Background

Inspired by JSConf in the US, Jan Lehnardt, Malte Ubl and Holger Blank, decided to organize JSConf.eu. They gathered a stunning line-up of speakers, and I’m just happy I got to be one too!

My travel there

I got to the Arlanda airport in Stockholm in good time, had already checked in and got through security pretty quickly. Checked the board for my gate, and saw that it was just a couple of hundred meters away. Everything under control (or so I thought). As always when waiting for a flight, I wandered around, looking in shops, buying a couple of bottles of water.

About half an hour before my flight was due to take off, I walked to my gate, 10 C. When I got there, there was no attendant, but just a door to go through. On the other side of the door, the only sign I could see was “Exit”. Ok, that couldn’t be right. Looking the other way, there was an elevator, so I got in and rode it to the bottom floor.

I ended up in something that felt like an aquarium, down on ground level looking out a huge window at the airplanes being packed and tanked. There was a door, but needless to say, it was locked. All I could see was one enormous button, with a label saying that I should press it to get a transfer to Terminal 2 (I was in Terminal 5, from where virtually all international flights go). I pushed the button, a circle lit up around it, and nothing happened. It said that the transfer bus would take ten minutes, tops, to show up – no bus did.

Looking at the time now, with 25 minutes to take-off, I was starting to get worried. I decided to run up the flights of stairs next to me, and find someone to talk to. It basically went like this:

- How do I get to Terminal 2 the fastest way?
- Terminal 2? Take the transfer bus.
- But no bus is coming, and my plan leaves in 25 minutes!
- Oh.
- Can you you check where the transfer bus is?
She called, on an intercom, no less, the transfer bus department, but, surprisingly enough, they knew nothing about transfer buses…

- There must be another way to get there, right?
- Well, you could go out through customs again, run to Terminal 2, go through their own set of security, and run to the gate. But it’s pretty far, so I’m not sure you will make it in time.
- Ok, I’ll have to try at least. Can you please call them the gate and let them know I will be late?
- No, sorry, there’s no way for us to contact the gate.
WTF?! Really? No way? Highly convinced they could contact them, there was no time for an argument.
- Forget it, I’ll run then.

Running with my cabin bag on wheels (most of the time, just one of them touching the ground and the other in mid-air), and my overstuffed backpack with computer and lots of other things, I first got through customs and then onwards on my journey to Terminal 2. And let me tell you, Terminal 2 is far away from Terminal 5 at Arlanda. I don’t know how many doors and long empty corridors I ran through, but I was all drenched in sweat and gasping for air. Every time I felt I wouldn’t make it, I just pushed a little harder – I just had to.

Five minutes before take-off I got to security at Terminal 2, where they forced me to leave my water bottles I had bought at the other waiting area, which in theory is correct of them, but it still bothered me at that time, because they’re both behind security checks. Screw the bottles, I was going to make it, no matter what. Through security, I found my gate and got onboard the plane just in time.

And let me tell you, in the time of a certain flu going around, it is not a good thing to get on the plane, drenched in sweat with a nervous stare – on top of that, I also started coughing from the panic run. Oh well, no one was leaning over to my seat, at least, I can tell you that…

Once in Berlin I was sitting waiting around for Remy Sharp to show up with his flight from Copenhagen. Interestingly, I flew with Air Berlin, and was there even before time, I think, while Remy flew with the Scandinavian SAS and was late…

As soon as he had arrived, we got in a cab and went to the hotel. My hotel room looked really nice, although there was this hint of a smell of sewage, and the windows had been left opened. Not a good sign…

Friday night dinner

I was really looking forward to Friday night, because it meant time to meet up with my good Danish friend Morgan Roderick, who is now living and working (contracting) for Nokia in Berlin (ironically, he lives in Sweden otherwise, but only places we have met is abroad). Morgan met up with me and Remy close to the subway station near our hotel, and he took us to a great Asian restaurant, which had all kinds of interesting dishes.

Once there, we met his British colleagues Toby and Andy, who were quite nice chaps, and after a while we were joined by one more of Morgan’s work friends, Magnus, who is from Sweden (and, of course, is very nice too). I really, thoroughly, enjoyed the evening, and it was the first time in quite some time that I actually felt relaxed. After a few hours of dinner, the Brits dropped of while the rest of us went into a cozy corner pub, with a funky interior (especially the bathroom!) and some weird music. Kind of gave the feel of being in Jackie Brown, or some other Tarantino movie.

After a fantastic evening, we got back to the hotel, and as is my usual fashion, I was doing some panic changes to my slide deck late into the night…

The conference, day 1

JSConf.eu was split up into two days, with lots of talks each day, and for the most of the time, dual tracks going on. Once I got there, I also managed to meet a number of fellow Swedes attending, where my friend Martin Lissmyr was one of them, and it is always nice to have Swedes around. For comfort and support, you know.

Below are short takes on the sessions I managed to see.

Talks I attended

The Future of Web-Apps – Dion Almaer

Dion was supposed to give this talk with his compadre Ben Galbraith, but after Øredev, Ben got so sick that he actually had to cancel and go home to the US. I hope you are better now, Ben! Dion’s talk consisted of parts of the talk I saw Ben doing at Øredev, but also of other interesting things. I also, finally, got to see the wonderful Louis C.K. talk “Everythings Amazing & Nobody’s Happy”, which I had on my hard drive, but had failed to take the time to see. All in all, Dion did a great and inspiring keynote! I’m just sad that, both at Øredev and JSConf.eu, all I managed to do was say hi to Dion, but never talk.

CommonJS – JavaScript vs. Ruby, Python, Java, etc. – Kris Kowal

CommonJS is intended to “…building up the JavaScript ecosystem for web servers, desktop and command line apps and in the browser.” I think it’s great with such an initiative, but at the same time, it’s not a part of what I’m personally interested in, so I didn’t listen that intensely. From what I understood, though, the work with CommonJS is appreciated.

Building Desktop-Caliber Web Apps with Capuccino and Atlas – Francisco Tolmasky

This was a very interesting demo, and the things they are creating really seem awesome – some clever minds at work there. They also dropped the idea of using MHTML in Internet Explorer to serve everything in one HTTP request – quite cool! Part of me can’t help to wonder about all the generated code, though, but I haven’t had the time to check it out.

HTML5 JavaScript APIs – Remy Sharp

Remy was giving a talk about different APIs and cool features offered with HTML5 and surrounding technologies, and I think the options for developers were alluring – and if you were just paying attention, there was a lot of things covered in a short amount of time.

JavaScript – From Birth to Closure – Robert Nyman

Well, yes, naturally I was there – this was my talk. I realized during this talk that I’m not a professional speaker, at least not yet. Especially during the beginning of my talk, I let some details get to me that kind of threw my focus off (insignificant details I over-focused on, like weird position for me to stand at, it seemed like people weren’t getting my first couple of jokes etc). After a while I got a little bit better, but not as good as it felt at Øredev. Oh well, I hope I have learned something, and that people went away from my talk with at least something.

Extreme JavaScript Performance – Thomas Fuchs

Having done some performance testing with JavaScript and how web browsers react myself, I think it was a good talk with things to consider in the future for an optimal result.

ECMAScript – Douglas Crockford

Douglas gave a stunning talk about the history of ECMAScript, different twists and turns on the way, how IBM seem to be filled with just lawyers who focus on patents rather than offering something actually good etc. It was also about the future of ECMAScript, and how everyone will work together in small steps to make it better. Douglas is a fantastic story-teller, and it is mesmerizing sitting there listening to any of his talks – and this was the third talk this week for me seeing him!

