ReadWriteWeb

Two conferences being held next month, one in Aarhus, Denmark on October 10 and another two weeks later in Portland, Oregon, are scheduled to feature Lars Bak, the designer of the V8 interpreter used in Google Chrome. In Aarhus, Bak will be joined by Gilad Bracha, a Google engineer and co-author of the original Java Language Specification and the creator of the Newspeak programming language, a derivative of Smalltalk.

The subject of their talks may have inadvertently been revealed by the GOTO Aarhus conference organizers: It's a programming language being conceived at Google tentatively called Dart (maybe bearing no relation to the DART advertising platform run by Google subsidiary DoubleClick).

Looking to have some fun this weekend and want to spend a few minutes taking a trip down memory lane? How about taking Network World's browsing test here. (link corrected) No, we aren't talking about verifying your HTML code, just your general knowledge of browser-based trivia. There are questions on the origins of Netscape (remember them?), what was the first Apple browser that pre-dated Safari, and questions about who really invented the browser. Some of the questions are very easy and some will take some study, or at least the ability to bring up Google and ask the right question. At least we don't write about the "browser wars" anymore.

And here is a short historical treatment in a great infographic by Jacob Gube .

Google is finally getting around to adding offline access back to Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar.

Today the company announced that it was adding offline capabilities immediately to Gmail, and offline features for Calendar and Docs will be rolling out over the next week starting today. The catch is, you might have to switch browsers or wait even longer.

Google has announced a new Chrome Extension and Google Toolbar feature called Google Related, which suggests new content relevant to the page you're currently viewing. The extension offers many kinds of suggestions, including Web pages, shopping, maps and Google Places results. Google Related displays a toolbar at the bottom of the browser window, and the suggestions pop up when the mouse hovers over them. If you like a suggestion, there's a built in +1 button.

The developers of two of the most influential open-source Web browsers are working together on a feature that should make Web apps play together much more nicely. As we covered on ReadWriteHack yesterday, Google's Chromium engineers announced that they're working with Mozilla on a framework called Web Intents, the brainchild of Google developer Paul Kinlan. Firefox announced its project last month.

Web Intents, based on an existing capability in Google's Android mobile OS, will let Web apps express a simple call for an action, like 'share' or 'edit,' which receiving apps will be designed to use, without either app needing to have specific knowledge of the APIs of the other. This way, instead of having to code for each specific Web app one might want to access, developers can just use these simple requests, which will be built into the browser. The Chrome and Firefox teams are each building this functionality for their own browser, but they're combining their proposals to use a single API for Web app developers to reach both platforms.

Today, Google has pushed three new features to the latest stable version of its Chrome browser. Instant Pages pre-renders certain pages in the background, like top search results or the 'next page' link in an article, when the software can reasonably predict that the user will go there next. A pre-rendered page will appear to load instantly.

Instant Pages builds on Google's instant search results and previews to further reduce the time users spend finding what they're looking for.

Google expanded international support for its Chrome Web Store today and will now allow merchants to target or exclude individual international markets. Developers within those markets can sign up for merchant accounts and localize their app listings, but paid apps won't be visible in those markets until later this year. The changes are the latest of several that are designed to monetize the development of Web apps via Google's Chrome browser.

In July, Google launched their API for in-app payments in apps delivered through the Chrome Web Store. The transaction incurs a flat 5% fee.

Want to draft emails, blog comments and other little bits of writing online by speaking to your computer? I'm certainly intrigued by the idea and a newly posted userscript makes it easy to do for Google Chrome users. Userscripts are wonderful little bits of code that developers write to bring new functionality or interface elements into any webpage. One of the newest posted at Userscripts.org today is a speech-to-text script which I am using to write this blog post right now.

Created by Josh Mandel, who says he coded it with a broken arm, Speakable Textareas works pretty well! With just a few clicks, you can install the script in your browser and it will insert a little microphone icon you can click on to invoke the Google Chrome speech-to-text API. It's quick and dirty but it's still pretty cool.

We have covered Google's Chromebook in a series of posts previously, including our story about questions to ask here and some other considerations here. But Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has written an excellent take on ZDnet here about what you need to know before deploying any of the Chromebooks across your enterprise.

According to a post on the Mozilla Add-Ons Blog, 85% of Firefox 4 users have at least one add-on installed. The average user has five add-ons installed. The figure doesn't include the Personas feature and excludes add-ons bundled with other software that users haven't actively chosen to install.

"We previously estimated that at least a third of Firefox users had chosen to install an add-on, but knew the number was higher than that," wrote Justin Scott, the product manager for add-ons at Mozilla.