OStatic

Last week, Moodlerooms announced that it had teamed with Google to integrate the Google Apps for Education service into Moodle.

This allows students and faculty using the open source Moodle learning platform to access all of Google's educational tools and applications, as well as the Moodle system, with a single sign on. Even more significantly, it simplifies managing and maintaining network collaboration tools, and allows students to access the system and get working on any computer that has a browser.

When Google's Marissa Mayer told TechCrunch's Michael Arrington that Chrome would drop the beta designation less than two days ago, the implication was that it would happen pretty quickly. When you consider the length of some beta stages (and drawn out, fanfare driven gold releases), Chrome's 1.0 release yesterday was fast and relatively quiet.

InformationWeek shares a little of my aforementioned concern that taking an application out of the testing stage prematurely can have some serious consequences, and it does offer some insight into Google's thought processes.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is reporting that Google's vice president Marissa Mayer told him in an interview that Chrome will be coming out of beta.

Mayer didn't give a definite time frame, but one would assume that this would mean sooner rather than later. This announcement is a little surprising for a few reasons.

Though the majority of companies have policies pertaining to responding to speculation, sometimes it just gets to a point they have to. For instance, say a rumor makes the rounds (with at least some supporting evidence) that Google has something up its sleeve that might possibly have to do with an operating system. Google can keep mum for a while, but it obviously has to be formally addressed, sooner or later.

It's unclear whether Google originally intended on announcing its Native Code Project last night, or if it hoped it could squeak out some more prep time before anyone noticed something was afoot. Either way, Google has unveiled Native Client, a technology that Google says will give web developers the full power of the client's CPU while maintaining browser safety, complete portability, and safety. And yes, it is open source.

The Mozilla Foundation has posted its financial statements and tax info for 2008, and a FAQ on the topic for those of us with short attention spans. While plowing through financial statements may not be the most exciting topic for Free and Open Source advocates, it's worth taking a look at what Mozilla has achieved as an independent project, where it's going, and how other projects might be able to emulate Mozilla's success to fund more and more FOSS development.

The good news is that, as of the end of their 2008 fiscal year, Mozilla is weathering the lousy economy pretty well. According to Mitchell Baker's post, reported revenues were up 5% from 2007, and the bulk of that revenue comes from the Firefox search functionality linking back to Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay. But Moz got dinged by the financial crisis in 2008, losing nearly $8 million of its long-term portfolio.

This week is a big one for open source browsers, which, as we've pointed out many times, are responsible for most of the innovation going on in the browser arena. The first beta version of Firefox 3.6 is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and you can get it here. Meanwhile, Google has delivered a very fast new beta version of the Chrome browser, and it features bookmark syncing so that you can keep your bookmarks streamlined across multiple computers.

Many of us spend more time in our browsers than we do with a lot of the most important people in their lives, so why not opt for a browser that is easy on the eyes? Today, Google has announced its new Artist Themes collection for the Chrome browser. While browser themes are nothing new, this particular set of themes features contributions from top designers and artists, ranging from Oscar de la Renta, to Dolce & Gabana, to Porsche, to Kate Spade and even pop star Mariah Carey. Here's a peek at some of the truly stylish themes available They are eye-catching.

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.

Following TechCrunch's recent post showing alleged photos of Google's upcoming Chrome OS, which don't seem to show much beyond the fact that the operating system may have very large icons, there are some new clues emerging about it. As Download Squad cites, based on notes in a post detailing changes to the Chrome browser's Chromium core, Chrome OS sounds a lot like a bootable browser running on Linux. There are reasons to believe that as soon as you start the operating system, you'll be in the Chrome browser, and reasons to believe that you won't have the choice to use other browsers. That could potentially cause Google trouble.

In a move that could quickly be followed by similar deals, Google has reportedly inked a deal with Sony to pre-install the Chrome web browser on new Sony VAIO computers. As JKOnTheRun notes, this marks the first deal that Google has signed with a hardware vendor to get Chrome involved in consumers? OOBE (out of box experience). The out of box experience with a browser is particularly important on consumer systems, where many users will simply use whichever browser is already installed, and similar bundling deals are what helped propel Microsoft's Internet Explorer to dominant market share. There isn't any word on what kind of money changed hands here, but I'm guessing it was a significant amount, and this deal is another sign of strong momentum for open source browsers. Check out more details here.?