Saturday night dinner

After the talks on Saturday, me and the jQuery crew, meaning, John Resig, Brandon Aaron, Jörn Zaefferer and Remy Sharp went out for dinner, and ended up at, of all places, an Australian restaurant at Potsdam Plaza in Berlin. Having never been there before, Potsdam Plaza seemed to be a spectacular place, and in the middle of it, there was this huge thing built up for the movie 2012 with waterfalls and all. I tried to get the team to cave in and acknowledge DOMAssistant’s superiority, but it didn’t really happen…

Party time

The event party was maybe a 10 minutes cold walk from Potsdam Plaza, and in there Nokia were sponsoring all alcohol – it seemed to be appreciated.
Also there, I got to meet David Zschille who I had met my first time in Berlin back in March this year, at a Mozilla event. Unfortunately, the music was a bit loud, so not many conversations were, well, fluent in there.

I shared a cab back to the hotel with my friend Tom Hughes-Croucher and Nicole Sullivan, and got back, well, not too late, I think.

The conference, day 2

A bit tired, I got up later, and luckily enough, I got to share a cab to the conference venue with Steve Souders and Douglas Crockford. As I have mentioned before, both these gentlemen have been highly influential to my work and evolvement as a web developer, and having first met them at Øredev and now in Berlin, it was almost half a week of me stalking them, constantly asking questions, desperately hoping that some genius would rub off on me. So, thanks for putting up with me, guys!

Talks I attended

Loading JS – even caveman can do it – Kyle Simpson

Kyle has being doing some really great work with LABjs, to tend to the problem of JavaScript loading blocking a web page, parallel loading and similar things. Quite nice!

End to End JavaScript – From Server to Client – Tom Hughes-Croucher

Tom was giving a talk of JavaScript on the server, how to improve the results of calls done with YQL with JavaScript and other things. Interesting, although not really something I personally work with on a day-to-day basis.

OOCSS – Nicole Sullivan

Nicole has some really interesting ideas with improving CSS, and she has a lot of experience to back her claims. Overall, I think she has great thoughts, although I’m not really on board with all her takes. I plan to cover OOCSS – Object-Oriented CSS – in a future blog post.

Unittesting JavaScript with Evidence – Tobie Langel

Poor Tobie got off to a bad start with a presentation file/program that gave him some grief, and as a fellow presenter, I really felt with him. Once that was sorted out, though, he have an introduction to unit testing with the Evidence framework.

JavaScript in Browser Performance – Steve Souders

Steve gave a talk very similar to the one he gave at Øredev, but my impression is that he was more on fire here, and that the crowd seemed to be more onboard with what he was talking about. Always inspiring!

Going home

Unfortunately I had to leave before the last talk by John Resig about testing JavaScript to catch my plane home. Proudly, I can say, I managed to have a casual talk in German with the cab driver for a full thirty minutes to the airport.

JSConf.eu was great, I applaud the initiative, and I sure hope it will happen again next year!

Please also take a look at My pictures of JSConf.eu 2009 and Berlin.

Background

One of the main problems slowing web sites down is the number of HTTP requests, i.e. the number of times a separate file need to be retrieved from the server; e.g. images, CSS and JavaScript files. Depending on web browser, you can only have between 2 and 8 concurrent HTTP requests. There can also be delays between requests, depending on file type asked for, redundant header information sent etc.

You can always combine all CSS files into one and all JavaScript files into one through a clever deployment script, but it’s still a couple of requests. Then with images, you can use CSS sprites, but that could affect memory, and there’s still no solution for inline images in a web page.

So, what if we could combine all HTTP requests into one?

Picture from standing on the break on Flickr

Resource Packages

Alexander Limi of Mozilla has been working on a solution to this, described in detail in Making browsers faster: Resource Packages. The idea is to be able to combine all HTTP requests into one, and have this implemented in all web browsers, and to have it backwards compatible.

Sounds to good to be true, right?

Implementation

The idea is to use the ZIP format, which is supported on all platforms, and to package all resources in a web page into one ZIP file. You then instruct the web browser, via a link element, to download that ZIP package of resources.

	<link rel="resource-package" type="application/zip"
		href="site-resources.zip">

Note that the type attribute is not needed in HTML5. Also worth mentioning is that the files in the resource package should take precedence over all files included in the page through other elements (e.g. the src attribute on images and script elements). Paths on the resource file will be relative to where the actual resource package exists in the hierarchy.

You can also complement it with a manifest file that list all your files in the resource package, and also be able to use it in conjunction with Offline Resources in HTML5.

javascript/jquery.js
styles/reset.css
styles/grid.css
styles/main.css
images/save.png
images/info.png

To make this work for any web site you build, you could either manually, or through a deploy script, zip all the necessary files together for your resource package. And when it comes to inline images in a web page, you could actually let the server just zip it on the fly, first time that page is being requested – it will be some work for the server, but the performance gain of just one HTTP request is very likely to make it worth it.

Picture from Mast Farm Picnic – 019 on Flickr

Web browser implementations

What web browser vendors need to do is implement support for a link element to include a resource package, unpack it and then use those files instead of those referenced at other places in a web page. Older web browsers lacking support will just ignore this and work as they always have.

What is really exciting is that this is already to be implemented in Firefox 3.7!

And what is also very encouraging is that Mozilla have been sending this proposal out to other web browser vendors, so everyone can offer it in their respective web browser (the beautiful thing of an organization such as Mozilla ). They have been in talks with performance guru Steve Souders, Alex Russell of Google and Ben Galbraith & Dion Almaer of Palm to get good feedback from an implementor’s perspective.

Perhaps the web will actually be fast(er) in the future!

Getting there

Since the Øredev 2009 conference takes place in Malmö, in Sweden, I decided to take the X 2000 train there instead of flying. I could try and say that it was for environmental reasons, which is a good thing, but to be honest, my decision was just based on travel time and making it easier with arriving directly at the station next to my hotel.

In retrospect, though – and I know how weak this sounds – the train goes really fast and takes the curves leaning, so instead of me working or reading, I just needed to basically just sit still to avoid starting feeling sick. So even though I like the idea, not sure I will take the train next time – at least not the high-speed one.

I work out a lot regularly, and I drink protein shakes. So, as a snack/afternoon meal at the train, I wanted to drink one, but didn’t really feel like preparing it in the toilet sink. Therefore, after some serious smooth-talking, I managed to convince the train conductor to allow me to use his little kitchen which had a sink and faucet. Last thing he said to me before I went in there was: “Be careful, the train can be a bit jerky in some turns – just so you know”.

I though “Yeah, whatever, I’m a grown-up now, I can manage”, filled my shaker with protein powder and water, and started shaking it. After just a few seconds the lid got off the shaker, and I spilled the containing goo all over me and the entire kitchen… I got some paper and started to clean up as good as I could; the kitchen looked fairly decent at least, but the protein drink stains on my shirt looked like sperm or something… No bother, only four more shirt-stained hours to go on the train!

So, in my stain misery, all I could do was tweet about it and share the “joy” with people. I think the best reply ever was from Jim O’Donnell, who wondered about me being in a room with the conductor, and a stained shirt, and ultimately asked me if “Protein shake” was our safe word!

Hotel room

Eventually I arrived in Malmö, and walked across the bridge from the train station over to the hotel, Elite Hotel Savoy. I checked in and got put in room 626. All well so far, but I got some interesting instructions on how to get to my room.

Take the lift to the second floor, get off, walk down half a stair, take the corridor to another elevator, take that one to your room.

Ok… I always thought room numbers starting with 600 would be on the 6th floor, but apparently my floor seemed to be wedged somewhere between the first and second floor, and elevator number two surely must have been going exclusively horizontal.

Nevertheless, I got a beautiful room with lots of space for all my stuff, and a little envelope with welcoming instructions as well (and even some Swedish car candy!). I unpacked what I had to, and then directly went off to the speakers’ dinner.

