Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) are all offering some form of courtesy Wi-Fi through the holiday season, at venues such as airports, hotels and Times Square.

Each has a relatively new service it’s hoping to attract consumers to, whether it’s Google’s Chrome browser, Microsoft’s Bing search engine or Yahoo’s revamped home page and customization features.

Google is working with Wi-Fi providers Boingo Wireless and Advanced Wireless Group to provide connectivity at 47 airports, including Boston, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami and Seattle from today until Jan. 15 (sorry New Yorkers, JFK, LGA and EWR are not on the list).

“We know that this is a very hectic travel season for people, and we hope that free Wi-Fi will make both traveling and connecting with friends and family a little bit easier,” Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search, said in a statement.

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It’s a face-off between new and traditional media at the Web 2.0 Summit.

Representing new media, in a discussion over the future of journalism, are Federated Media’s John Battelle; Marissa Mayer, who leads Google’s (GOOG) search services and consumer products like Chrome; and Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times (NYT), and The Wall Street Journal’s top editor, Robert Thomson, stand in for the old guard.

Aggregator sites like Huffington Post and online portals like Yahoo (YHOO) and Google have seen their readership, advertising revenue and influence increase. Meanwhile, traditional-media types have criticized these forces for unfairly leeching their reporting and hurting their business models. We’ll be alert for verbal sparring.

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Google’s (GOOG) Eric Schmidt “resigned” from Apple’s (AAPL) board because Chrome and Android were encroaching on Apple’s core business, or so Steve Jobs says. But what if the opposite were true? What if Apple is encroaching on Google’s core business? Later this month, Apple is expected to break ground on a massive new data center in Maiden, North Carolina.

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Earlier this month Google (GOOG) announced a new operating system called Chrome. It’s meant to transform personal computers and handheld devices into single-purpose windows to the Web. This is part of a larger trend: Chrome moves us further away from running code and storing our information on our own PCs toward doing everything online–also known as in “the cloud”–using whatever device is at hand.

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Just six years ago, the web was dominated by one browser: Internet Explorer, specifically Internet Explorer 6. Without Netscape to compete against it and the ability to bundle its browser with Windows XP, Microsoft (MSFT) experienced superior market share–up to 95 percent at the peak. Today though, we have far superior browsers like Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome, as well as Internet Explorer 8.

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Lately I’ve been worried about Firefox. Ever since its debut in 2004, the open-source Web browser has won acclaim for its speed, stability, and customizability. It eventually captured nearly a quarter of the market, an astonishing achievement for a project run by a nonprofit foundation. But recently Firefox seemed to go soft.

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Google (GOOG) sometimes finds itself at a difficult crossroad of wanting to make as much information available to as many people as possible, while still trying to obey the laws of the countries they operate in. I recently had a chance to talk to Marissa Mayer, who started at Google as their first female engineer, and has now risen to the ranks of vice president in charge of some of Google’s most critical product areas, such as search, maps, and Chrome.

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The NY Times (NYT) is running an article about a bunch of illustrators complaining that Google (GOOG) offered to promote their work for free as special skins for its Chrome browser. The concern? That Google wouldn’t pay them to promote their work.

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Chrome is not going to replace Windows. A computer requires an operating system such as Windows, Apple’s OS X or Linux to make the machine work. It does, however, have the potential to do what Mr. Gates feared: make the choice of operating system less important.

So writes John Gapper, the fine columnist for The Financial Times in today’s paper. Chrome, of course, is Google’s new browser, which is pretty explicitly designed to be a Windows killer. As Mr. Gapper notes, that precise fear–that an Internet browser could become such a powerful platform for applications software that it would effectively take over the function of the operating system–is what caused Microsoft to start the browser wars in the 1990s, effectively putting Netscape out of business.

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Yesterday’s flare-up about the Terms of Service for Google’s new browser Chrome, followed by the company’s rapid backtracking on the demands it was making of users, left many people wondering about Google ToS in general.

Is it OK for service providers to require that they be exempt from the copyright norm of no re-use without explicit permission? We don’t think it is.

Chrome’s original ToS made far-reaching claims to rights for promotional re-use and sharing with partner companies of any data sent through the Google browser. When users cried foul, the company apologized and said that this standard condition for all Google services wasn’t appropriate for a browser. It’s not uncommon for services online to make such demands–but we argue that there’s a better way for this to be done.

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Most science fiction readers have a special place in their hearts or their bookshelves for William Gibson’s short story, “Burning Chrome.” In it, two hackers, or console cowboys, break into the Swiss bank account of Chrome, “a member in good standing of the local Mob subsidiary.” “Burning Chrome” is a classic for cyberpunk and sci-fi fans because in the story, Gibson describes and coins the term “cyberspace.”

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A couple of observations on Chrome: It’s good, it’s an OS, and where the hell is Intel. Multiprocess? Hello, multicore on the desktop. Hello, Intel? Wake up. I think that Google is being smart by not calling attention to the OS issue. Why? Because the definition of an OS favors Microsoft–and all the legacy baggage with PC-centric stuff. Why get into that conversation?

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The Internet is atwitter with Google Chrome’s innovative new features, but there was no clear winner in our speed test comparing Firefox and Chrome–which means your choice of browser may depend solely on features. Apart from a few specific issues (namely process management), many of Chrome’s best features are already available in Firefox 3, proving yet again the power of extensibility. From incognito browsing and the streamlined download manager to URL highlighting and improved search, let’s take a look at how you can bring some of Google Chrome’s best features to Firefox.

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Google’s release Tuesday of a test version of its new open-source web browser, Chrome, marks an important moment in the ongoing shift of personal computing from the PC hard drive to the Internet “cloud.” I distinctly remember when, back in 1988, Apple Computer added MultiFinder to its Macintosh operating system, allowing my beloved Mac Plus to run more than one application at a time. That was, for us Mac users, anyway, a very big deal. Chrome–if we can trust the comic book–promises a similar leap in the capacity of the cloud to run applications speedily, securely, and simultaneously.

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