Razer's 17.3 gaming notebook on track for December release

Unveiled in August, Razer's gaming laptop is reportedly in the home stretch of production and should be available before Christmas. In fact, according to Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan, a handful of privileged insiders have already received their systems. Preorders of the Blade are expected to open on theRazer Zone website in the next few days and orders will be shipped before Santa squeezes down your chimney.

Billed as the first "true" gaming notebook, the Blade is inspired by Ka-Bar's combat knife and offers some solid specs for sub-inch-thick laptop. Its hardware remains largely unchanged from August, including a 17.3-inch 1080p display, a 2.8GHz Core i7, 8GB of DDR3 1333MHz RAM, an Nvidia GeForce GT 555M with 2GB of VRAM and Optimus, an HD webcam, USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports, HDMI-out, and Bluetooth 3.0.

Interestingly, the company has managed to upgrade the system's storage without charging more. As the story goes, before the Blade was announced, Razer had to offer component suppliers a premium to get them onboard because they didn't have much confidence in the system. However, they were "floored" with the community's response in August, allowing Razer to renegotiate its component pricing.

The company used those savings to upgrade the 320GB HDD to a 256GB SSD. We wouldn't be surprised if the recent spike in hard drive prices also played a factor in the shift to flash storage, but that's hearsay. Regardless, the change should make it a little easier to swallow the Blade's $2,800 asking price if you already planned to purchase one, and it could sway a few people teetering on the fence about it.

Besides cramming more horsepower into less space, Razer's gaming notebook offers a unique interface. The "Switchblade UI" (presumably borrowed from the Switchblade prototype) is adjacent to the standard keyboard and offers 10 customizable hotkeys above a multi-touch screen. The latter serves as a trackpad when you're on the go, but it can display handy in-game data if you're using an external mouse.

Chrome on track to overtake Firefox by year's end

Google’s Chrome is on track to surpass Mozilla’s Firefox as the second most popular browser globally by the end of the year. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer holds a solid lead among all other competitors, according to data from free website analytics company StatCounter.

StatCounter’s top five browsers in September 2011 show that Internet Explorer holds a 41.7 percent market share while Firefox has 26.8 percent of users and Chrome is just behind at 23.6 percent.

When viewing the same data over the course of the past year, it becomes clear just how rapidly Chrome is closing in on Firefox and how many users are leaving Microsoft’s offering. In October 2010, Chrome only had a 12.4 percent share, Firefox was at 31.2 percent and IE was at 49.2 percent. IE lost 7.5 percentage points in just one year while Chrome added 11.2 percent. If these same trends continue, Chrome should top Firefox before the end of the year.

As noted by Computer World, other stats providers often report quite different findings. For example, Net Applications'August 2011 report indicates that IE holds a 55.3 percent share while Firefox sits at 22.6 percent and Chrome is a bit further back at 15.5 percent.

The reason for the discrepancy between reporting sites has to do with how each company gathers and reports data. Net Applications is said to theoretically paint a more accurate picture because they factor in the Chinese market. As such, companies like Microsoft typically tend to quote Net Applications’ results when citing market share.