Speakers’ dinner

The speakers’ dinner took place at the absolutely gorgeous City Hall in Malmö, which is, especially on the interior, very very nice – let me tell you, it was the first time as a speaker walking on a red carpet to the welcome room. Feeling a bit lost and not really knowing any other speaker, I browsed around amongst the other speakers in the mingling room just before the dinner, and luckily I ran into the lovely Theresa Neil. Theresa and I both were speakers at the Scandinavian Web developer Conference 2009 so we got to know each other there, and it was good to see that she once again this year was visiting Sweden!

We were then ushered into another, highly ornamented, room with lots of round tables put up for dinner and enormous chandeliers hanging over our heads. Theresa and I sat down at one table, and we were joined by some people from the conference organizing committee as well as performance guru Steve Souders, Vice President of Development at Oracle Cameron Purdy, interaction designer Dan Saffer and Alex Loddengaard.

It was a nice dinner with some very, eh, interesting dishes, and at the end of it I dared to approach Steve Souders – he has influenced a lot of my work and it was really good to meet him in person!
After the dinner a few of us went to the official pub of the conference, just next to my hotel, and drank beer, spoke and generally had a good time.

Like before any of my speaking engagements, I was staying up way too late, making last-minute changes and generally panicking…

The conference

I got up pretty early in the morning, and went for a morning walk. Had breakfast, packed all my stuff and then I decided to walk to the venue instead of taking the offered shuttle service – just to get some fresh air and properly wake up, I thought. And man, did I wake up! It was very brisk outside so I guess the walk served its purpose at least.

I got my badge, which interestingly read “Independent” (probably since I was invited as me, and not just as an employee) – I liked the notion, though, of being strong and independent.

I managed to see some of Marc Lesser’s keynote “Accomplishing more by doing less” (he sure has a name that fits his presentation…), before I went to where my presentation would be and got ready.

My presentation

I gave my presentation JavaScript – From Birth to Closure (View/download on SlideShare) and overall I think it went pretty good. I was worked up, in a good mood and I felt I got good some good feedback/reactions from the audience as well. Only regret I have is that I had a dirty joke in the middle of my presentation, just to desperately shock/wake people up. Sure, some people liked it and tweeted about it, but the general feedback after was that it was a bit low and uncalled for, and I believe some even got offended. Please accept my apologies – the joke is now gone.

Let me also say that it is quite a mental challenge to give a talk on JavaScript with Douglas Crockford, JavaScript Godfather, in the audience. The feedback I got afterwards, though, was that I seemed to have done well.

Presentations

With nine (!) separate tracks going at the same time, there were quite a number of talks to choose from. The other presentations I attended were:

JavaScript: The Good Parts – Douglas Crockford

I have seen this talk before by Douglas, except for some minor changes, and it is a great presentation, and especially the introduction to have if you are coming to JavaScript from other programming languages like Java, C++ or similar.

Even Faster Web Sites – Steve Souders

Steve was talking about how much performance matters, not just for end user experience, but also in conversions, loyalty and revenue, and showed both some interesting techniques as well as numbers to back his claims. First time seeing Steve talk, and it was very inspiring!

The JSON Saga

Douglas gave his talk about how JSON came to be, and it truly is a saga that has led to where we are today. Besides everything JSON, I also learned that Douglas apparently, at times, likes to design logos.

Design to Development – Collaborating and Communicating on Interaction Design – Theresa Neil

Needing a break from code, I decided to see Theresa give her talk about user experience and different approaches to common problems. As a fellow presenter, I also liked her new slide deck design!

How Exactly Can Developers Create a Compelling User Experience? – Ben Galbraith

Getting inspired by Theresa’s talk, I decided to stay for another user experience talk. Ben, (previously with Google, then Mozilla, now Palm), gave a nice presentation about how design and user experience matters, and presented a lot of feedback and quotes from people researching it.

Evening

After the conference, the organizers were offering dinner at the venue together with some beer – I think this is a great idea, to keep everyone around and still mingling even though you are several hundred people! During dinner, Remy showed up, since he was due to talk the day after. We had some dinner together, and then later some beers at the pub, but both he and I were quite tired, both from escapades before the conference, as well as upcoming adventures.

Morning after, I left to go home and meet the family, before embarking on my next conference adventure (which I will cover in my next blog post).

The Øredev Conference review

It was my first time at Øredev, and I have to say I was extremely satisfied! Everything, down to the last detail, was very well organized, and everything just worked!
Especially as a speaker, it’s so good when you don’t need to waste time and effort into administrative details, but instead just focus on your talk, and the web track leader Olof Adell set a great example there!

If I ever get the chance to go again, I would say yes without hesitating! Thanks for everyone making it such a great event, and especially to Michael Tiberg for making this happen!

My pictures from the event are available in the Øredev 2009 conference photo set

I, for one, is immensely grateful for the change Firefox has brought to the web, with openness and standards usage that has really spurred a better web climate. We all owe a lot to the people who allowed to open-source it and Mozilla for having fought that battle.

The median Firefox market share value is 26% according to Wikipedia, and behind it are Safari, Google Chrome and Opera that are also all very competent web browsers. And, sure, at times Firefox is still a memory hog, but lots of fantastic work is constantly being done on improving it, and I know that virtually everything I mentioned in Help Making Firefox Better – Share Your Thoughts! is being worked on as we speak.

And it feels special that the birthday of Firefox is also the day of when the Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago, and they are both parts of shaping a more open world.

So, congratulations Firefox, and thank you you for all you have accomplished! Here’s to another five years of improving the web!

I heard/read about the conference when it was in its planning stage, but since I was already scheduled to speak at Øredev this week and had some other things to attend to, I early on discarded the idea of attending JSConf.eu.

However, as things got closer, I realized I could actually be a part of it, and given the impact of the event and all the interesting talks, I felt I would really like to talk there as well!

In May this year at the Scandinavian Web Developer Conference 2009, I as well as Jan Lehnardt and Malte Ubl gave presentations, and interestingly enough, together with Holger Blank, they are organizing JSConf.eu.

So, I got on touch with them over the weekend and spoke with Malte, and basically got to hear that they would love to have me do a talk, but that the budget wouldn’t cover my expenses – which is fair enough, my proposal was “drastically late”, as Malte called it , and the JSConf.eu 2009 conference schedule had already been organized. So, I spoke to my employer, Valtech , who graciously immediately offered to sponsor me!

Therefore, I can happily announce that I will, alongside the fantastic list of speakers, do a talk at JSConf.eu. I’ll be covering some brief JavaScript history, common best practices and then more advanced things like scope and closures. Slightly worried that my talk might be too basic, but at the same time, I hope to fill in some blanks and repeat important information that everyone should know, and hopefully inspire people to delve into the fantastic workings of JavaScript.

Will you be there?

Apple has applied to patent CSS transformations and animations. I’m no lawyer, and it’s virtually impossible what results such a patent owned by Apple would lead to in reality, but really, if it in any way cripples interesting technologies and approaches in creating richer web sites, end users and web developers are the losers.

And, I know, it seems to be in the spirit of Apple to close things in, but I sincerely hope they will drop this and instead contribute to the web with open technologies and ideas – we have all seen various companies going down the proprietary path for things web-related, and it has never been for the better.

So, Apple, please, just stop it.

On top of the various ways of selecting elements in a web page and using the FriendlyFire collaboration (all described in the Firefinder page), it now also supports 8 languages, thanks to very helpful contributors:

• English
• Japanese
• German
• Italian
• Polish
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Danish

If you haven’t already, go download Firefinder now!

Also, if you are interested in contributing with translating any other language, please let me know, through a comment or the ways to contact me!

