Google has released an experimental version of the Chromium web browser with support for the company’s new Dart programming language. Dart, which is Google’s attempt to improve on JavaScript, has thus far not enjoyed much support outside of Google, but the company continues to push forward with its own efforts.

The new development preview version of the Chromium browser, the open source version of Google’s Chrome browser, contains the Dart Virtual Machine. This release, which Google is calling “Dartium,” can be downloaded from the Dart language website. At the moment it’s available only for Mac OS X and Linux. Google says a Windows version is “coming soon.” Keep in mind that this is a preview release and intended for developer testing, not everyday use.

Google originally created Dart to address the shortcomings of JavaScript and ostensibly speed up the development of complex, large-scale web applications.

While there is much programmers might like about Dart, it is, like Microsoft’s VBScript before it, a nonstandard language from a single vendor created without any regard for the existing web standards process. The new Dartium release is the first browser to include a Dart Virtual Machine and, based on the response from other browser makers to the initial release of Dart, likely the only browser that will ever ship with a Dart VM. For its part Google says it plans to incorporate the experimental Dart VM into Chrome proper in the future.

The company also has a plan for all those browsers that aren’t jumping on the Dart bandwagon — a compiler that translates Dart to good old JavaScript. In this scenario Dart ends up somewhat like CoffeeScript, a JavaScript abstraction that makes more sense to some programmers.

For more details on the new Dartium browser and the latest improvements to the Dart VM, be sure to check out the Google Code Blog announcement.

Chrome Related shows other semi-relevant pages

Google has released a new service entitled Google Related, a "browser assistant" Chrome extension intended to direct users to webpages on the same topic as the one they’re currently viewing. While some applications of the service, like getting extra info during a restaurant search, are useful, some others produce unhelpful suggestions in a framework that should be more trainable than it is.

Once you have the Google Related extension installed, a bar will begin appearing along the bottom of certain types of pages, such as news, shopping, or restaurant websites. Various tabs allow you access to content related to that page–visiting a restaurant’s website may produce a tab with a Google map of the restaurant’s address, a second tab with reviews, and a third tab of related locations (as identified by Google Maps).

The restaurant website suggestions are the most coherent, as the previous list nails exactly what I’m looking for when I look up a restaurant. But some of the tabs are too selective and Google-centric (unsurprisingly), as when the Reviews tab produces Google Places reviews and links to the Urban Spoon page, but not to Yelp.

A Google Related tab produced from a news story concerning an HTC vs. Apple patent spat.

Visiting a page with a news story will produce a dropdown (or more accurately, a shoot-up) of culled news stories on the same topic from other sources. The displayed stories seem limited to the most recent updates you might find at the top of a Google News search, a format better for the rarer breaking stories than authoritative ones getting picked up over and over in brief by multiple news outlets. The pullquote in the HTC vs. Apple-produced tab above is a nice feature, but the content is only barely related to the story.

What the extension lacks the most is the ability to train it. Links offered from the Related bar are +1-able, but if you click the "View More Articles" link from the story above, you get a get a long list of stories from various outlets that can’t be +1′d. This strikes us as a prime opportunity to teach Google Related which sources you trust or would like to see in your related news tab when you visit a news story. Still, true to Google form, Google is collecting statistics on the project, so we may be training it more than we know.

Given Google’s recent "more wood behind fewer arrows" declaration, the only-partially-useful Related is a mystifying addition to the company’s product slate in its current state. The extension is available today for all Chrome users.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

The rumor mill has been buzzing for months about the imminent arrival of a new “Facebook browser” called RockMelt.

Well, it really does exist, and it’s here. RockMelt is being released as a limited public beta Sunday. Anyone can sign up to test it out, but the release will be throttled so as not to overload the cloud-based components of the app. RockMelt will be doling out download links as quickly as it can manage on a first-come, first-served basis.

The two founders, CEO Eric Vishria and CTO Tim Howes, demonstrated RockMelt to Wired a few days before Sunday’s launch.

It’s based on Chromium, so it inherits Google Chrome’s speed, looks, and basic functionality on both Mac and Windows.

And while its Facebook integration runs deep, RockMelt is not exactly a Facebook browser. It’s a social web browser, allowing you to post links, videos and status updates to both Facebook and Twitter (that’s it for now, but more services will be added later). There are also built-in clients for consuming your Facebook feed and managing multiple Twitter feeds, a chat client, and lightweight RSS reader. It does use your Facebook account to personalize the experience, but its reach is broader than just Facebook.

