Using Gmail can be a great experience, but sometimes it’s just nicer to read email in a desktop or tablet app. Having those two panels, one for your list of emails, and one for the actually email content can be much more intuitive. Well, not you can have the same sort of set up int he Gmail web app.

Google always tries to make it easier for people to connect—whether that means sending an email, chatting or video chatting, you can reach the people you care about from right inside Gmail. Last year, Google made it possible for those of you in the U.S. to call any mobile phone or landline directly from Gmail and now they are making this available to many more of you who use Gmail outside the U.S. by offering calling in 38 new languages.

Since Google I/O, Google have been working hard to make the Chrome Web Store available to more users around the world as well as to provide additional monetization opportunities for developers. Now, they're happy to share progress in both of these areas.

Mozilla’s user experience team has unveiled a new and very different look for Firefox. For now we only have some very pretty mockups to feast our eyes upon, but in a couple of weeks Firefox 8 will migrate from the Nightly channel to Aurora — and after that, the new interface will begin to emerge in Firefox 9, 10, and 11.

Ahead of a full release this fall, Apple has pushed the Web front end to iCloud live for developers to kick the tires on. The new site, which resides at iCloud.com, features a similar front-end to Me.com, which will be shuttered next year with Apple's MobileMe service.

As part of Google's effort to evolve the Google design and experience, they’ve improved the www.google.com search experience on tablets. Google have simplified the layout of search results pages and increased the size of page contents like text, buttons and other touch targets to make it faster and easier to browse and interact with search results in portrait or landscape view.

Adobe Systems Incorporated announced the first public preview release of Adobe Edge, a new HTML5 web motion and interaction design tool that allows web designers to bring animation, similar to that created in Flash Professional, to websites using standards likes HTML, JavaScript and CSS.

Google has taken steps to speed up website loading times before, but its new method is different. Google calls it Page Speed Service and it’s open to any webmaster that wants to give it a try. Google’s methods for speeding up the webpages are a bit sketchy though.

Google has released a new developer version of Chrome to re-enable a multitouch gesture that changed in Lion, the new version of Mac OS X that Apple released last week. With the new operating system, a three-finger swipe left or right moves among different full-screen apps or desktops. That conflicted with Chrome's use of a three-finger swipe to move backward and forward in browsing history.

Microsoft announced that the next version of the Windows Phone operating system, code-named Mango, has been delivered to manufacturers, which can begin testing it on their handsets. The move is one of the final steps before the software arrives on new phones and is delivered to existing users as a software update.