioned users to expect. Now those extensions are here and it's a very interesting story. Understanding the Versions of Chrome Between Chrome, Chromium, dev and beta releases, things are getting a little complicated. Here's how it breaks down: Chromium is open source developer channel, "the bleeding edge" of Chrome development. That's what we've been using here on Mac and it's the only Mac version today that supports extensions. It's untested and less stable than the other versions. We've been using it for months, though, with only occasional problems. Chrome is the official release. There are 3 versions of Chrome: dev , beta ( Windows or Mac ) and stable (Windows only). The vast majority of users use the stable version, Mac users got beta build 4.0 today. Dev builds come out every week or so and are at most 1 week behind Chromium. Baum and Rakowski asked in our interview for us to please switch to using the Dev version for Mac instead of Chromium as soon as it supports extensions. Mac Dev Version Will Get Extension Support Very Soon Some of Nick Baum's Favorite Chrome Extensions So Far Aviary - screen capture and image editing Google Docs PDF/PPT Viewer Google Translate - truly, a wonder to behold Brizzly - an advanced Twitter experience, built by Baum's former co-worker on Google Reader, Jason Shellen Right now the official extension gallery won't allow Mac users to download extensions. Officially, at least. This bookmarklet will allow you to install them in Chromium on a Mac with just one extra click. (Thanks, MG Seigler , for finding that.) That bookmarklet will not allow you to use extensions in the official beta for Mac that launched today, just in Chromium. Baum and Rakowski told us today that the next dev build for Mac will allow extensions. That could be out as early as tomorrow morning or in a few days, and it's anyone's guess when extension support will come to the Beta version released today. (Who wants to use the Beta version when Dev is so much cooler?) Anyone can get extensions from an unofficial site called ChromeExtensions.org and if you're on a Mac it's probably most effective tonight to grab Chromium and the bookmarklet above. Then you can get extensions from the official site as well. Chrome Extensions Are Not Like Firefox Extensions Unlike Firefox extensions, Chrome extensions install without a browser restart and they update automatically. Too many extensions have been a part of the bloat that's made Firefox-use nearly intolerable for many of us, but the Chrome team says extensions will cause no more drag on Chrome performance than opening up a new web page in another tab would. That's a big part of the premise of Chrome, that every process is running distinct from other processes, so one tab can't slow or crash the others. It's an architecture well suited to running web applications, not just loading web pages, and it's great to hear that the extensions platform works the same way. GreaseMonkey? Oh, There Will Be GreaseMonkey One of the most enjoyable tide pools of innovation in the Firefox extension world is built on top of the Javascript user script plug-in GreaseMonkey . These tiny scripts re-organize web pages in radical ways for more usefulness and fun. Scripts like AutoPagerize will load the next page at the bottom of the one you're on, creating a continuous scroll, or WikiDashboard will insert a drop-down dashboard into every Wikipedia page to show a scatter plot graph of who has edited that page the most. The fun never stops with GreaseMonkey. What of Chrome, though? Guess where, Aaron Boodman , the creator of GreaseMonkey works now? That's right, on the Chrome Extensions team. Boodman recently made it even easier for GreaseMonkey scripts to be added to Chrome than they are in Firefox. A single click transforms the scripts into Chrome Extensions, at least for Windows users. We haven't found a successful Mac implementation yet, but we've got our fingers crossed that this will no longer be an issue when full extension support comes to Chrome for Mac. Red Hot APIs On the Way Baum told us today that the team "will add APIs for other data types soon, personal web history being a prime candidate, so extensions will be able to access that and manipulate it in all sorts of ways." That sounds great. It's one thing for a browser to promise not to sell my web history, but it's a whole new ball game when developers can build software that lets me derive all the more value from the history of my activity around the web. Bring it on, Team Chrome! We might feel a little guilty for abandoning the wonderful community project that is Firefox, but this new browser is just so damn good it's hard not to give it a serious try. It just so turns out, we have a particularly relevant sponsor this month that we should point to. Add-on-Con is a major event all about browser add-ons. It's being held in Mountain View, CA this Friday. Google is a sponsor and Aaron Boodman, the man behind GreaseMonkey and now working on Chrome Extensions, is a speaker. Check it out! Discuss

