I doubt a Linux release will have substantial impact on their market share given current Linux client usage. But I do think it is important for Google to offer support for Windows/Mac/Linux if they want an edge on IE.

This chart shows deployment stats on the "stable" 1.x releases of Chrome. There are instructions on getting Chromium to compile on Linux. Chromium is the open source project behind the Chrome browser.

Linux client market share needs some help. I think it is great to get the word out there that Linux is a viable desktop alternative, and maybe this will turn out to be a good way to win some converts. However, I think perhaps learning from what worked well for Firefox and then perhaps building a similar grassroots campaign combined with a well designed site that shows some real desktop advantages offered by some of the more polished distributions combined with the option to download easily runnable OS images (i.e. VMWare Player) might fare better.

Linux client usage appears to be making gains as well. I am assuming the articles reference to "stronger data center position" hinges on primarily server usage.

Currently less than 25% of browser usage can pass the ACID 2 test. It will be interesting to see how the release of IE8 affects this. Luckily for JS developers, projects like JQuery make cross-browser scripting WAY easier and less error prone. Hopefully broad support for an increasing subset of web standards will make cross-browser layout quirks less annoying for web developers. Overall I think the ACID tests are a good thing to measure this.

Agreed. This graph pretty much summarizes why dropping their Mozilla relationship would be incredibly stupid on Google's part.

According to these guys: http://www.statowl.com/third_party_cookie_support.php Roughly 9% of Internet usage will not be trackable using 3rd party cookies. I am not really for or against Google's decision. But I think it is interesting to see what percentage of Internet users are aware of tracking mechanisms and are also against being trackable.