We’ve been doing a lot of js-based development on our project lately, and the more news like this, the better. Safari and Firefox have new JavaScript engines coming out that look really promising performance wise. In contrast, recently the ECMA group (that is in charge of the JS “standard”) abandoned their v4 plans to go with a less ambitious v3.1 of the JS language – maybe no the best decision, but I don’t think its the end of the world.
On our project now, we are now writing Object Oriented JS! (Something I never thought would happen). There are now great JS debugging and tracing add-ons for Firefox which make developing JS much easier – its turned into a proper programming language in only a few years, thanks to the push for web applications to behave more and more like desktop applications. I must say this is all very encouraging =)