Whatever your age, googling can chase away the blues.

All that surfing isn’t that time wasted but may actually be good for your brain. Researchers believe that the World Wide Web may help elderly patients fight chronic depression and other illness.

A team from center on Aging at the University of California has found that trawling the Net stimulates brain function more than other activities, such as reading a book. Engaging with technology can have important benefits for mental fitness as it involves complex activity, which keeps the brain ticking, particularly for middle aged and older adults.

Curiosity and the urge to challenge one’s mental faculties promotes neurogenesis. This could come through reading, writing and watching videos as well. the joy of Googling promotes the yearning to juggle with concepts, stories and narratives, which replenish brain energy and promote new circuits. While Googling helps one challenge existing concepts, it also provides food for new intellectual debates. In fact, the debate lingers on long after the computer has been shut down.

It’s something of an open secret that Mozilla, the organization behind the open source Firefox Web browser, gets most of its funding from Google — 91 percent, to be exact. The deal gives Google top placement in Firefox’s search engine bar. But now that Google is also shipping Chrome, its own branded browser, some critics are asking whether the search engine giant’s deep pockets have allowed it to gain too much influence over the Web browser market.

The technologies used to build Web pages — including HTML, JavaScript, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) — are all open standards, maintained by industry consortia. No one company owns them. But experimental features often appear in new browser releases first, then are integrated into the official standards later. One example is Google’s Gears technology, which is built into Chrome and is available as a plug-in for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Gears is widely expected to influence the upcoming HTML 5 standard.

That’s all well and good, except that arguably only Microsoft can compete with Google’s share of the browser market. For example, Opera is a longstanding alternative browser that is often praised for its compliance with Web standards, but its market share is but a fraction of that of Firefox or IE. Because of Opera’s narrower reach, a new feature introduced in Opera might be seen as less significant, and therefore be less likely to become part of the public standards.