Better-looking calendars in Chrome 27 beta, now ready for the stable build of the browser.

Already known for its speed, Google just boosted Chrome's Web site rendering speed by another 5 percent.

The latest stable release of the browser, Chrome 27 (download for Windows, Mac, or Linux), received the small improvement by managing its resources better. To boil down the jargon, the browser's internal resource scheduler now favors more critical resources over preloaded sites.

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Google Reader will soon be closing its virtual doors. In a move that shocked the Web, Google's SVP Urs Hölzle announced on March 13 that, despite the RSS service's "loyal following," the company would "retire" Google Reader on July 1. More than any of the other 69 products that Google has killed over the past two years, Google Reader's demise has shaken a longtime community that depends heavily on the service.

Aw.

Foofaraw and conspiracy theories (about why Reader was killed) aside, if you use the service and want to save any of your feeds, favorites, or community contacts you have made over the past eight years, you should get your data out now. Here's how.

There are two routes to the same result for exporting your Google Reader data. Both use Google Takeout, a service from the company's "Data Liberation Front" that allows users to export their private info out of various Google products. It currently supports 13 of Google's services, including Reader.

To export your Google Reader data, you can start at Google Takeout and select the "Choose Service... [Read more]

On Tuesday, Opera for Android finally graduated from beta and into the final release zone, becoming available on the Google Play store.

Discovery is a news content aggregating feature built into Opera.

After a recent announcement about overhauling their browser and migrating to Webkit from their homemade Presto engine, Opera has been hard at work at redefining the browsing experience from the ground up. Since the release of beta and the move to Webkit, Opera's team has directed their focus toward what they believe to be more valuable feature innovations for Opera while keeping up with rival browsers.

But a redesigned interface is just the beginning. Opera for Android also retains popular features like Speed Dial and improved compatibility, thanks to Chromium. The new "Discover" and "Off-road mode" have also become permanent additions to the Opera family, taking center stage with this version release.

Discover is a native feature within Opera that surfaces articles and content from the Web, based on the user's interests. While the idea of newsreaders and content aggregators isn't anything new, having it built into the browser does save you the trouble of running separate apps just for cont... [Read more]

Opera's browser.

Opera Software's new and improved Android browser has gone gold.

The company announced the news on Tuesday, saying that its browser for Android, which was available as beta software in the Google Play marketplace, is now complete and officially launched. Getting it out of beta means that Opera is confident that most of the bugs are gone and the software is ready for wide use.

Opera announced the initial browser overhaul in February at Mobile World Congress. Rather than base the software on its Presto engine, it decided instead to move to the open-source Blink engine used in Google Chrome. Blink is Google's offshoot of the WebKit project, upon which Apple's Safari is based.

Although Google Chrome for Android requires version 4.0 of the operating system (aka Ice Cream Sandwich), Opera works on older or less powerful phones running version 2.3 (aka Gingerbread). Mozilla has taken the same approach with its Firefox for Android.

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