It is especially interesting, and scary, for me since all the other names on the bill are true JavaScript heroes. Just take a glance at this list of the speakers:

• Jake Archibald
• Christian Heilmann
• Todd Kloots
• Peter-Paul Koch
• Stuart Langridge
• Robert Nyman (that’s me! )
• Simon Willison

As the name implies, it is naturally about JavaScript, but also with a complete focus on front end-development – as opposed to many other conferences. With this impressive list of speakers, I am sure anyone interested in JavaScript will be wildly pleased!

Besides, the name is awesome, isn’t it? I am so happy I came up with it, and that Remy, the event organizer, liked my suggestion.

Make sure to buy a ticket now while there are still some left!

Web browser market share

Let’s start by looking at the current web browser market share, available at Browser Market Share and Browser Version Market Share:

Internet Explorer

65.71%

Firefox

23.75%

Safari

4.24%

Chrome

3.17%

Opera

2.19%

That’s generally almost a level playing field, wouldn’t you say? Sure, take away 30% from Internet Explorer and share among the others, but still the trend is going towards a well-balanced web browser market. I guess one reflection is that Opera, after developing web browsers for all these years (and having a very good product!) has a very low market share on the desktop, and I think they need to do something exceptional to change that.

If we break it down per web browser version (with over 1% share), it looks like this:

Internet Explorer 6.0

24.42%

Internet Explorer 7.0

19.39%

Internet Explorer 8.0

16.84%

Firefox 3.5

12.65%

Firefox 3.0

9.62%

Safari 4.0

2.92%

Internet Explorer 8.0 – Compatibility Mode

2.30%

Chrome 2.0

1.74%

Opera 9.x

1.27%

Firefox 2.0

1.24%

Chrome 3.0

1.20%

Here, there are a lot of interesting conclusions we can draw. First and foremost, IE 6 is still the most used web browser in the world – to me, this is terrifying, and saddening that we’re still suffering from that era. Interesting to see how many users who have upgraded to Firefox 3.5, although I thought it would be more in comparison to version 3.0. Also noteworthy that the Compatibility Mode in IE 8 are used by more people than all Opera users together, and almost as many as all Google Chrome users. Also, given Google Chrome’s aggressive upgrading strategy, I thought there would be more people with the latest version.

Looking at Top Browser Share Trend, we can see that Firefox 3.5 and IE 8 are the web browsers with the most upgoing trend at the moment.

Ballmer: Chrome and Safari are rounding errors

In a recent interview, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stated that Chrome And Safari Are Rounding Errors. And yes, sure, I know he has to act like that. Or, correction, he believes he has to act like that to bring confidence to Microsoft fans. However, in my world, it gives the opposite message: if you are downplaying competitors share, as opposed to bringing forth why your own product is so special, it’s a sign of fear and uncertainty (and don’t ask me where he gets the statistics of having 74% of the market, where most studies show around 65%).

Is Google Chrome a success or not?

But, one thing is interesting there in Ballmer’s statement, and also in the very varying opinions I hear from people about Google Chrome. It has been in the (Windows) market for a little over a year now, and it has a little bit over 3% of the web browser market.

Some people claim it’s an amazing feat in just one year to get 3% of the market, while others see it as a failure with all Google’s brand and marketing power; that they instead should have had something like 10% by now to have succeeded. Some people claim that Google Chrome OS is a, more or less, desperate measure to put even more focus on the web browser, to make more people use Google Chrome.

So, what do you think: is Google Chrome a success or a failure? Or perhaps in between? And do you have any thoughts on web browser market share of today?

Therefore, my ambition here is to:

• Give you a little history
• Go into what HTML5 is and what it covers
• Show code examples
• Target the question whether you can start using it or not

Background

The HTML5 work stems from the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group), and their focus is the development of HTML and APIs for web applications. The reason it came to life back in 2004, founded by people from Apple, Mozilla and Opera, was a worry about the direction W3C were taking with XHTML, and no focus on HTML or the real-life needs for web developers.

It got really interesting in July of 2009, when W3C announced that XHTML2 would be cancelled in favor of HTML. This means that the only future development of HTML and XHTML is in the form of HTML5 – HTML5 is the future, whatever you think about it.

I should also mention right away that HTML5 is spelled just that, with no space between the the L and 5 – read more in Spelling HTML5.

What is HTML5

So what is HTML5, really? Basically, it’s about extending HTML/XHTML with new more semantically rich elements, deprecating attributes, introducing new attributes and altering how some element and attributes are allowed to be used. Hand in hand with that is the possibility to use attributes for WAI-ARIA to make a web page more accessible, such as with landmark roles.

It also introduces a number of APIs for making it easier to create web applications:

• 2D drawing API with the canvas element.
• API for playing of video and audio with the video and audio elements.
• API that enables offline Web applications.
• API that allows a Web application to register itself for certain protocols or media types.
• Editing API in combination with a new global contenteditable attribute.
• Drag & drop API in combination with a draggable attribute.
• API that exposes the history and allows pages to add to it to prevent breaking the back button.
• Cross-document messaging with postMessage.

Other things that initially was in the specification, but broken out into separate specifications are:

• API for Geolocation
• Web Storage.
• Web Workers.
• querySelectorAll.

All in all, a lot of nice new things and technology to help us shape the future of the web. As you can see, some of the above things are in the actual HTML5 specification, some others are broken out into their own specifications. Think of it as with AJAX: when that term and hype hit the world, anything that was even remotely related to JavaScript in any way was thought to be AJAX.

Pretty much goes with HTML5: for most people, that’s generally the term you need to imply that you are using new state-of-the-art technologies to create a web site; in reality, that might be “just” HTML with some new semantic enhancements, or it might be an extravaganza with the new APIs in conjunction with JavaScript.

I think the best document to read to grasp the changes are HTML5 differences from HTML4, which will cover:

• Open Issues
• Backwards Compatible
• Development Model
• Impact on Web Architecture
• Character Encoding
• The DOCTYPE
• MathML and SVG
• New Elements
• New Attributes
• Changed Elements
• Changed attributes
• Absent Elements
• Absent Attributes
• Extensions to HTMLDocument
• Extensions to HTMLElement

Backwards compatibility & progressive enhancement

I think one of the main reasons behind the adoption of HTML5 is that it sets out to be backwards compatible and work with the web browsers there already are in the market, and have been for some time, too. This is done through new elements which, generally, have no particular look or behavior attached to them, but rather offering more semantic richness and then up to you style them via CSS according to your liking.

The other parts are new elements that have been implemented in some web browsers, and not in others, where the progressive enhancement approach that has been preached for a long time comes into play. Meaning, use the new elements which will give a richer experience in some web browsers, whereas it will fall back to default content in others.

Example in question: a cascade of new input element types:

• tel
• search
• url
• email
• datetime
• date
• month
• week
• time
• datetime-local
• number
• range
• color

So far, WebKit and Opera have been the most busy rendering engine to implement some of these, especially in relation with Opera’s work with WebForms 2.0 support, but in other web browsers it will fall back to a regular input type="text". That means, for instance, that input type="search" will will give subtle, but better user experience, in Safari and Google Chrome, but will be a fully functional for all others.

The beauty of progressive enhancement.

HTML5 code introduction

Let’s get down to some code introduction and what you need to be aware of when you start coding HTML5.

Syntax options

The doctype for HTML5 looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>

No versioning, no redundant information. All progressive enhancement on a feature-level, as opposed to complete releases that need to be implemented.

And, to be a bit more pragmatic than before, HTML5 will allow both quick-closing of empty tags (such as input, link etc), but you can use those elements just as well without quick-closing them. Quotes for attributes are also optional, and you know what? You can even use upper-case letters for your element names of you will!

