Gmail Labs Goes International

Google has announced its Gmail Labs are now available on a global scale to users in 49 different languages. Google says its international users have been requesting the experimental features available in Gmail Labs

"You may wonder, since most Gmail features are available in almost every supported language immediately at launch, why Labs hasn't been," Google said in the Gmail Blog

"The truth is that Labs itself is a bit of an experiment -- it came out of people's 20% time, and we weren't sure if it would really work. Specifically, we thought there was a chance that everything would just break."

Google has 43 Labs applications and when a user signs on, the application creates a custom version of JavaScript based on how many of the 43 features are in use. Google says there are 8 trillion possible versions of the Gmail JavaScript that a user could receive and with the addition of 49 languages the number climbs to 430 trillion versions.

"It would obviously be a challenge to actually test all of these versions. But we put a lot of effort into building an architecture that supports this type of modularity, and fortunately, it seems to be working pretty well so far. So we figured, why not, what's another 422 trillion permutations?"