Google Chrome continues to gain browser marketshare , edging past Apple’s Safari in the U.S. and, apparently, also taking some users from Mozilla’s Firefox. The latest browser statistics from StatCounter align with reports we’ve seen from other analysts, including Net Applications , which first indicated that Chrome had become the number three browser globally back in December 2009

With Google gearing up to launch Chrome OS, a big hardware partner is reportedly taking a look: Dell. According to Reuters , the computer manufacturer is currently talking to Google about including its new operating system on laptops, though no specific devices are yet to be announced. Dell and Google have already teamed up on a number of devices, so Chrome OS laptops wouldn’t be a huge stretch

A couple of weeks ago, Google released a video demonstrating the speed of its Chrome web browser. The video proved that rendering a web page in Chrome is faster than some random (though admittedly very quick) events, such as blasting a potato through a tube. And if you thought that’s quite silly, you’re not alone: Opera thinks so, too.

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups.

Iron Man 2 has been getting its share of online play lately — what with the millions of views the trailer racked up on YouTube, the iPhone app and all that augmented reality jazz .

Google has just dispatched a new stable release for its Chrome web browser, this time for Mac and Linux as well as Windows.

Happy Towel Day ! This universal holiday, which honors the life and work of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams, is being celebrated by his fans the world over today. To show reverence for Adams and his extensive and delightful tomes on interstellar travel, fans carry around a towel, which, in the books, is described as the single most “massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.” And of course, where there are silly, worldwide happenings, there are Flickr and YouTube uploads. Here’s a Köln, Germany, flashmob reenacting a bit of the literature: And here are some Swedes celebrating Towel Day at a pub: At an office in Amsterdam, a cubicle-dweller reminds us of the Guide ’s motto: There’s this charming after school special on the usefulness of a towel: And here’s a more thorough, canonical look at why a towel is the most useful item in the universe: Towel Day events are taking place all over the world today, from a flashmob in Columbia to a Vogon poetry slam in Portland.

The Dell Streak, a miniature tablet computer that runs a version of the Google Android smartphone operating system, launches in the UK early next month, followed by releases in the U.S. and the rest of the Europe later in the summer.

Not one to rest on its laurels, the Google Chrome team is hard at work on Chrome 6 . The official move to the 6.0 designation in the Chromium developer builds officially started a few days ago. The move to a Chrome 6 branch for Chromium means that the final tweaks and polishes on Chrome 5 are almost complete.

A new report suggests that next month, computer manufacturer Acer will unveil a slate of devices that run on Chrome OS , the web-centric OS that Google unveiled last year.