All of these examples are valid HTML5:

<DIV>A monkey</DIV>
<p id=john>John's P</p>	

<input type=text>
<input type="text">
<input type="text" />

This might be scary to some people, and I agree with the concerns the HTML5 Super Friends presented, where they want a way to, in a more stricter way, be able to validate the consistency of the code. However, with all different people’s coding styles and our legacy, allowing this freedom was probably the only pragmatic option to get people along, instead of fighting battles that will never be won.

It should also be noted that it is not needed to specify the type attribute for style or scriptelements; it is automatically assumed to be CSS respectively JavaScript.

And, a great thing is that you can now wrap entire blocks with an a element to make that entire block a link to somewhere!

HTML or XHTML

I should also mention that there are two options to serve HTML5 content: as HTML or XHTML. The somewhat confusingly named XHTML5 differs a bit from HTML5, though:

• No doctype is needed, just an XML prolog.
• It must have a namespace: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
• It must be served with either of these MIME types: application/xhtml+xml or application/xml.
• The noscript element can not be used.

New elements

Lot’s of the research behind HTML5 has been how people name their elements, with IDs and classes, and part of the result are new elements named/inspired by those. There are a lot of new elements in HTML5, where these are probably the most interesting as you can use them right away in any web browser.

article

Mark up parts of the content that is independent, for instance blog post, article etc.

aside

Used to mark up relevant additional information, like a sidebar.

audio

Used for natively including audio in a web page.

footer

The counter-part to header; could be used for any footer section per context.

header

Used for headers in its context. Note: not just for the header of a page, but also for each header part in section, article and similar.

hgroup

Used for grouping several headers, for instance, a main heading and a sub-heading.

nav

Used for marking up main navigation.

section

Mark up a generic document section. Easily confused with article, and on top of that you nest either of them, in any order, with the other.

time

Used to mark up a time or date.

video

Used for natively including video in a web page – lots of interesting work is coming along here in terms of web browser support.

HTML5 examples

Let’s get down to some actual code and see what an HTML5-coded web page could look like. I have put together a simple HTML5 example with new elements and WAI-ARIA landmark roles as part of my HTML5 demos page (quite sparse now, I know, but I will incrementally add examples to it).

This is the complete source code of that web page:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
	<meta charset="utf-8">
	<title>HTML5 example with new elements and WAI-ARIA landmark roles</title>
	<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/base.css" type="text/css" media="screen">
	<!--[if lte IE 8]>
	<script src="js/html5.js"></script>
	<![endif]-->
</head>

<body id="index-page">

	<div id="container">
		<header role="banner">
			<h1>HTML5 example with new elements and WAI-ARIA landmark roles</h1>
			<p>This page has valid simple HTML5 markup complemented with WAI-ARIA landmark roles for accessibility</p>
		</header>

		<nav id="demo-top-nav">
			<ul>
			<li><a href="http://robertnyman.com/html5">HTML5 demos and samples' start page</a></li>
			<li><a href="http://robertnyman.com/">Robert's talk</a></li>
			<li><a href="http://robertnyman.com/javascript/">JavaScript compatibility tests</a></li>
			</ul>
		</nav>

		<div id="demo-main" role="main">
			<section id="demo-main-content">
				<header>
					<hgroup>
						<h2>A title</h2>
						<h3>Subtitle to the above title</h3>
					</hgroup>
				</header>

				<article>
					<p>Some content, created <time datetime="2009-10-14">October 14th 2009</time></p>
				</article>
				<article>
					<p>Some more content - i guess you get the drift by now</p>
				</article>

				<article>
					<header>
						<h2>The HTML code for this page</h2>
					</header>

				</article>
			</section>

			<aside id="demo-aside-content" role="complementary">
				This is just a demo page to see HTML5 markup and WAI-ARIA landmark roles in action in a simple context
			</aside>
		</div>

		<footer id="page-footer" role="contentinfo">
			Created by <a href="http://robertnyman.com/">Robert Nyman</a>
		</footer>
	</div>

</body>
</html>

As you can see, it looks more or less than every other HTML web page you have ever seen, but with just a few new HTML elements being used and the role attribute with landmark roles for WAI-ARIA to make it more accessible.

If you want a more real-world example, just view the source code of robertnyman.com: I have now rewritten it as HTML5!

Can I use it today?

I would say yes!

There was some wild speculation about the date 2022, because one of the main men behind the work with HTML5 and the specification was asked in in an interview about HTML5 and its timeline, and the date 2022 was mentioned. Then everyone assumed that HTML5 wouldn’t be ready until 2022, which is not was addressed, but rather when web browsers would have two releases with completely full support for HTML5 (compare that to CSS 2.1 support etc and the time it has taken, and you will probably get a more sane reaction). Read more about in 2022, or when will HTML 5 be ready? if you want to know more.

But let’s go through the pros and cons, and I will explain why HTML5 is ready to be used.

Pros

Major players using it

To begin with, a lot of major players have already started implementing it. Google.com already have the HTML5 doctype (although they should really improve the markup accordingly), the new hyped Google Wave is revolving a lot around HTML5 and related APIs (which ironically uses a HTML4 Strict doctype…) and there is also a YouTube HTML5 demo page.

Strict rendering

The HTML5 doctype will trigger the strictest rendering in all web browsers. No Almost Standards Mode, no quirks; strict all the way, which is the way we want, and the way it should be.

Progressive enhancement

You can start today just by changing the doctype. Then gradually move onto exchanging some structure elements, sprinkle it with some WAI-ARIA etc and before you know it, you have a fantastic HTML5 page!

Validation available

Now even the W3C Validator supports HTML5. Just use the Firefox Web Developer Extension to validate your HTML against it. The HTML Validator extension unfortunately doesn’t support it yet, but I know there are at least plans to include this – if you have any ides or input, please help him out.

SEO

It probably doesn’t matter much right now, but in the future, I think that web sites that are marked up in a much more rich fashion with new HTML5 elements to give them the multitude they need, will benefit a lot from this.

Cons

Ah, right, drawbacks. There are always some, isn’t there?

Internet Explorer

It probably doesn’t come as a shock to you, but Internet Explorer, all current versions (yes, including IE8 as well) has a little issue: it won’t apply any CSS to an unknown element (e.g. nav, section etc).

However, Sjoerd Visscher found out that with an HTML5 Shiv, sort of an electrical shock for IE to start rendering things at least a little bit more properly, you can address that problem.

The gist of it is that you need to call document.createElement with the name of each new HTML5 element you use in the page. You don’t need to use it to append or place those element, just call it to make IE aware of them. Remy Sharp has written a little HTML5 enabling script for Internet Explorer, version 6 to 8 which works in all possible cases.

People eager for HTML5 has argued that we will need script dependency for IE to render styling for those elements, otherwise it will render unstyled, but with the content still fully accessible. While I agree in theory, I think it is, at times, an unnecessary requirement for using HTML5.

Another option is the content negotiation approach, where we on the server exchange the new elements for old ones just for Internet Explorer. It’s simple: just have a regular expression to replace all block elements (header, footer, section etc) with div elements, and the inline ones (time, mark etc) with span elements.

Together with that, always style you elements through their id attribute or class value, and you are good to go! All modern web browsers + screen readers + search engines will get rich HTML5 markup; IE will get plain old HTML.

The drawback of the first option is script dependency to get correct styling for the new HTML5 elements; the drawback with the other approach could be duplicating CSS and JavaScript code. Therefore, consider the options and choose the approach you deem most suitable.

Specification discussions

There are still some discussions about some elements in HTML5 and how they should be specified, what existing options/combinations there are that will work in existing user agents (which is a must; it can’t break things). Overall, though, I’d say use the new parts everyone agrees about and that will work, and hold on with the bells and whistles until it’s ready.

