JavaScript programmers, rejoice! It's been a good week for open source from big companies. Earlier this week Yahoo! released its Traffic Server it acquired from Inktomi, and now Google has unleashed Closure Tools. These are part of the toolset that Google uses to create JavaScript-heavy applications like Google Docs, Gmail, and Google Maps.

As announced on the Google blog, there is an official stable release 3.0 of the Chrome browser available now. You can download it here, and if you're already using Chrome, you'll be automatically updated to the new version. Google's post includes walkthroughs of some of the major new features, including significantly faster Javascript performance, a new look for the New Tab page, and improvements to the Omnibox--the search bar and address bar that makes it very speedy to navigate to sites you're looking for. Here's what you'll find under the hood in the new Chrome.

We've done several posts on how open source skills can arm job seekers with valuable differentiation from the rest of the pack, and lots of support for that concept continues to arrive. From working for commercial open source companies to working on open source-focused divisions at big companies such as Google, skills with tools such as PHP, Hadoop, and open source content management system platforms can be really valuable in today's tough job market.

In this post, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert took note of the very favorable trends in the job market for people with Drupal skills. In Elance’s Online Work Index, which analyzes the hot categories for tech jobs posted on its online marketplace, PHP-related jobs held the number one spot in July (as has been true since February). Now, Black Duck software, which maintains a large knowledgebase of trends in open source usage, is out with some notable statistics about which programming languages are showing momentum in open source projects, and how they're being influenced by growth in web applications.