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While Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has lost the most share since Chrome’s launch, Google has hurt Mozilla’s Firefox, too: Without Chrome, most of those gains probably would have been Firefox’s.

According to Web analytics firm Statcounter, Google Chrome represents about 7% of the market, up from 4% last September, when Chrome turned one year old. Firefox comes in at 31%, or roughly flat from last September. IE is about 55% of the market, down from 58% last September, according to Statcounter. We’ve seen similar growth on Business Insider: Chrome now represents 11% of visits, according to Google Analytics.

Chrome is one of the many ways Google is trying to kill Microsoft. We’ll see another one this year when Google begins shipping Chrome OS, an operating system based on the Chrome browser that could potentially threaten Microsoft’s Windows cash cow.

Google has stated that one of the reasons for acquiring Picnik was to have an online image editor that could work with their upcoming Google Chrome OS.

Google Chrome OS would be a cloud based operating system that would run pretty much from inside a web browser.

Since Google does not plan to bundle any application with the operating system itself, they are aiming to have online editions of most of the routing stuff.

Google already has an online office suite in the form of Google Docs. They also have storage on it. Google Picasa Web is an online storage for photos and videos. Picnik pretty much satisfies the need to have a functional image editor on Chrome OS.

Via, techwhack

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When Google announces it was working on an operating system for netbooks and other devices, the company said netbooks with Chrome OS would start shipping in late 2010. But it looks like Acer may be fast-tracking its first Chrome OS netbook for a mid-2010 launch.

We already knew that Acer was working on a machine with Google’s operating system. Now Digitimes reports that it could ship by the middle of the year. It’s not clear whether this means that Google plans to push up its launch date for Chrome OS or if Acer plans to release a machine running beta software.

This isn’t Acer’s first foray into a Googlecentric netbook. The company also offers a mini-laptop that dual boots Google’s Android operating system and Windows 7. But Android is an OS designed for smartphones (and increasingly for low power tablets), while Chrome is specifically designed for devices with larger screens and faster processors.

If you can’t wait for Acer and other netbook makers to start preloading machines with Chrome OS, you can download pre-release builds of Chromium OS today. Chromium is the open source, beta version of Chrome OS. It’s still a work in progress and under heavy development. But it already supports a pretty wide range of netbook hardware.

Via, liliputing