With IE9, Firefox 5, and Chrome 12 all out, the second browser war is only getting fiercer. Let's take a look at the market share numbers for last month. Between June and July, Internet Explorer dropped 0.87 percentage points, much more than the previous month.

Google has updated version 12 of its browser. Google is pushing out this update as a security fix. Nevertheless, Chrome 13 should be released next month, according to the company's schedule of releasing a new stable build every six weeks. Chrome is used by 1 in 8 users on the Web.

Google plans to add real-time communication features into the popular Chrome web browser, according to an announcement on Google's Chromium-dev group. The technology will be powered by its own WebRTC open-source project.

Chrome OS notebooks from Acer and Samsung are expected to launch next month at $349 and $429, respectively. The fact that you can get a more powerful netbook with Windows 7 pre-installed for roughly the same price, or even less, is already putting some people off.

But that doesn't mean you should disregard Google's operating system without so much as giving it a try, especially since it's available as a free download for you to test on your own hardware. We'll show you how to create a bootable USB flash drive with Chrome OS or run the it using a free virtual machine.

The recently launched Chrome OS notebooks from Acer and Samsung offer a glimpse of the future Google envisions, where all your computing is done hassle-free through the browser. Would you be interested in getting one, even if just as a secondary machine? What would you consider the sweet spot in terms of price? Vote and let us know your thoughts in the comments.