Internet advertisers are able to create personalized ads by tracking user’s browsing habits with cookies (a term which has been subjected to far too many puns to warrant another), which is why you may see an advert for the next Twilight movie on your favorite website.

While tailored ads are more relevant — and generally more tolerable — than their generic counterparts, they also raise privacy concerns: websites can sell personal information to 3rd party advertisement agencies without the user’s knowledge.

To protect their users’ privacy, both Google and Mozilla have devised “Do Not Track” solutions for users to easily opt-out of personalized advertising. While the end goal is the same, the two companies have vastly different approaches.

Yesterday was a big day for Google: In addition to unveiling Chrome OS [check out our explanation of Chrome OS], they unveiled the Chrome Web Store, where users will be able to download paid and unpaid web-based apps, extensions, and themes for Google’s Chrome browser.

While the web store has a smoother UI than Google’s previous outlets for downloading Chrome extensions and themes [see our roundup of good Chrome extensions], the biggest change is the introduction of applications, which many tech pundits have seen as an attempt by Google to take on Apple at its own game. The key difference, however, is that whereas Apple’s apps live within the walled garden, Google’s are entirely web-based, though many have offline capabilities.

What makes a good web app, exactly? What distinguishes it from desktop applications and plain old websites? It’s a blurry line — the biggest complaint in the comment sections for many apps currently in the store is that they’re basically just links to webpages. But among the most important characteristics are good user interface design, speed, and, when possible, the potential for offline use. (As you’ll see from the apps below, a gray and black color scheme seems to be an unwritten requirement.)

If the evolution of iPhone and Android apps — many of which have Chrome store counterparts — is any guide, there’s a lot that can be done with web apps that hasn’t yet been done. In the meantime, here are eight of the best apps we’ve seen from the Chrome web store:

The rumors to the effect that Chrome OS would be more or less dead on arrival apparently did not sit well with Google: In a recent set of New York Times interviews, Google execs assured us all that its web-centric operating system would be ready for prime time by the end of 2010, as would a Google-branded, third party-manufactured netbook powered by Chrome OS.

But where does Android, Google’s already-widely-adopted mobile OS, fit into the equation? Even Google says it isn’t quite sure:

Facebook doesn’t make information about who’s unfriended who public, possibly for fear of bloodshed. But there’s a browser extension called Unfriend Finder that lets you do just this for yourself.

Compatible with Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Opera, this script by Edouard Gatouillat is simple to install: Download it, make sure the extension is active, and then, the next time you log into Facebook, you’ll get a series of instructions on how to use it, as well as a setup box. As you can see in the picture below, an “unfriends” menu pops up on the left-hand side of your page, below the “friends” menu. You may want to restart your browser after installing it as well, as I was initially grayscreened by Facebook when I logged in immediately after installing.

One major point: This app is not retroactive, meaning that it only tracks unfriends in the future, not in the past. So you’ll have to sit tight with it for a while before you can see any results, and the people who have unfriended you in the past will remain an intriguing, most likely unsolvable mystery.

Even when you’re not on Facebook.com, Facebook’s tentacles are nearly impossible to avoid on today’s Internet: According to the social networking site’s public statistics, more than one million sites (including this one) have integrated with the Facebook platform, and more than 150 million people interact with Facebook on external websites each month.

For some Internet users, there’s nothing wrong with this state of affairs, and Facebook Connect may make their web surfing more convenient: However, for others, this is either an annoyance or a privacy concern. For this reason, Google engineer Brian Kennish — working in a personal capacity and not because anyone at the company asked him to — has written Facebook Disconnect, a Google Chrome extension that blocks all traffic from third-party sites to Facebook’s servers, though you can still browse Facebook.com just fine.

CNET has the tantalizing, techy scoop on WebP, a new graphics compression format that Google plans to officially unveil later today. Based on WebM, the open, royalty-free video format launched earlier this year by Google, Mozilla, Opera, Adobe, and more than 40 other publishers, WebP aims to take on the ubiquitous JPEG standard of image compression, the first version of which was released way back in 1992.

Like JPEG, WebP is a lossy format, meaning that some image data is lost over the course of compression, though at higher qualities with less compression it’ll still look similar to the eye. WebP’s chief advantage according to Google, however, is that it’s far more efficient. When Google surveyed 1 million sample images across the Web, 90% of which were JPEGs, compressed them in WepP, and compared, they found that WebP offered “the same quality [as the JPEGs] with 40 percent smaller file sizes.” Most excitingly, Google plans to bring native support for WebP to its Chrome browser in “just a few weeks.”

WebP isn’t perfect, however: Encoding WebP image “takes about eight times longer than JPEG.” Then there’s the bigger question of whether WebP can catch on at all:

In addition to Safari 5‘s uptick in performance and its formidable new built-in ad-blocking function, which will delight some readers and terrify some web publishers, the biggest change present in Apple’s latest overhaul of its Safari browser is the long-overdue addition of Extensions.

For me, and, I suspect, for many people who like the Internet, Safari’s previous lack of extensions put it at a major disadvantage versus Chrome and Firefox. Browsing the Internet is an important enough part of many of our lives that it seems necessary that any good browser be easily customizable to reflect and ease our Web habits. Previously, Safari supported plug-ins, but these were always clunky and rather limited in scope; as soon as Safari 5′s extension capabilities were rolled out, Pimp My Safari, which had been a go-to site for the fairly small Safari modding community, closed shop. But not before passing the torch to this site:

A day after the news got out that Google was banning Windows use among its employees due to security concerns, they’ve announced, if not a hard release date, a release ballpark for their own Chrome operating system.

According to Sundar Pichai, Google’s VP of product management, Chrome OS will be coming some time in the “late fall.”

Reuters: ”Chrome OS is one of the few future operating systems for which there are already millions of applications that work,” Pichai said. “You don’t need to redesign Gmail for it to work on Chrome. Facebook does not need to write a new app for Chrome.”

Earlier this month, Google rolled out a cheeky, competitive video that compared the speed of Google’s Chrome browser with a potato gun, sound waves, and lightning, with Chrome getting the upper hand each time. Now, just days after Chrome for Mac and Linux phased out of beta, Norway-based Opera Software has launched a parody of the Chrome video with a distinctly Scandinavian sense of humor.

Rather than compare the speed of their Opera browser to a shooting potato, they compared it to a boiling potato. Many hijinks ensue, including the titularly-alluded-to herring sword fight, in what is at once an homage to Google’s video and a mockery of its silliness and pomp.

In a recent post on Google‘s Chromium blog, the company reveals that it has been thinking long and hard about how to deal with a commonplace annoyance with the potential to handicap cloud computing and make the company’s web-based apps less useful: Printing. Specifically, “printing” as we know it today, involving print drivers that need to be installed for computers to communicate with nearby printers — and which are often only available on CD-ROMs.

Google Cloud Print isn’t yet fully worked out, but Google’s aim is that in the future, web apps using it will be able to print to any printer, regardless of drivers or operating system — even if they’re running from a mobile phone or other device: