According to LAUNCH, Yahoo! was set to release its own browser, called Axis, tonight at 9PM PT. Apparently someone jumped the gun though, because details, including its live iOS app, have been discovered.

Our own Robin Wauters stumbled onto Yahoo’s trademark application for Axis last December, wondering what it was. Its website: http://axis.yahoo.com/, has all of the details along with the download link.

From the demo, the browser looks like it takes Google’s autocomplete to a whole new level by bringing up pages on the right hand side as you search for them.

Have a look at Yahoo! Axis in action, which installs an extension for your existing browser (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, or Firefox) and sits in the bottom lefthand corner:

Once you click the search box, it expands to show you the results:

In addition to the desktop version, Yahoo! released an iPhone and iPad app (which you can download now) as well:

The iPhone version is pretty slick, as you can see below:

The iPad version clearly uses the full real estate of the larger device:

In an email sent to LAUNCH, Yahoo! outlined exactly what makes Axis different from its competitors:

Yahoo! Axis is a new browser that redefines what it means to search and browse- enabling a seamless search experience on your iPhone, iPad, and even your desktop. Here are some highlights of how Yahoo! Axis brings search to life in a whole new way:

·Smarter, Faster Search with Rich Design: Get instant answers and visual previews so you can continuously discover and explore content without interruption. Never leave the page you are on to view your search results again.

·Connected Experience: Move seamlessly across devices, picking up wherever you left off as you move across your desktop, iPhone, and iPad. Recently visited sites, searches, saved articles, and bookmarks are automatically accessible across all your devices.

·Personal Home Page: Get direct access to your favorite sites and content across all your devices with the customizable Home Page.

Here’s a walkthrough of the product from its project manager at Yahoo!:

As we reported earlier this week, Google’s Chrome jumped over Internet Explorer to take the #1 browser position. Many said that it was “too late’ for Google when it introduced Chrome, saying that Firefox was on a clear path to take on Microsoft’s giant.

While the desktop version of Axis isn’t an actual browser, the fact that there are iOS versions of it that are standalone products makes it one. The big winner in this release could be Microsoft’s Bing, which provides the search results for Axis.

This is the biggest consumer product Yahoo!, which just fired its CEO, has launched in years. Is it too late for Yahoo!, or is the company just getting started?

Tell us what you think about Yahoo! Axis in the comments.

➤ Axis for iPhone and iPad

There are quite a few options when it comes to the browser that you use to surf the Internet. You can pick from Firefox, Safari, IE, Opera, Chrome, and other smaller players that I’m probably missing. Much like mobile devices, the browser has become a powerful platform for developers to build apps on top of.

Google has actually done a fantastic job of highlighting extensions built on top of the Chrome browser in its “store”. I get sent quite a few Chrome extensions these days, but it’s difficult to write an entire piece about each one.

The best extensions serve a single purpose and are drop-dead simple to use. Here are 9 Chrome extensions that you should download and try right now:

Save to foursquare

This simple extension can be triggered from sites like TripAdvisor and Google. All you have to do is click the foursquare button that the extension installs, and it will save it to your “to-do list” within the app. This is the perfect way to use foursquare on the desktop efficiently for browsing to serve a better purpose for mobile later.

Sure, you could stick to browsing foursquare’s website to look for new restaurants, but that’s not a reality.

➤ Save to foursquare

FVD Video Downloader

You’re in the airport and you find a really cool video that you want to watch on the plane, which unfortunately doesn’t have WiFi. How can you easily grab the video and put it on your desktop? There are numerous ways to do this, but this particular Chrome extension makes it super simple.

You can also download flash games, music MP3 format, as well as MP4 or FLV video files in just one click. This baby has kept me entertained on many a flight and train rides.

➤ FVD Video Downloader

Writer

If you’re a blogger, writer, or just a simple note-taker, you probably know that getting the thoughts from your brain to the desktop can be a rough experience. There’s so much going on in blogging editors like WordPress and Tumblr, which distracts you from saying what you want to say.

Writer is a killer extension that gets you away from all of the noise and plops you into a very simple, and feature-free, writing environment that will help you focus on the task at hand. I use this one a lot.

