In the course of only a year (September will mark its first birthday), Google's Chrome browser has carved out a good niche for itself. It's widely liked as a fast, very stable browser, and NetApplications' market share data for July showed it at almost three percent share, up from only one percent a few months ago. This week, there were several significant Chrome-related developments, including Google's announcement of a 64-bit version for Linux, and bookmark syncing tools. Here are the details.

We've written before about Foxmarks, which recently went through a name change to Xmarks. Though it now works with several browsers, it was popularized as a Firefox extension used by many mobile users who want to synchronize their bookmarks and profiles across devices. Good as it is, I also like to use MozBackup--another Firefox extension--for backing up profiles and many similar tasks. MozBackup is compatible with a slew of browsers, and lets you back up and restore bookmarks, mail, contacts, history, extensions, cache and more. Here's what you get with it.

Here at OStatic, we've often covered the most useful extensions for Mozilla's Firefox browser. The extensions, of course, are what make it such a compelling browser to use. There has been a general trend among Firefox extensions toward extending the way the browser helps you get more out of the applications that you use all the time. In this post, you'll find six of the best examples of these app-helper extensions, which you can grab and install in minutes. Whether you use Google, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, applications on mobile devices, or popular development tools, you'll find top-notch, efficiency-boosting extensions here.