Google is getting into the operating system business (again) with Google Chrome OS. Palm put WebKit at the heart of a device with webOS, the Crunchpad talked about it for the netbook, and there have long been desktop-boot-to-browser devices out there.
Google Chrome OS goes deeper:

There has been a nice discussion H.264-in- vs plugin APIs on the WhatWG list.
This lead to Greg Maxwell posting about his experience with the quality of Ogg Theora with real world examples, and Chris Blizzard linked it up with 35 days offering the following lead in:

Ben loves to talk about old games such as Dark Castle. I personally love remembering old Sinclair ZX Spectrum games but also fondly remember Leisure Suit Larry.

You probably remember the history. JavaScript 2, the reckoning, was going to come from EcmaScript Edition 4. That never happened, and instead the 3.1 group moved on with their agenda for "baby step" changes to the language.
Now we have a final release of that work, with a new name, EcmaScript Edition 5 which is an interesting change :)
Erik Arvidsson tells us his thoughts:

Martin Kool of Q42 let us know that his company decided to open source the Q42 multiplayer engine which is "a lightweight, generic multi-user solution, allowing developers to create their own browser-based application or game over port 80."
The engine is written in C# on the backend, and of course, JavaScript on the front end.
You can check out the sample chat client that leads you to the following code:

Eric Wahlforss, the founder of SoundCloud, wrote in to tell us about "The Cloud Player", a iTunes / Songbird clone written entirely in Ajax:

Steve Mattison let us know about a new AJAX game has been released by the makers of that old popular PHP-based village building game Travian. This one is more like Sims meets Cultures, and it is called Travians:

[via Simon Willison]
A little bit of Friday JavaScript-craziness for you.
Matt Wescott has created a ZX Spectrum emulator in JavaScript. The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was an old-skool PC from the 80s.

Details: