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  The new Google Chrome Design.

It's Chrome's 15th birthday, and the browser is getting a big redesign to celebrate, or at least, it's as big of a redesign as you can do on a big, empty window to the Internet. Google's "Material You" design language is finally coming to Chrome stable (after some experiments in the past), and that means lots of rounded corners and pastel colors.

There has long been a "customize Chrome" button on the new tab page, but now when you open it you'll get a selection of Material You color swatches that look like they were ripped right out of Android. There is still a white theme if you want to ignore all that, though the default color now seems to be back to blue instead of gray, just like the early versions of Chrome. As previously promised , the SSL lock icon in the address bar has been replaced by a settings switch. The "Down arrow" tab menu has been moved to the left side of the browser (on Windows, at least). All of the text and icon line work has been tweaked to be thicker, and some things, like the bookmark folders, have totally new icons.

Everything has been rounded over. The top left and right corners of the toolbar are now rounded corners. The menu is rounded. The tab corners are even more rounded than they were before. And the Chrome window in the screenshots isn't even using the native OS UI—it's a totally custom window so that even the corners of the browser window can be rounded over. There isn't a single sharp edge on this thing.

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  These left-aligned tabs are sorted into "pinned tabs" and "today tabs." [credit: Samuel Axon ]

On Tuesday, The Browsing Company made its unusual new web browser Arc widely available on desktop for the first time.

Arc has been available in an invite-only preview for about a year, but yesterday was the first day it became available to download for all Mac users with no waiting list. The widespread availability coincided with Arc's graduation to version 1.0, too.

Arc was only released on the Mac and iPhone for now, but The Browser Company says it plans to launch on Windows before the year's end.

Enlarge / Safari on a Mac, displaying the Google Chrome website. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple's Safari web browser has more than 1 billion users, according to an estimate by atlasVPN. Only one other browser has more than a billion users, and that's Google's Chrome. But at nearly 3.4 billion, Chrome still leaves Safari in the dust.

It's important to note that these numbers include mobile users, not just desktop users. Likely, Safari's status as the default browser for both the iPhone and iPad plays a much bigger role than its usage on the Mac.

Still, it's impressive given that Safari is the only major web browser not available on Android, which is the world's most popular mobile operating system, or Windows, the most popular desktop OS.

Enlarge / A special 100th-version splash page appears on the first launch of a new Firefox installation. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Firefox released its 100th update, and some fanfare accompanied the release on Mozilla's blog about the web browser. Firefox 100 is available this week for both desktop and mobile versions.

To celebrate, Mozilla says it will be regularly sharing fan art inspired by Firefox throughout May. But while that 100 number carries some symbolic weight, the update itself isn't particularly monumental.

On the desktop, subtitles and captions are now supported in Firefox's picture-in-picture mode for videos. Three key websites officially support subtitles and captions in PIP: YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video. Plus, the feature works on websites that support the WebVTT standard, like Twitter.