“I think that the next 18 months we’re going to see a 100- to 1,000-fold speed increase in JavaScript as Google and the guys at Mozilla are going to kick us all in the arse and make our JavaScript jittered,” Microsoft senior program manager Scott Hanselman told the audience Friday, days after Google released its Chrome browser.

While we’re transfixed by the presidential election, in the world of high tech another duel between two well-funded, take-no-quarter candidates has just emerged … and in the long run the impact on our daily lives may be nearly as great — and perhaps even sinister.

Instant-Torrents is a new service that allows people to download, find, and share torrents on a private network. Users can download torrents via the site, and direct downloads are available when others have downloaded the torrent before.

Mozilla has officially announced the availability of the second Firefox 3.1 alpha. This release includes support for the highly-anticipated HTML 5 “video” element and a handful of other features that move the browser forward.

So far we’re pretty smitten with Google’s Chrome

Google issued major upgrades to both Picasa 3, its photo management software, and Picasa Web Albums, its online sharing competitor to Flickr. Ars Technica takes the two new products for a spin around the studio.

After playing with it for a while, it’s too early to say that I’m blown away, but I must admit that I’ve stumbled onto some impressive feats which show that the team that built Chrome was intelligent, mature and forward-thinking. Here they are, in no particular order.

Mozilla CTO and JavaScript creator Brendan Eich has posted the results of benchmarks which indicate that Firefox’s new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine outperforms Google’s new V8.

We’ve previously put the major browser releases to the speed test, but today we’re measuring Chrome against the second beta of Internet Explorer 8, as well as the beta of Firefox 3’s next iteration, 3.1. We tested tomorrow’s browsers on startup and page-loading times, JavaScript and CSS performance