The last call for the HTML5 working draft is in October this year. The future is already here.

Where we are today on the web

I for one is really happy that this is finally becoming true and usable. Sure, as always there are a number of issues and things to discuss, but overall we really need this as web developers. We need new elements, APIs and options to create dazzling web sites, and we have been waiting so long for something new at all.

I also think this is vital for the climate of the web, to have open standards to code after, and to compete with the ever-growing closed-in and proprietary technologies that try to claim the web as their own.

Have me do a presentation

If you found all this to be immensely interesting, and would like to discuss it in real life or hear more, please contact me if you want me to talk at a conference, your company or similar!

Related reading

HTML5 Specification

The specification for HTML5.

WHATWG FAQ

A good FAQ about WHATWG and general answers to questions about HTML5 and peoples’ wishes.

HTML5 differences from HTML4

Great introduction to the differences between HTML4 and HTML5.

Dive Into HTML5

Mark Pilgrim has started writing an online book about HTML5. Only a a couple of chapters available right now, but already an interesting read.

HTML5 pocket book

Jeremy Keith has a handy little map over HTML5 elements and what they are supposed to be used for.

HTML5 Doctor

Great posts about general issues and ways to solve them, and also discusses flaws in the specification and alternatives.

Designing a blog with html5

Good introduction to how you would mark up a blog with HTML5.

HTML5 Super Friends

Well-known web names exclaim their support for HTML5, but also bring up issues they would like to see resolved.

My talk

I will do a presentation in the Wednesday Web Development track about JavaScript history, what it is and where it comes from, and then move into such interesting and important areas such as best practices, object-orientation, scope and closures. And yes, I know, quite brave to try and pack all that into 45 minutes. Wish me luck!

Other presenters

I can say for sure that I’m glad to be the first speaker on Wednesday, because following me are JavaScript king Douglas Crockford and performance guru Steve Souders! They have been, and are, very influential to me and it’s truly an honor to be featured on the same bill as them.

Accompanying them are Piotr Walczyszyn and Nikolai Onken, who will talk about Adobe AIR respectively Business Applications with the Dojo Toolkit.

The Thursday Web Development track also has some interesting talks with Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer, Remy Sharp and others.

Getting a ticket

Øredev 2009 is a massive 5-day event with lots of different tracks – therefore, there are a number of ticketing options available. Everything from 1-day-, 2-day passes etc to other options. Please check it out and if you find it interesting, I might see you there!

Background

As we all know, Mozilla, with Firefox, took back the web from a Microsoft-dominated era with Internet Explorer, made it open again and put emphasis on web standards. The way I see it, we owe gratitude for the openness and much healthier web browser landscape we see today, and it’s a very important step towards an open web.

Following that, Apple started developing Safari, based on WebKit, and last year, Google got into the game with Google Chrome (also based on WebKit). Somewhere at the sidelines, marketshare-wise, Opera has been around for quite some time, and has lately put a lot of effort into having people evangelize about HTML5 and future technologies.

With all this innovation, faster release cycles, new features and better overall support is brought to us, and I believe competition thrives from this. For many years, Firefox was known for setting the bar, both with web standards support and new exciting features, but as of lately, other web browsers have started seriously competing for this position, in terms of feature-support and performance.

Meeting in Prague

In Prague, I got the opportunity to discuss with Firefox Director, Mike Beltzner, and Firefox developer Vladimir Vukicevic about the future of Firefox, what to focus on and what web developers find most important. I also featured in a panel about HTML5 moderated by Vladimir where we discussed the balance of fixing old issues compared to implementing new things.

Before the panel, Vladimir had also expressed what they are looking for:

We are interested to hear what you think we could be doing better at, in terms of support for current or emerging web standards. Are there existing features in other browsers that you want to take advantage of that we don’t support? What about those features is compelling?

What’s missing from the web platform? Where do you want to see us take it? If you could pick one capability to add to the web, what would have the biggest impact on your web app development?

Of the currently supported standards, what’s painful? What would you like to see us focus on improving, whether through enhancement or through change?

What I think

The way I see it, Firefox took, and held, the lead for some time, but it is facing a huge challenge right now. The parts I find most important are:

Start-up time

In my daily work, with colleagues as well as people I met in the various companies I visit or do work for, a lot of them have chosen Google Chrome as their number one web browser. Anyone I ask about why, the answer always comes out the same: “Startup time – Firefox is so slow”. I know lots of work is being done by Mozilla in this area, but, if possible, I believe it has to be given even more priority. One suggestion is to postpone checking for add-on updates till after the web browser has actually started. Complement performance focus with looking at perceived performance vs. actual performance.

Performance, performance, performance

I think this can not be stressed enough. Without a doubt, the reason behind a fast adoption of other web browsers, especially Google Chrome, is spelled speed. Page rendering and JavaScript performance have to increase even more. In all fairness, it has to be said, Firefox 3.5 without any add-ons is very fast and almost up to par with the others, but at the same time add-ons is the main competitive advantage and in many cases, the sole reason for people choosing Firefox. Therefore, add-ons implementation has to get faster as well, and I believe Jetpack is an attempt to achieve that – problem is, native Jetpack in Firefox and people porting their add-ons to it is far away in the future, and other measures need to be taken before that.

Separating processes

This goes a little hand-in-hand with the performance points made above, but with separate processes for each tab, and especially one for the Firefox UI, it gives a great playing field for accomplishing that. I know this is in the long plan for Firefox as well, but I just want to emphasize how crucial it really is.

Release cycles

I think it comes down to how often a new version is released, but also, more importantly, how many features that are being tried to be packed into each release. The important choice to make is incremental additions and enhancements, and not believing each version will contain everything that is desired.

Acid3

Why I think the Acid3 tests matter is not necessarily what support that comes with a 100/00 score, it’s about the message it sends out to developers. If Mozilla can’t deliver a score of a 100, while WebKit and Opera can, it conveys the feeling that Mozilla have a harder time and is a little bit behind implementing things.

Implementing new features

What was good with the Firefox 3.5 release was support for video and audio elements, Location Aware Browsing, general HTML5-related support in the form of CSS enhancements, query selectors etc. Keep this up, but most of the above are just following WebKit examples – I would like you to be first with the most mind-blowing features! (I think the AwesomeBar is one example of such a great feature)

I want Firefox to be the best web browser out there again, all categories, and I believe these are the vital steps to achieve that. Make me proud!

What do you think?

Those are my thoughts. Is Firefox your main web browser, or do you just “use it for developing”, as I mostly hear? What would it take to make it your number one web browser again?

Help Mozilla out by contributing your thoughts!

Getting there

Thursday October 1st I met up with fellow Swedes Patrick Finch and David Tenser (ok, Patrick is actually British, but he lives in Sweden, so it counts as one of us ) to get on our flight with Czech Airlines. They were about to participate on Friday on an event for the local Mozilla community in Prague, and I had made sure to have one extra day of touristing in the city before the actual conference.

Once we got to the Andel’s hotel where we were staying (a very nice hotel, by the way), we got settled in our rooms and then planned to meet up to have dinner. In the lobby, I also met Søren Skrøder, who I got to know at the Mozilla/Maemo event in Copenhagen back in May. As it turned out, though, the main organizer William Quiviger (who now sports some kind of Jef Goldblum-look with his glasses…) was just a tad stressed in getting things in order and be on top of everything, so we went to the preparation area.

Once there, we met Barbara Hueppe, Paul Roguet, Irina Sandu, Svetlana and other people making their best to get everything in order. Being the kind spirits that we are, we added our small efforts to get everything done, so we could go out and eat something: by this time, I was famished!

Once we got everyone together and went out to eat, let’s just say that there were mixed ideas about where to go, and where the actual place was located. We walked around in Prague for almost an hour, till we finally settled on a restaurant. I ordered in Carpaccio, which was awesome! After dinner, I was exhausted, so I got back to the hotel, said hi to Axel Hecht and then went to my room to get some sleep and be prepared for a full day of Prague touristing.

Tourism in Prague

The next morning, I met a lot of Mozilla people at the breakfast, and I and Søren had decided to make an attempt to tourist together, since he had also dedicated his Friday time for the same purpose. We started by packing our bags, buying some water and then initiate our Prague excursion.

We took a glance on the map, had a brief discussion about what we wanted to see and then embarked on our walkabout. One of our first destinations was the the huge main park in Prague, Pet?ín hill. Neither I or Søren expected it to be so hilly, though, and there were serpentine walkways taking us up the steep hill.

After quite some time walking, we eventually reached the Pet?ín Lookout Tower, which gives an amazing view over Prague. There sure are a number of stairs to walk up, but it was definitely worth it! After having spent quite some time in the park by then, Søren expressed that he really wanted to move on and see other sights (these opinions were expressed in tweets like “Søren says we have had enough of pretty park pictures now. ” and “Søren says: “Fuck the scenic route”.”).

Understanding the hints, we started walking downhill again, and got to the Strahovsky monastery – unfortunately, it was closed when we got there. However, outside we met two people from the Mozilla community in Barcelona, and decided to make company.

That was then followed by a visit to Loreta Holy Shrine and then lunch at a local restaurant. Baffled by the constantly low prices: about €1.50 for a large beer and no lunch or dinner costed more than €20 (unless you wanted something really special). Post-lunch, it was finally time to reach the Prague Castle!

Within the castle area is also the gargantuan St. Vitus Cathedral, which we spent a fair amount of time in. After that visit, we went into the urinal, and I got the idea to take a picture of a toilet that was sealed off in an interesting way. Suffice to say, the reaction of the other people in the urinal, when they heard the camera flash, was not comforting. I learned something that day about taking pictures in urinals…

By this time, it started to get chilly outside and the wind started blowing, so we briskly moved forward out of the castle area, by wine growing on the hill side, and down towards the Vltava/Moldau river and across to the Old Town area of Prague (still a little bit scared of the guy who came walking on the sidewalk with a chainsaw – apparently Czech people defend their own hood in a different way…).

Once in the Old Town we had a look at the extraordinary Astronomical Clock and had the luck to see it at the full hour with all of its display. On our way, there’s was an offer to see a non-verbal performance of Beatles’ Yellow Submarine – Great, I’ve been looking for that all my life…

Next stop was the Museum of Communism, depicting the history of communism in the world, and in Prague in particular. It is terrible, but also needed, to be reminded how evil man can be, and that we really need to be more respectful and understanding to each other.

When the museum visit had come to an end, our Barcelonian friends needed to go back to the hotel again. Søren and I, however, just knew he had more to see in the city. We walked to the Charles Bridge, where the Swedes fought the Czechs during the Thirty Years’ War, and also got the opportunity to climb up in the tower on the Old Town side.

Last task of the day was crossing the bridge, admiring its gorgeous statues and then finding a tram station to get back to the hotel again. At the hotel, some Danish countrymen of Søren had arrived, so I, Søren and Finn Sørensen went out and had a nice dinner together (Carpaccio again for me, two nights in a row – oh, how I love it!). That was later followed by a welcome beer at the hotel with all the newly arrived conference attendants.

By this time, my room mate from Sweden, Stefan H, had also arrived, and in a Swedish humble manner we almost constantly apologized to each other for how much room we took in our hotel room, what a mess we had created etc.

My tourist day in Prague was fantastic, and I’m truly happy I took the time to do it!

The conference

The Mozilla conference had two full day of presentations, and I will list the ones I attended. The talks were divided into four tracks:

• Development
• Internationalisation
• Advocacy
• QA

(entire schedule)

Saturday presentations

Welcome address by Tristan Nitot

Tristan is the President of Mozilla Europe, and he welcomed us all to the conference and went a little into what it would contain.

Keynote: Glyn Moody

Glyn Moody is a technical writer who spoke about the importance of open software, how Mozilla of today is derived of the old Netscape roots, and how amazing it is that it actually happened. I wonder what the web would have looked like without Mozilla. Also, Moody is a great name, and I sure know it would fit me.

Keynote: Mark Surman

Mark is the Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, and his talk was about spreading the word, building community, and, in essence, making sure we continue to work for an open web. He also raised the extremely important question: “Will we have an open web 100 years?”, and how we can make sure that happens. Mozilla Drumbeat is a way to help people spreading the word.

Panel discussion with Tristan, Glyn and Mark

After the keynotes, it was time for a discussing about the open web, integrity and how can protect people on the Internet. I think a very important question was raised by someone in the audience about what information and data we can claim that we own; is a great blog comment of mine, in someone else’s blog something I can claim ownership to, what about pictures others take of me etc. Unfortunately, this was just dismissed with jokes about being seen drunk on Facebook, which really missed the big question. Sad.

Firefox Next – Mike Beltzner

Mike is the Director of Firefox, and he gave a very interesting talk about the future of Firefox, what they see as the true competitors (not other web browsers, but rather proprietary technologies such as Flash, Silverlight and Gears), how it needs to have shorter release cycles and what they need to focus on in the future. Later during the conference, I got to have a chat with him, and was happy to hear about the work on improved start-up time, how performance is perceived and other things.

Firefox in Europe

Mike Beltzner led an open discussion about the future of Firefox in conjunction with help, support and input from the European community. Good suggestions and I hope they got something to think about for future plans.

Firebug

Jan Odvarko of the Firebug team walked us through new features in the upcoming Firebug 1.5. Being a Firebug extension developer with Firefinder and Inline Code Finder, I would had hoped for more information about extending Firebug, but I think the right thing was to talk about general features. After his talk, it was great to finally meet Jan in person, talk a little and share the challengin experience of, as an extension developer, trying to understand Firebug…

Prism

Having developed a few Adobe AIR applications, for some time now, I have been hoping that Prism would take off and offer a good open alternative. As I see it, Prism is decent, but at the same time I get the feeling that the development pace of it isn’t that fast, and that they would have to put more effort into it if they want to compete with Adobe AIR.

Weave

Anant Narayanan did a very interesting and inspiring talk about Weave, where they are today and possible future plans. We spoke a little after the presentation about Opera Unite, possible interest in offering similar things to users and such.

Jetpack

Aza Raskin was supposed to give this talk, but his plane was late (or something), so Anant and someone else (missed the name) had to step up and hold an open discussion. What is clear is that Jetpack is most likely the future extension model for Firefox, phasing the old one out (at least for most use cases), but it will take some time and there are a number of things to work out before we reach that point.

My friend Remy Sharp was also to hold a presentation about HTML5 as well, but unfortunately couldn’t make it to Prague.

Saturday evening boat ride on the Vltava/Moldau river

Mozilla had arranged for all of the conference attendants to first ride specially booked historical trams down to the river, and then board a boat to get a dinner on board accompanied by a guide. However, with about 180 attendants, Czech beer and people spread out, the guiding didn’t really take off.

It was also possible to get up on the top of the boat to get a beautiful view of Prague at night. There I first got to have a good talk with Steve Lau of Songbird and then Martin Kliehm, who fights a lot for accessibility.

I also found it amusing to to see Patrick Finch, a.k.a. Remington Steele (or James Bond if you will), giving his special agent stance on the boat, and telling a story about an amazing feat of his.

