After months of development, 10 beta releases and an RC version, Mozilla officially unveiled Firefox 4 to the world yesterday (3/22). Firefox 4 is a great update with new features and massive speed improvements, and that may be just what it needs to compete with the fast-growing Google Chrome.

But, as you might have expected, Google isn’t sitting idly by either.

Later the same day, Google announced the arrival of Chrome 11 to beta version. Now, you might see this as little more than the version which brings the new icon, but if you take a closer look, this beta release actually contains some cool improvements.

The new feature that is equally, if not more, interesting as the brand new Chrome icon is a new added support for the HTML5 speech input API. This means you’ll be able to talk to your computer and let Chrome transcribe your voice to text, without Flash or additional plugins.

This beta update of the Chrome 11 also contains GPU-accelerated 3D CSS, a feature that lets developers create websites with 3D effects using CSS.

See what I mean by cool improvements now?