It’s sure been an interesting week for people who cover browsers. Last weekend, we heard that Internet Explorer 11 will probably support WebGL and SPDY. Then, on Tuesday Frederick Lardinois got an email from Mozilla, asking if he had time to get on the phone with Mozilla’s CTO Brendan Eich to talk about the organization’s next generation browser engine Servo and the Rust language it is written in. Turns out, Mozilla Research wasn’t just going to work on this alone, but managed to get Samsung to help out with bringing this new engine that’s optimized for multicore and heterogeneous computing architectures to Android and ARM. Given that Mozilla had remained relatively quiet about Servo until now, it was a bit of a surprise that it was now ready to put it into the spotlight.

Google just announced that it is forking WebKit and launching this fork as Blink. As Google describes it, Blink is “an inclusive open source community” and ”a new rendering engine based on WebKit” that will, over time, “naturally evolve in different directions.” Blink, Google says, will be all about speed and simplicity. It will soon make its way from Chromium to the various Chrome release channels, so users will see the first Blink-powered version of Chrome appear on their desktops, phones and tablets in the near future.

Google will refresh its Nexus 7 tablet this summer, launching a new version powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor around July, according to Reuters – which is about a year after it launched the original Nexus 7. The news agency said two unnamed sources also told it Google is aiming to ship between six and eight million of the tablets in the second half of the year.

Adobe Systems has released Lightroom 4.4 with support for two mainstream SLRs, Nikon's new D7100 and Canon's Rebel SL1, and with better image quality for a Fujifilm cameras with unusual sensors. Lightroom is designed for editing and cataloging photos, especially those shot in cameras' proprietary raw image formats that offer higher quality but impose an image-processing burden on photographers. Adobe periodically updates the software to support new cameras -- and in the case of version 4.4 to fix problems with existing cameras such as the Fujifilm models.

Facebook continues to pull back the curtain on some of the technical details behind its search products, this time with a new look at the Social Graph. The social network's latest reveal is about LinkBench, a new database benchmark for the Social Graph, which is being released this week on GitHub. Touted as a tool for developers who need to benchmark and fine-tune database systems, LinkBench was designed to replicate the data model, graph structure, and request mix of Facebook's MySQL social graph workload.

The next version of jQuery, the popular JavaScript library, will drop support for Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8, but that doesn’t mean Microsoft isn’t very bullish about getting developers to use jQuery 2.0 and HTML5 to develop “a new wave of jQuery-based Windows Store applications.” As Microsoft announced, Microsoft Open Technologies, the company’s wholly owned open source-focused subsidiary, and the JavaScript experts at appendTo, have been working with the jQuery community to ensure that the next version of the framework offers full support for Windows Store applications.

Back in 2011, Epic ported its popular Unreal Engine 3 technology to Flash and showed how relatively high-end 3D games could run in the browser. It’s 2013 now, however, and Flash isn’t exactly a hot topic anymore. So to show off what game developers can do with a modern browser and without plugins today, Mozilla and Epic teamed up a little while ago to port Unreal Engine 3 to the web, something that was unthinkable back in 2011.

For years now, Google has offered its Google Maps Engine to enterprises that want to visualize their custom geospacial data. Starting today, anybody will be able to use a subset of this functionality, thanks to the launch of Google Maps Engine Lite (beta). This new tool, Google says, will allow any mapping enthusiast to “create and share robust custom maps using this powerful, easy-to-use tool.”

Getting to easily store and share content online as well as immediate access to new updates are benefits of using cloud-based software that should be at a subscription price which "well and truly" supports this real value. That's how Adobe Systems hopes to convince more customers to use the cloud version of its creative media and digital marketing software, according to Craig Tegel, regional president of Adobe Japan and Asia-Pacific.

Facebook announced that advertisers would be able to pitch members directly from the News Feed with less holistic messages that direct people outside of the social network's walled garden. The launch, which Facebook is calling a "small alpha test," brings Facebook Exchange-targeted (FBX) ads, which are special ad units served to members based on their online browsing behavior, to the desktop version of News Feed for the first time.