Google has begun to phase out support for Internet Explorer 6, the browser identified as the weak link in a cyber attack on the search engine. The firm said from 1 March some of its services, such as Google Docs, would not work "properly" with the browser. It recommended individuals and firms upgrade "as soon as possible".

Find music related to a chosen artist

"The LOPPSI law, which could be voted on in March, will make filtering the French Internet a reality, "the Chinese way" (…) If nothing is done, within a year, not only might Big Brother-like spyware be mandatory on every French computer, but everything that goes through its pipes could be scanned."

Nice take on the NexusOne.com domain name "mistake"…

"Over the past few days I’ve read numerous stories by my peers suggesting that Google messed up by not registering the NexusOne.com domain name prior to launching its new phone initiative. My initial reaction was the same. But I quickly changed my mind: not acquiring the domain name was actually a smart move. Brilliant."

Shorten and expand URLs with different shortening service providers. ChromeMUSE is an extension to facilitate the use of URL shortening services. A short URL can be generated for any web page, using the user's preferred shortening service. The short URL is automatically copied to the clipboard to paste into other applications. ChromeMUSE also automatically expands short URLs on any page, replacing the target URL with the original URL and displays the page title as a tooltip. The URL expansion is provided by LongURL.org, which handles links from more than 200 services.

"You know how Google sometimes “predicts” what you might be searching for by giving you a little drop down menu of suggested search queries? These suggestions, of course, are based on what other users frequently search. So I tried teasing out some gender differences. Look at the pictures below."

For the tech industry, The Noughties were very nice indeed. Except when they weren't.

During the first decade of the millennium, it goes without saying that computing has changed in a big way, becoming cheaper, easier to use, more mobile, and – in the words of the Mountain View Chocolate Factory – more "webby." But it should also go without saying that the decade included its fair share of spectacular snafus.

Google Chrome automatically saves a list of the search engines you've encountered while browsing the Web. For example, if you visit http://www.youtube.com, the browser auto-detects and adds the YouTube search engine to your list of search engines that you can access from the address bar.

Actually, rating these extensions by "worth the slowdown," as is often the case with Firefox, doesn't seem applicable here. Chrome renders pages just as snappily on a Linux install with eight extensions loaded, and the memory use seems not all that different. Your mileage may certainly vary.

We pulled out extensions from the gallery for highlighting that do something a bit different from widely-available bookmarklets, or at least fill a crucial need for those who use the web productively. You can disagree with our picks or tell us how blind we must be to miss a great one—do so in the comments, and if we missed a really great one, we'll update the post.

Like using the pinned tabs feature in Chrome but wish you could make your pinned tabs permanent? Combine the –pinned-tab-count command switch magic and a list of your favorite pinned web sites to do just that.

"In a year, most enterprises will have the choice to "get rid of [Microsoft] Office if they chose to", suggests Dave Girouard, president of Google's enterprise division.

He acknowledged that Docs is currently "much less mature" than Google Mail or Calendar. "We know it. We wouldn't ask people to get rid of Microsoft Office and use Google Docs because it is not mature yet," he said.

But, this is expected to change in a year, when the company's introduces some "thirty to fifty" updates to Docs to beef up the SaaS (software-as-a-service) office suite. These will include updates to features and performance, Girouard said."

The Complete Guide to Google Wave is a comprehensive user manual by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash.

Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that's notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. Here you'll learn how to use Google Wave to get things done with your group. Because Wave is such a new product that's evolving quickly, this guidebook is a work in progress that will update in concert with Wave as it grows and changes. Read more about The Complete Guide to Google Wave.

Maximizes the area for displaying articles by removing all the stuff that you probably never use anyway. Be ready to learn your keyboard shortcuts though because this is a really stripped down interface.

About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called "off-page" factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.

Google Analytics is a free service that offers users up to 5 million pageviews a month. If your site generates more than 5 million pageviews per month, you will need to link it to an active AdWords account in order to avoid interruption of your Google Analytics service. Google Analytics currently defines an active AdWords account as an AdWords account that has at least one active and running Campaign, with a minimum budget of $1 per day (or the equivalent amount in a non-U.S. currency).