Google recently announced that it was forking WebKit to create the Blink rendering browser engine in an effort to pare down the WebKit engine to the essentials for Chrome. Since WebKit is used on over seven different platforms, it had become very tedious for the Chrome team to make adjustments for their browser without having to worry about the rest of the WebKit baggage.

What they didn’t announce was the rate at which they would be working on the project, and when we could expect to see some of these revisions. In true “browser war” fashion, the Blink team has removed all stops, and in just over a month, culled 8.8 million lines of code from Blink.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president for Chrome and Android today announced that the company’s Chrome browser now has more than 750 million monthly active users. That’s up from 450 million users Google announced at last year’s I/O. This number, as far as we can see, includes both desktop and mobile users.

Google launched Chrome in 2008 and since then, as Google proudly noted in today’s keynote, it has become the most popular browser in the world. It is also now, as Pichai noted early on in the keynote, a very important platform for Google that stands side-by-side with Android.

Bitcoins are nominally worth $113 as of this very moment. That means very little in the real world. As Forbes writer Kasmir Hill notes, it’s pretty difficult to go up to the McDonald’s cashier and offer an invisible cryptocurrency that resides entirely on the Internet in exchange for a Big Mac. She’s survived a week using nothing but Bitcoins and, although she’s still alive, her experience wasn’t friction-free.

That’s changing. While I find most announcements that so-and-so website is now accepting Bitcoins to be little more than PR stunts, the fact that Gyft, a gift card site, is now accepting BTC is important. In essence, it allows Bitcoin users to turn their value into store credit and, more importantly, this credit can be spent at places you actually want to spend it.

YouTube has been making its own space on multiple entertainment services for a while, but according to a report from the Financial Times, it's now on the cusp of revealing its own subscription services for some of its specialist video channels.

Rumored for several months, according to the FT's unnamed sources it will include up to 50 different channels, with subscription pricing starting at "as little as $1.99 a month."