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5 Cool Things to Know About Google Chrome Extensions

Google Chrome may be the best browser on the market. It's faster and more stable than Firefox and today began opening up to user modification with the availability of more than 300 browser extensions . Official Mac and Linux versions were just made available today as well. Can Chrome remain so much stronger than Firefox once a pile of extensions or added on? That's the question and now is your chance to start finding out the answer. It's been more than a year since Google launched Chrome , but today is a big day for the browser. Sponsor The one bit of bad news is that neither the official Mac version nor the developer version we've been testing for months - called Chromium

It's official: Google is ditching its homegrown Gears offline web app API in favor of backing HTML5 for the win. Now that the Chrome browser is becoming available for Mac, and the Snow Leopard OS doesn't play nicely with Gears, Google has decided to trash the whole works and wait for HTML5, even though the spec isn't yet ready and isn't supported by commercially available browsers. Oh, the humanity... or rather, the machinery. Sponsor In the mists of time, back when Gears first launched , we wrote, "We've written many times before about the need for offline web app access... And guess who is most at risk with this announcement? Yes, Microsoft. Google after all has many of the top 'best of breed' web apps now." This was before Google's Chrome browser had hit the scene, and the Gears project was a collaborative effort between Goog, Opera, and Mozilla. But in our coverage of last year's Google I/O conference, we wrote of Gears, "We question whether offline access is even necessary. After all... in today's world, you're never too far from an internet connection. We concluded that offline access is important now, but less important with each passing day." Not only could Gears be used to take online data offline; Google had more in store for Gears users. A few short months later, Google announced a geolocation API for mobile devices running Gears. We wrote, "We think that location-aware software is going to be one of the most interesting markets to watch in the near future and as as location-aware devices become more ubiquitous, we will hopefully see a lot of new and innovative services make use of them." But the party ended with Snow Leopard's release. A change in the newest Mac OS prevents Gears from running on newer Mac computers. Whether or not the relationship is one of causation or mere correlation, Google is now abandoning Gears. As one Google rep told the L.A. Times , "We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites." Believe us Google, no one is looking forward to the cross-browser, cross-OS implementation of HTML5 as much as we are. Discuss

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Google Dumps Gears for HTML5

Feedly , the magazine style feed reader we first covered back in August of last year , is now available for the Google Chrome web browser. As with the Firefox implementation of the service, the Chrome version also uses a browser plugin to offer an alternative user interface to Google Reader. This early version of the Feedly for Chrome release offers most of the features found in the original Firefox version of the service, but requires the installation of a dev build of Chrome in order to work. Sponsor Feedly: A Better RSS Reader and More Feedly is much more than just another way to read feeds. Although it originally got its start as an alternative UI to Google Reader, today the service is part RSS reader, part social network aggregator, and part search utility. Since its launch in 2008, Feedly's developer Edwin Khodabakchian has constantly added new features including Twitter and FriendFeed integrations, a river of news view , search tools , Mozilla Ubiquity integration , a Feedly "mini" toolbar , and

Google Chrome has begun taking submissions from third party developers. In a blog post written earlier today, Google is asking developers to contribute to the Chrome extensions gallery - an act that will put third party applications on both the Chrome browser and eventually the operating system. Sponsor ReadWriteWeb covered the company's first official extensions in the Spring. Since then Google announced the Chrome OS . As explained in the Chrome OS launch, "Every app you write for the web is a Google Chrome OS app." By embracing 3rd party extensions, Google is one step closer to rendering desktop operating systems obsolete. As extensions replace traditional desktop applications, users will become more accustomed to syncing their data to the cloud. The success of Chrome will depend on whether or not the extensions affect the speed that users have grown to love. The company will open the Extensions Gallery up to "trusted testers" in the near future. Developers can contribute to the project by uploading creations to the Developer Dashboard here . If you need ideas, a good place to start would be to look at the "Most Shared" in the Firefox Add-ons Gallery and think about how you can port some of those gems over for the Chrome experience. Discuss

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The Last Days of Desktop: Chrome Welcomes Third Party Extensions