We’ve seen browsers custom-built for the social web before, most notably Flock, which launched as a MySpaced-up version of Firefox. Mozilla experimented with Ubiquity, an in-browser tool for posting to different social sites and interacting with web services. There are a number of add-ons that can embed social networking dashboards into the browser for you. These tools have grown in popularity as we’ve struggled to manage the ever-increasing flow of links, media and bits shared by our online friends.

So, the idea isn’t original. And RockMelt doesn’t sport a complete re-invention of the browser interface, either. But it is very streamlined, and there are some key elements that people who live and breathe the social web will find intriguing.

First of all, you log in to RockMelt before you use it. You authorize the browser to connect to your Facebook account, and the browser is instantly customized for your social circle, showing your friends and your favorite sites in slim sidebars — or “edges,” to use the RockMelt parlance.

The edge on the left has your picture at the top, and the friends you interact with the most appear in a list below you. To send a new tweet or to update your Facebook status, you click on your picture. To send your friend a message or start a new chat with them, click on their photo. You can also share things by grabbing an image or video on the web page and dragging it on top of your friend’s icon.

The edge on the right has small icons for each of the services RockMelt tracks for you (only Facebook and Twitter for now) as well as spaces to add RSS feeds from your favorite sites.

The “edges” aren’t intrusive — they are less than 50 pixels wide each — but they do add extra visual heft.

“You can’t forget you’re a browser, and you can’t get in people’s way,” says RockMelt CEO Eric Vishra. “We designed these edges to be very thin, to be there when you want, and to blend in when you don’t.” You can also dismiss them with hot keys.

Clicking on one of the icons in the right edge — either Twitter, Facebook or a website icon — brings up a little pane that shows recent posts and activities from that source. Following the “keep things out of the way” philosophy, these panels can pop out from the browser to float freely if you want.

All of your user data is stored in the cloud by RockMelt (on Amazon servers) and synced when you log in, so no matter whose copy of RockMelt you’re using, you see your own custom version of the browser. Others are moving in this direction, too — Chrome connects to your Google account and Firefox has an agnostic Account Manager. But RockMelt’s Facebook integration is central to the experience.

RockMelt is polling Facebook, Twitter and your favorite sites periodically to check for updates (There’s no Firehose or PubSubHubbub magic yet, the founders tell us). But the feeds are real-timey enough. Updates show up in under a minute, often less. The updates are collected by the cloud service and pushed down to the browser.

There’s also a big “Share” button at the top of the browser. Clicking this button opens up an all-purpose sharing window, so you can tweet a link, post something to your Facebook wall or send the link as a message to a friend. Not a huge innovation, as we’ve seen something similar in Flock, but it’s nice.

Lastly, when you use the web search box in the browser, you get another floating window pane that shows the top ten search results. You can click (or navigate with keys) through this list, and the results flip by in the main browser window. RockMelt starts pre-fetching and rendering each one of those ten search results as soon as they show up (with Flash blocked). When you click through the list, you’re seeing real web pages, not snapshots, and you don’t have to wait for the individual pages to load. It’s wicked fast, like flipping through a stack of cards. It sounds bandwidth hoggish, but the browser calculates how much pre-fetching your connection can handle and adjusts accordingly.

Those are the big features. But let’s consider for a moment the elephant in the room: RockMelt is very, very Facebooky. It uses Facebook to sign you in, the in-browser chat experience is built on Facebook Chat, and when you share something via a message, you’re sending them a Facebook mail.

The founders say there are investigating other login experiences, like Twitter sign-in or OpenID logins using Google, Yahoo or AOL accounts.

“We’re going to remain agnostic and pick the services that the most people want to use,” Vishra says, but the team decided to “go deep” on Facebook simply because of the site’s size and volume.

Although it’s disappointing to see that the browser doesn’t play as well on the open web as it does on Facebook’s web, the tight focus makes sense for a young browser trying to gain a foothold in the mass market: Go drop your line where the fish are biting.

The downside being, of course, that if you’re not a Facebook person, RockMelt isn’t as interesting. I could see it being useful for Twitter power users who have a Facebook account, even if they don’t use Facebook heavily. But if that’s your angle, RockMelt’s chat and messaging features, which are based entirely on Facebook, are nothing more than food coloring.

