Google Chrome, which turns a happy second birthday today, has celebrated by releasing version 6 to the world. The most noticeable change in Chrome 6 is the slightly revised user interface, which has been made simpler through merging of the two menus into one, removal of some unnecessary interface features and a brand new color scheme that is now a grey instead of blue.

Other than the user interface update, Chrome 6 brings improved syncing tools with new support for syncing of web form data and extensions along with bug fixes, patched security holes and speed improvements. Google claims Chrome’s JavaScript performance is three times faster than it was in 2008.

Why the Chrome team has decided to release a major version number Chrome update (5.0 to 6.0) with relatively minor changes is odd. Usually version number schemes leave the first number for major versions and subsequent numbers after decimal places are reserved for minor changes and bug fixes.

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Microsoft Russia has made a major blunder today after posting a screenshot of the upcoming interface of Internet Explorer 9 – the next big revision of Microsoft’s infamous browser. So far Microsoft has teased us with some platform previews showing the JavaScript and HTML5 power of IE9 through the new Chakra engine, but no interface has been revealed.

The image in question, as you can see above, has since been pulled from Microsoft Russia’s press website but they weren’t quick enough for blogs around the internet to download the image and re-post it. Futhermore, Neowin claims to have confirmed the screenshots as real after coercing with sources close to the project.

This single image tells a lot about Microsoft’s direction for IE9. The user interface team has removed the chunky and clunky interface present in Internet Explorer 8 in favor of an ultra-minimalistic design similar to that of Firefox 4 and Chrome. Microsoft has moved tabs to the top area, removed the large Favorites bar to a button on the right hand side along with Home and Settings, removed the search bar and slimmed down the UI as much as possible

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So in a follow up to our original preview showing the latest from the Windows Live Messenger 2011 beta, we now have access to the second beta of the upcoming Messenger update and are here to give you the updates and our impressions. The second Windows Live Messenger 2011 beta comes loaded with bug fixes and improvements including a few new features that we take a look at.

First off, you can download the latest Windows Live Messenger beta from Microsoft’s Windows Live Essentials beta page, and either do a fresh install of Messenger or update, and quite possibly you will want to install some of the other Essentials applications too. Unfortunately regardless of an upgrade or fresh install, you’ll need to restart after you install beta 2.

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Over the next few weeks we will be testing the latest and most popular music players to give you a judgement on which music player is the one to use out of the myriad of players out there. For the first in the series we’ll be taking a look at Windows Media Player, the stock media and music player that comes included with Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

Windows Media Player has been included with Windows since Windows 2000 with Windows Media Player 7, a media player that has slowly evolved from the original “Media Player” that was included in Windows 3.0. The current version, Windows Media Player 12, is included as a component of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and is not available for standalone download. For those of you not running Windows 7, WMP11 is available for download.

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So when we last had a look at Safari 5 we were disappointed to discover that some of the advertised features, extensions support and an extensions gallery, were not included with the original package. It turns out that the support for such extensions has been added in the most recent update to Safari, 5.0.1, so we take another look at the browser today but focus on the included extensions support.

After updating to 5.0.1, which we had to do via the web after we couldn’t find the in-built updater (is there even one?), it’s not immediately obvious where the extension gallery can be found. It’s located at the bottom of the drop down settings menu just above the “About Safari” button, so it’s not the easiest or most obvious thing about the browser. The button for the extension gallery actually just redirects you to extensions.apple.com, which is a bit of a downgrade compared to the fantastic built-in browser in the Firefox 4 beta

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The new Windows Live Messenger Wave 4 Beta has been released, and is packed with possibly the most alterations of any Messenger since the old interface. It appears that this revision of Messenger attempts to connect all social aspects of the internet and integrate them into one program.

Updating from to the beta is very easy, and follows a similar process to the current version. Once updated, you’ll have to reboot which is a slight annoyance but nothing too strenuous. When you open the program for the first time, you’re greeted with a set of options asking whether or not you wish to connect to various services (such as Facebook, Myspace, YouTube and heaps more, but oddly no Twitter yet) or update your profile information. This process takes about a minute and is pretty straight forward.

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Wine, our favorite piece of software to run Windows applications on Mac OS X and Linux, has been updated yesterday to 1.2 – the second major stable revision of the software. There has been some major new features to join Wine, the biggest of which being support for loading and running 64-bit applications in the program on x86-64 processors (unfortunately you can only do this on Linux right now). The 64-bit update brings the addition of two prefixes – one for 32-bit only and one for 64- and 32-bit, much like the current flavours of Windows available on the market.

A few user interface tweaks have also been made in Wine 1.2, including a new icon set for built-in applications, animated cursors, a new application wizard control panel to deal with installed applications and support for a myriad of new languages. This is just the beginning of a long list of over 23,000 changes and 3,000 bug fixes over two years of development effort – a small section of the most important changes can be viewed over at the WineHQ

If you’re in need of a fantastic Linux/Mac program to run Windows applications in for whatever reason, Wine is your best bet for compatibility and stability without having to create a Windows virtual machine inside your operating system. You can download Wine, or get instructions on how to download Wine through your Linux distribution at the WineHQ downloads page. Note that Mac OS X is not fully supported however it will work if you follow these simple steps.

In a follow up to our previous post on HTML5 we now have a video showing a speed comparison between Firefox 3.7, Internet Explorer 9, Opera (unspecified version) and Chrome 6. The latest test preview of IE9 utilises hardware acceleration as well as a new JavaScript engine and better HTML5 support. The Firefox 3.7 Alpha also uses hardware acceleration that matches IE9′s in terms of performance, and Chrome 6 tries to use its engine but ultimately fails miserably.

Most notable from the video below is that Firefox 3.7 actually beats IE9, which recently has been shown to be a speed demon, by around 5%. Both IE9 and Firefox 3.7 used the least CPU power during the test as well. As these browsers are in testing phases one would hope that by a final version things would be even smoother and faster and hopefully with interface improvements (*cough* Firefox *cough*).

It’s quite surprising to see Chrome in last place when it comes to browser speed considering that it was the fastest browser around when it was released and consistently beats non-beta Firefox and Internet Explorer versions in the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark. This could be due to (as stated in the video) an early implementation of hardware acceleration or it could mean that Firefox and IE9′s devs are just better at coding these features into their browsers.

We wait in anticipation of the full releases of all these browsers

Fresh from the VLC team is VLC 1.1.0 with a few new worth additions for any media enthusiast. Big on the list of changes is GPU decoding of H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2 for those with a Windows or Linux machine (Mac users luck out). Currently GPU decoding is limited to those with a Nvidia graphics card however due to ATI driver issues however ATI has stated that this feature will be working in a later build of Catalyst. Intel graphics support will also hopefully be included at a later stage. As for new codec support:

VLC 1.1.0 also includes DSP decoding using OpenMax IL, improved MKV HD support, and compatibility with Blu-ray subtitles, MPEG-4 lossless, VP8, and WebM. The latest build touts a better audio experience, with additions such as support for DVD-Audio files, AMR-NB, MPEG-4 ALS, Vorbis 6.1/7.1, FLAC 6.1/7.1, and WMAS, not to mention tweaked meta-data and album-art features.

VLC 1.1.0 also touts a decoding speed boost of up to 40% thanks to code optimizations including thousands of lines of code removed to make the player lighter and faster. VLC also aims to be more stable, as usual with new software builds, despite the added features. You can grab VLC 1.1.0 through the VideoLAN website as it appears as though the auto-updater is failing in the old VLC (or at least it was when we tried). Head below for our opinions on the player.

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HTML5 is currently being developed as the next major revision of HTML. The main feature? It will remove the need for using plug-ins such as flash in web browsers. HTML5  will use <audio> and <video> tags instead of relying on embedding flash into a web page.  This will generally provide a boost in performance and will make older plug-ins such as Flash or Silverlight obsolete. It won’t happen over night but eventually it will happen.

Here’s a video of Quake II being played in a browser.