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).

Mozilla employe and JavaScript creator Brendan Eich is giving a surprise talk at Node.js today on the subject of using Mozilla's Spidermonkey JavaScript engine in Node.js, instead of Google's V8.

The Spidermonkey/Node.js project has been known for a while now.

Mozilla just announced the launch of Kraken, a new JavaScript benchmark. The Mozilla team notes that developers spend a lot of time optimizing their code to improve the browser's performance on certain benchmarks, but these improvement often don't actually create a better user experience. According to Mozilla engineer Rob Sayre, Kraken instead focuses on recreating "realistic workloads and forward-looking applications."

Google just announced Froyo, the next version of its Android mobile operating system. According to Google, this new version will be significantly faster and more enterprise-friendly. Froyo will also offer a backup API, a "cloud-to-device" messaging API and support for tethering and portable hotspots. In addition, Android 2.2 will feature a significantly faster browser and better ways to find Android apps.

Google just announced the launch of Chrome Frame, a new open-source project that will allow Chrome's rendering engine to run within Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6,7, and 8. This plugin, which is available now, will give developers the option to ask users if they would prefer to switch to the Chrome rendering and JavaScript engine. Users simply continue to use Internet Explorer and the switch will be completely seamless, with no noticeable changes to the user interface.