See also:

• New Flock Is Simpler, Now Based on Chrome
• Mozilla Gets It Right, Moves Identity Management Into Firefox
• New ‘OpenID Connect’ Proposal Could Solve Many of the Social Web’s Woes

The all-new beta of the Flock browser is based on the same code as Google Chrome. The company ditched Firefox in favor of Chromium in this new version.

The social web browser Flock is undergoing a major change in its next release. The upcoming Flock 3.0 will move away from the Firefox backend Flock has used for years in favor of Chromium, the open source implementation of Google Chrome.

If you’d like to test a beta version of the new Flock browser, head over to Flock beta page and grab a copy. For now the new Chromium-based Flock is available for Windows 7, XP and Vista only. A Mac version is reportedly in the works.

Flock is a browser built for social web junkies. It helps you manage your identity across multiple social websites, and it brings status updates and posting widgets directly into the browser via sidebars. Ever since the browser was first introduced in 2006, it’s been based on Firefox’s open source browser code, so this new version is a drastic change of plans. Flock is a niche browser — its user base is minuscule compared to the web at large — but those who do use it are dedicated and passionate about it.

The new Flock has been radically simplified, eliminating support for all but the biggest social networks and media sharing sites, namely Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Sorry MySpace, you’re just not part of the social web anymore (at least according to Flock).

The Flock 3.0 beta is a totally different browser than its predecessors — about the only thing that’s the same is the name. As you would expect, Flock now looks like Google Chrome, with tabs on top and the familiar, all-in-one URL and search bar. Flock has added some of the tools from older versions, rebuilding them on top of the new Chrome foundation, namely the social networking account manager and a sidebar that displays all your friends’ updates and lets you post your own status updates.

The sidebar looks similar to previous versions, though there are some new filters. You can narrow your Twitter updates to show only mentions or direct messages, and curb Facebook noise by eliminating wall posts, pokes, event invites or whatever. Just about every type of notification can be toggled on or off for any of the supported services.

Manage your groups in Flock's sidebar.

Perhaps the most useful addition to Flock 3.0 is the ability to create groups of friends to filter and manage your incoming updates. Out of the box, Flock offers two groups — Best Friends and Co-workers — though you can customize and create your own groups as well. Once you’ve got your groups set up, Flock makes it very simple to switch between seeing what your friends are up to, what’s going on with your work colleagues, your family, and so on. For those with hundreds of contacts and friends spread across multiple sites, and for those who apply different social standards when interacting with people from different parts of their life, this will likely be Flock 3.0′s killer feature.

Another very useful new feature is the integrated search field in the URL bar. Flock has changed the way Chromium’s URL search bar works to include your friend’s Twitter posts, Facebook updates, Flickr images and YouTube video in your searches. It makes easy to find out what your friends have said about whatever you’re searching for.

We’ve been using Flock for several years now and have to admit that we’ve never quite been able to figure our where it fits into our daily browsing tasks. Previous versions were sluggish, and the amount of setup required to interact with a bunch of different websites was overwhelming. Also, it’s an open secret that there was little Flock could do that you couldn’t accomplish by installing a few good add-ons to vanilla Firefox.

By contrast, the new Flock is a svelte, speedy browser. It immediately feels more relevant and fresh. And, in narrowing its support to only the most popular social sites, Flock is less daunting for newcomers. Getting started is in fact incredibly elegant — the browser launches with a screen that asks you to set up a Flock account, but you can skip it and just start surfing. As you log in to social sites like Twitter and Facebook, Flock begins filling out the social sidebar with updates from your friends on those sites mere seconds after you’ve logged in.

That said, you long-time Flock users may be unhappy with the new version — particularly if you rely on any Flock-compatible Firefox add-ons or use any of the many sites Flock no longer supports. While Flock 3.0 should work with any Chrome extensions, Chrome extensions do not have quite the same range of function as those in Firefox.

If you’d like to give the new Flock a try, head over the beta download page and grab a copy. Keep in mind that Flock 3.0 is still a beta and may have some bugs. If you’re on a Mac, there’s a mailing list you can sign up for to be notified when a Mac version is available.

See Also:

• Newest Flock Release Brings Twitter, Facebook Chat to the Browser
• Chrome 5 Arrives, Mac, Linux Versions Now Available
• Flock 2.0 Beta Builds On Firefox 3 Improvements