➤ Writer

Pandora to Spotify Playlist Converter

When it comes to listening to music, I don’t stick to just one service. For a random radio-like experience, I tend to stick with Pandora. When I hear a song that I like, I click the thumbs-up button so I can remember the song later and help the service learn about what I like.

When I’m in an on-demand kind of mood, I like to use Spotify. This extension takes all of the things that I’ve liked on Pandora and turns them into playlists on Spotify. I can’t even begin to tell you how cool this is. Go give it a shot.

➤ Pandora to Spotify Playlist Converter

G+Twitter for Google Plus

If you’re using Google+ and don’t want top hop over to Twitter to check your stream, then this extension is for you.

With this extension, you can view your Twitter stream, Tweet, Retweet, and view conversations, all from within Google+. You can also share your Google+ posts on Twitter easily, which is one of its best features.

➤ G+Twitter for Google Plus

Magic Actions for YouTube

This extension kicks your YouTube video experience into hyperdrive. With features like auto-wide, auto-HD, and volume control with your mouse wheel, watching videos becomes a full lean-back experience.

It aims to make you feel like you’re in a movie theater and it does a pretty darn good job of it. This is a must-get for YouTube fans.

➤ Magic Actions for YouTube

Screen Capture (by Google)

One of the tasks that I do the most daily is take screenshots. When I’m reviewing a site or want to grab something really funny to share with a friend, I grab a screenshot.

There are cool desktop applications like Skitch that do a great job with this, but something like this extension makes it really easy to create a PNG file from a full-screen or region of the browser.

➤ Screen Capture (by Google)

Disconnect

Companies on the Web make money from showing us advertisements and directing us to content based on our “likes”. This is done mostly by tracking all of our actions on its sites. For some of us, that’s really creepy.

This extension blocks cookie and tracking requests on sites like Yahoo! and Google, giving you a running tally of everything that it has blocked for you. Turn this on for a day and surf the Web, it might scare the bejesus out of you.

➤ Disconnect

Scroll To Top Button

One of my favorite functions on the iPhone is tapping to jump up to the top of the page. It saves me so much time, I can’t even put it into words or numbers. Why don’t browsers have buttons just for this?

There’s nothing worse than reading a long article and then having to scroll all the way back up with your mouse or trackpad. This extension fixes that and will scroll up or down, allllll the way. Yay.

➤ Scroll To Top Button

There you have it, that should keep you busy for a while. Do you have any favorite Chrome or Firefox extensions? Let us know about them in comments!

A few weeks ago, the Google Chrome team launched a new app in its store called My Chrome Theme, which allows you to create and share your own custom theme for Google’s browser.

Today, the team shared that My Chrome Theme is now available in 36 more languages, making it more accessible to everyone who wants to get in on skinning Chrome.

Once you install the app from the Chrome Store, you simply upload a photo and start changing around the colors for the browser’s taskbar and such:

Once you’ve gotten your theme ready to share with the world, the app provides you with a link to send out to all of your friends. Socializing the browser a little bit more is a nice move on Google’s part, especially since desktop browsing is such a personal experience.

Since it’s an easy tool to use, anyone can create a theme. If you don’t think that browser personalization is an important feature, you haven’t talked to people like my mom. She’s all about making everything on the computer her own.

➤ My Chrome Theme

You’ve probably seen the apps used by The Washington Post and Yahoo! on Facebook that require you to install something before you can read an article shared by one of your friends from their sites. Not only is it annoying, it just means that these publications want access to your personal information so it can learn about your reading habits.

I’d rather not let any publication store a list of articles that I’ve read, and I don’t want to install an app that publishes something as I’m reading it. That alone is a privacy invasion, so in seeking a way to bypass this annoying functionality, I found an add-on for Chrome that lets you skip the app installation phase altogether.

While the Facebook Unsocial Reader for Chrome isn’t the sexiest app in the world, it gets the job done if you’re annoyed by Social Reader apps like I am.

What the app does is copy the title of the article that was shared, skips the app installation screen, and takes you directly to a Google “I’m Feeling Lucky” search using the headline. The first search result is usually dead-on for the article that you wanted to read in the first place.

The app was developed by George Mike and I have to agree with his assessment below:

So there you go, if you want to skip over having to install an app to read an article, this is how to do it when you’re using the Chrome browser.

➤ Facebook Unsocial Reader

I’ve always felt like app discovery should be as social as possible, even though Apple has never really done much when it comes to this. For example, Crosswa.lk launched an entire social network around app discovery before Apple purchased Chomp to socialize the App Store itself.

According to Google, its Chrome Web Store is about to get more social thanks to the apps that you’ve downloaded and +1′d. Here’s what the company had to say in an email sent to publications like The Next Web:

…in the next few weeks, Chrome Web Store users will be able to see applications and extensions that have been +1d from people in the Google+ circles. To help people make the most out of this filter, we plan to recommend them to follow certain Google+ pages.

From the sounds of that, the “social” functionality will be going both ways, as when you visit the Chrome Web Store to look for apps and add-ons for your browser, you’ll see suggestions based on +1′s, as well as recommended users who are heavily involved in sharing those apps.

While Google Play already shows you a +1 count for apps, it isn’t surfacing content to you based on what your friends are saying and doing. Hopefully that’s something that the company adds soon, because it makes total sense to let me know which apps I should download based on if my friends have shared or rated it.

This is another example of how Google+ has become the “glue” to bring many of Google’s products to life with social interactions and activities.

This is great news for developers, as the surfacing of apps based on our likes will increase traffic and downloads.

Are you both a Google Chrome and Windows Phone user? Comfortable handing over your Google login details to some Swiss startup you’ve never heard of?

Do you also have $2.49 burning in your pocket, just waiting to get spent?

I doubt there are many of you, but if you’ve managed to answer affirmatively to all three questions, and you’d like to synchronize your bookmarks in Chrome with your Windows Phone device, then do check out Chrync on the Windows Marketplace.

The app, which you can try for free, gives you an up-to-date list of your Chrome bookmarks, ready for the opening in Internet Explorer on your Windows Phone.

Furthermore, the app syncs your browser tabs and recently browsed pages, which is cool but should serve as a reminder that the maker of Chrync could potentially gain access to a lot of information about you based on your browsing behavior.

Buyer (and tester) beware and all that jazz.

Notably, Chrync communicates directly and securely with Google’s servers using the native Chrome sync protocol, which means there are no plugins to install.

The trial version is fully functional, but comes the odd prompt asking you to purchase a ‘license’ for the – frankly ridiculous – sum of $2.49.

The app was built by Damian Mehers, who works for Evernote. To be perfectly clear, this is one of Mehers’ personal side projects.

➤ Chrync for Windows Phone

As you’re moving about the Internet you’ve surely bookmarked some things now and then. The concept of bookmarking has turned into a booming business for sites like Pinterest and Delicious, but those sites focus on the social nature of link-saving and sharing.

For your own personal needs you’re probably using whatever tools that your browser of choice provides for bookmarking. Google’s Chrome browser, for example, allows you to easily set up folders to place your bookmarks in and lets you search through the titles to find that gem you didn’t have time to read last week.

But what if you’ve forgotten the title of the site you’ve bookmarked and didn’t meticulously place it in a folder to help you find it later? That’s a problem that I’ve had many times and I’m sure you’ve faced the same thing.

A site called Stashmarks allows you to seamlessly upload your Chrome bookmarks and then indexes them in an effort to make them completely searchable.

What was that story called again?

With Stashmarks, you won’t have to remember the title of the story,. All you have to do is try to remember at least one word that was mentioned in the link. The service indexes all of your Chrome bookmarks as you add them in real-time, allowing you to search through the entire text of the link later.

After you’ve uploaded your bookmarks, the service takes a few minutes to index the pages as Google’s own search engine would do on the Internet. While the service doesn’t provide the article for offline viewing, it will let you find what it was you bookmarked and couldn’t find and then let you click over to it:

In addition to letting you view and search through these bookmarks from any machine you’re on no matter where you are, Stashmarks also uses the folders that you’ve used for the bookmarks to sort them by tag. The site’s design is extremely simple yet extremely fast and pleasant to use.

If you’ve spent a lot of time bookmarking important links from the web, storing them on a third-party service isn’t a bad idea at all, especially when it takes the extra step to index them for you for easy searching later. If you’re not sold on the concept of social bookmarking and still like keeping links to yourself, you’ll really dig Stashmarks. The company behind it promises a Firefox version in the future, but for now it’s Chrome only.

