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Late last year, Google introduced a new feature to its image search on mobile browsers. In essence, it worked pretty much like Pinterest, allowing users to "pin", (technically "star" in Google-ese) to save it for later browsing. While extremely convenient when you're browsing on your smartphone on the go, it's admittedly also a useful feature even when you're sitting comfortably in front of your desktop or laptop. Good thing, then, that Google is finally making that very same feature available on larger computers and, naturally, works well with its mobile counterpart.

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The Web is in a sort of a rat race. While Internet connections get faster, web sites are getting more and more complicated, balancing, even negating, those speed improvements. A few tech companies, particularly Google, strive to introduce technologies as well as best practices to help speed up the Web, but those solutions are usually limited to specific browsers or specific circumstances. A new project from MIT called "Polaris", however, is aiming for a browser-agnostic method that could make web pages load as much as 34% faster.

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The days of bloated, bug ridden, error prone web browser plugins are finally and truly numbered. Just last month, Adobe has practically started Flash's retirement from the web, pushing instead for a more standards-friendly HTML5. Now Oracle is doing the same, somewhat. Of course, it isn't dropping the ball on Java entirely but it is announcing the inevitable and probably demise of the Java web browser plugin. That said, what it recommends as a replacement is still a Java-based technology for launching full applications from a browser link.

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This morning I woke up and did what I do to start my weekday mornings; I read the news. One of the most interesting pieces I read was about a new internet browser being developed by the co-founder of Mozilla. That alone is pretty interesting stuff, but as I read further into it, I realized that Brendan Eich has completely lost touch with reality.

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Brendan Eich is a man that is familiar with the Web as well as controversy. After all, his is both credited and at times cursed for having created Javascript, one of the most widely used and, at the same time, reviled programming languages. He also co-founded Mozilla, from which he was practically forced to leave two years ago. Now Eich is back at doing what he does best: creating browsers and stirring up the pot. Brave, as it is called, is a speedy browser that blocks ads by default. And then it replaces them with other ads.

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Last August, Google introduced a new way to communicate on the Web via your browser. It re-launched Hangouts as a dedicated website in its own right, taking advantage of the full space that the browser window offers instead of a simple popup menu or browser plugin. Less than three months later, Google is pushing what could be the biggest update to Hangouts on the web yet. As you can expect, it has improvements all around, starting with its performance all the way to the user interface.

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Google introduced Material Design last summer, and now about a year later it has introduced Material Design Lite, a web framework for bringing the design language to the Web. Google makes various promises about it, including that it “gracefully degrades in older browsers”, all the while bringing a Material Design look to a website through JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. The components library gives access to various items like badges and buttons, while customization options lend it all a personal touch.

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The Internet is running out of addresses, and adding new domain names and suffixes isn't going to help. The resource we are on the verge of eclipsing is Internet protocol, or IP addresses. When the internet was first put to use in the 1980's, engineers created IPv4, which has an upper limit of 4.3 billion different IP addresses. We've almost accounted for them all. According to the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), only 3.4 million IP addresses are still available from the 1.3 billion IP addresses allotted to North America.

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Of all the things Microsoft has been historically good at, video chat wasn’t one of them. They left Skype lingering on the vine for far too long, and are only now bringing the service up to speed. It’s coming along nicely, though, and it’s about to be available everywhere. At Build 2015, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella quickly breezed past a unique new feature for Skype; a web SDK that will see Skype built right into other apps. Rather than build a native chat client, Developers can now call on Skype.

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Twitter, which has undergone a series of updates lately, is again toying with what you see once you’re logged in. The new-look search results in Twitter don’t toy with your results, but do feed them to you in a flashy new way. When you perform a search in the Twitter web client, you might see a new layout designed to engage and entice followers. It’s not available to all users, nor is it working with all search queries just yet.

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Last week, Google updated Chrome to version 42 (beta). In that update, there was a small (possibly overlooked) feature that brings push notifications to your phone for websites than enable the feature. The update is part of Google’s Fizz initiative, which aims to bridge the wide gap between native mobile apps and web apps for mobile. That same update is creating a bit of buzz, but also confusing the matter of apps a bit, as push notifications for mobile websites are now available — just like native apps.

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You can chat with friends and family via Facebook Messenger on your phone or tablet, but to get to Messenger via the web, you have to navigate through Facebook’s website. At F8 this year, Facebook made sure we all knew Messenger would become more platform than app, so today’s announcement is really no surprise. If you head over to messenger.com, you’ll now be greeted with a standalone web version of Facebook Messenger, which exactly mimics the mobile version of the service platform.

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