As you’re aware by now, earlier today Mozilla officially unveiled Firefox 4 to the world. At first glance, it’s a great update with massive speed improvements. And that’s good, because that’s exactly what they need to combat the fast-rising Chrome browser from Google. But Google isn’t sitting still either.

This afternoon, Google pushed Chrome 11 into beta. On the surface, users might see this as little more than the version which brings the new Chrome icon. But underneath, there are a couple awesome new things going on as well.

One of the new features is added support for the HTML5 speech input API. This means that you’ll be able to talk to your computer and Chrome can interpret it. Those who have become accustomed to doing this on Android and other mobile devices will love this. More importantly, it’s an HTML5 spec that any developer will be able to take advantage of, not just Google.

If you’re running Chrome 11, you can try it out here. It works very well. You speak, and the browser is able to transcribe what you say. No Flash, no plug-in. Yep. Awesome.

The Chrome 11 beta also bring an initial take on GPU-accelerated 3D CSS, Google notes. This means that developers will also be able to create websites with 3D effects using CSS shortly. Again, very cool.

As the version numbers have been rapidly increasing, Google says it doesn’t like touting new version bumps. But this one is pretty nifty. And it should go stable fairly soon as well.