➤ Stashmarks for Chrome

Just because Hangouts in Google+ are an audio and visual experience doesn’t mean that it’s completely accessible to those with visual impairments. There are chatrooms on the side of a Hangout where people tend to type a bit of backchannel conversation as the main video conference goes on.

One developer picked up on that fact and decided to do something about it by creating a Google+ Chrome extension that uses text to speech technology to reads everything that appears in the chat box out loud.

Mohamed Mansour shared his thoughts on how Google+ Hangouts should be made more accessible with those who need a helping hand, or in this case a helping eye:

Today I was in a hangout, where I met a blind war veteran. It was really inspiring to see him use such technology. But it was really hard for him to use it since it wasn’t accessible friendly. I was writing on the chat on the left, and it was really difficult for him to read the text. I am really into Accessibility, and I worked on it a lot in Chromium in the past, and I really wanted to help him.

So I told Tim, “what if the chat spoke to you?” Tim said, “that would be awesome”. When I saw the big smile on his face, I had to do it! So I created this extension for Chrome!

In an inspiring example of developing for good, the extension is available for Chrome and here’s a video demo of it below:

The example shown in the video where there is now an audio announcement when someone joins the Google+ Hangout is fantastic, considering that someone who might not be able to see the text would never know otherwise.

We know that the Google+ team is taking a cautious approach to releasing a full API for its Google+ social tools, but this is a perfect example of what can be done with extra tools for developers. This is also a feature that the Google+ team should consider making an official part of the product.

➤ Accessible Hangouts for Google+

Google’s Chrome browser is becoming more secure as we speak, thanks to a program we talked about last week. The Chromium Security Rewards Program is sponsoring an event at the CanSecWest security conference right now, and the highest monetary reward has already been given.

Here’s what the Chrome releases team had to say about it today:

The Chrome Stable channel has been updated to 17.0.963.78 on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome Frame. This release fixes issues with Flash games and videos, along with the security fix listed below.

Security fixes and rewards:

Congratulations again to community member Sergey Glaznov for the first submission to Pwnium!

[Ch-ch-ch-ch-ching!!! $60,000] [117226] [117230] Critical CVE-2011-3046: UXSS and bad history navigation. Credit to Sergey Glazunov.

While it may take a while for these security updates to get integrated into a future release of the browser, if you’re a fan of installing iterative versions of Chrome, you can get all of the details on the changelog here.

As we noted last week, Google is building a great relationship with developers by having programs like this, and also keeps nasty hacks out of the public eye. Developers must submit their security exploit directly to Google without sharing it with anyone else first. If they publicized the exploit, they wouldn’t be able to claim a prize. That’s super smart on Google’s part.

Google plans on giving up to $1M in total rewards during the event, in increments of $60k, $40k, and $20k, depending on the level of the hack. Apparently Glazunov’s was a big one, netting the Russian student a top prize in the category of “Full Chrome exploit”.

If Google is good at one thing when it comes to developers, it’s the ease and speed of adding new apps to its Chrome Web Store and Android Market. There are no reviewers checking out apps like there are over at Apple, which means that developers can get their ideas to market almost instantly.

Today, the Google Chrome team announced an update for its app configuration tool Appmator. The tool has been available to developers since 2010, but this marks its first update since launch.

Here’s how the team describes the Appmator tool:

Appmator makes it even easier to get your web apps into the Chrome Web Store. It gives you complete control over your app manifest and lets you quickly configure your app for the store.

Using the Appmator tool to properly configure your app for the Chrome Web Store turns the submission process into one that’s a minute or less for developers.

Here are some of the updates to the tool for version 2:

- A fresh new user interface (it looks really nice now)
- Addition of an icon editor (pluggable via +Web Intents)
- Added new permission for background processing
- Added WebGL and CSS3D requirements

When you visit Appmator, all you have to do is enter the URL for your app and the tool will handle the rest:

You’ll be able to change the name of your app and its properties, which will then be turned into a zip file that you have to upload directly from your Chrome Web Store dashboard:

That’s it! It’s a pretty user-friendly process and should provide developers with enough incentive to get their apps into the store and update it as they go along.

youRhere is one of our favorite apps for the Google Chrome Browser, check it out and tell us which ones you like in the comments!