After a few hours on the river, we got back to the pier again, and got on a bus back to the hotel, and I got to have an interesting talk with David McNamara about many varying things. Once back at the hotel, a few of us decided we needed just one more beer, and went out on the town – we were me, Brian King, David McNamara and Matjaz Horvat. Once at the bar, we also met Kamil Lach, who I got to know in Copenhagen in May, and someone else, who I just can’t remember (I was jus tired; do not blame the beer intake, ok?! ).

Brian gave me a good talk which really inspired me on the way back to the hotel – thanks, Bri!

Sunday presentations

Keynote: Seth Bindernagel

Sunday morning started with a talk by Seth about the importance of localization, and how it has been, and is, such an important part of helping to bring Firefox to everyone in a lot of countries.

HTML5 Roundtable

Both stepping up for an absent Remy, and out of my own interest, I took one of the places on the HTML5 roundtable, amongst a total of 9 developers, which was during two hours before lunch. The idea was to discuss about HTML5, feedback and concerns and also let the audience ask their questions about it. I think I did ok on it, but overall, my feeling is that we could have been a bit more structured with the set-up and topics, and nine people on the panel were probably a few too many.

Interestingly enough, one of the other people on the panel was Anthony Ricaud, who is a WebKit Developer and works on the Web Inspector. Kudos to him for taking part of a Mozilla event, and it was good talking about Web Inspector as well.

Above-mentioned Martin Kliehm was part of the panel, and did a good job emphasizing the need for accessibility in HTML5, and I was also joined by Ilmari Heikkinen, who showed a nice canvas animation demo and is also behind CAKE (take a lot at the amazing Missile Fleet, for instance).

Stratified JavaScript

Showed some interesting examples with concurrency in JavaScript.

Songbird

Steve Lau presented Songbird, which is an open source music player based on XULRunner. Quite interesting, and I liked Steve’s cool, calm presentation approach. He demoed the extension capapbilities, skinning etc and I for one sure hope it becomes popular.

Mozilla Labs: The Future of You-centric Browsing

Aza Raskin, who had arrived Saturday evening, gave a talk about user experience and setting the end user, i.e. you, in focus and control. Interesting presentation, but personally I felt i would have wanted some more hands-on examples. We had a talk after, and I asked a number of questions about user interface, what he was working with compared to the current work being done on Firefox, his opinions on certain things etc. Aza is a busy man, so if you get the chance to corner him, make sure to ask everything that’s on your mind.

That was all I saw during the Sunday, and it was followed by trying to make sure to get the time to say good-bye to everyone before it was time to go to the airport.

Going home

Two small buses were chartered to get us to the airport, work courtesy of FuzzyFox who probably had enough stress for a year organizing it all. Once at the airport, I sat down and had a talk with Anthony Ricaud, before it was due time to bug (even more) gifts to my loved ones and then board the flight home.

Thank you Mozilla and everyone attending for a great event, and I hope to see you all again soon!

All my pictures are available on Flickr and on SmugMug.

It is a two-day conference in Prague where a lot of interesting people will be discussing very interesting things.

There will be four main tracks:

• Development
• Internationalisation
• Advocacy
• QA

Personally, I’m naturally very interested in the development track, but the advocacy part is also something I care a lot about. In terms of speakers, it’s a little of who’s who of Mozilla names, and I can’t wait to see the presentations!

Funnily enough, my friend Remy has been invited as the HTML 5 guru, so I’ll make sure to prepare some difficult questions for him.

My part? No speaking, for once, just attending, mingling and generally having a good time!

If you are from, or have ever been to, Prague, I would really appreciate some good advice of what to see and do – it’s my first visit! I’ve made sure to have one extra day of sight-seeing and experiencing Prague, so I really want to make the most out of it!

Also, are you perhaps going as well?

Google Chrome Frame

In Introducing Google Chrome Frame , Google explains that it is a plug-in to Internet Explorer, to completely replace the rendering engine with the Chrome one, based on WebKit. This means that you will get the same support within IE, that Chrome offers, when it comes to HTML and CSS features and JavaScript performance. Yes, for real.

It reminds me of when Mozilla, on a smaller scale, offered Screaming Monkey to replace the script engine in Internet Explorer, but it never really took off.

Google’s approach is that if you/the end user has installed the Google Chrome Frame plug-in, all you need to do is add this meta element to your web page/site:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">

The irony here is, of course, that this is the same meta tag Microsoft suggests to make Internet Explorer use its IE 8 mode or its Compatibility View – having a new option, “real fucking rendering”, so to say, is of course hilarious!

Google Wave not supporting Internet Explorer

One very interesting thing was mentioned in Google Wave in Internet Explorer: Google Wave will not support any version of Internet Explorer; not version 6, 7 or 8.

They have come to the conclusion that it is such a waste of time and money to try and make it good in Internet Explorer (recognize the feeling?), and that it will be sub-par at best, anyway, so they will not develop for it. Instead, they will recommend to Internet Explorer users to either install the Google Chrome Frame plug-in or to install another web browser which have better support and superior performance (can’t help wonder why Opera are never allowed amongst the web browsers Google list).

Picture taken from Google Wave in Internet Explorer

My thoughts

I’m really on the fence here about Google Chrome Frame. My two basic takes are:

No one will care

The way I see it, most people who use Internet Explorer belong to one of two categories:

• Home users who have no idea what a web browser is, and will not install anything (or, in some cases, everything – different story… )
• Company users with company IT restrictions where it doesn’t matter if it’s a web browser upgrade, new browser or “just” a plug-in – they’re not allowed to install anything.

When it comes to the latter category, my estimate, after having seen a lot of different companies’ IT departments and learned about their values and general stance, is that they will shrug their shoulders and just ignore this. And if people can’t install Google Chrome Frame, and those in charge won’t let them, it’s practically useless and will have no impact.

Part of this, also, is that I believe people, to some reasonable extent, should be able to access any content on the web, and that it is our job as web developers to offer this to them. It’s not their problem if they use a less competent web browser.

It’s fantastic!

When I first heard about Google Chrome Frame, I liked the idea and I know Alex Russell behind it is one of the smartest developers in the world. I am 100% convinced that this has been implemented in an optimal way, especially from a performance perspective, so not having to develop for any Internet Explorer rendering engine sounds like a god-send!

And what will make this matter is not just that Google offers the technology to do it, it’s that they require either the plug-in or a more competent web browser for Google Wave. And if Google Wave comes even close to the potential it has, it will a serious contender to, or at least as popular parallel service as, Facebook and Twitter; people will care since they will want to be able to use it. Just imagine the effect if Facebook had this requirement!

I also think what will decide how this is perceived is that Microsoft have a long business history of locking people in, of business strategies crushing opponents and any chance of competition, and it has led to their extremely poor reputation today. If we look at Google, instead they have just focused on delivering kick-ass services that everyone will want to use, not be forced to. And this is why this might have effect: it’s there to make people’s web browsing lives better, not just an attempt to quench other companies’ offerings.

The effects of this

I feel that we have crossed a line. It’s not just about the regular IE 6 complaining, it’s about companies openly stating that Internet Explorer just doesn’t cut it and that it’s time, from a financial, sanity and best-for-the-web standpoint, to demand more. Microsoft can’t just ignore this, especially with the steady decrease of Internet Explorer users, so the way I see it, they have three options:

• Stop developing Internet Explorer. Just say it was fun while it lasted, but it’s time to face the facts and let go. (this will not happen)
• Come to the conclusion that the rendering engine never have the possibility to match the open-source work of WebKit and Gecko, and instead focus on everything around the content, and integrate one of the open-source rendering engines. (this will not happen either)
• Put full focus into making Internet Explorer 9 the most kick-ass web browser in the world – screw backwards compatibility! I’m sure Microsoft has the financial abilities as well as skilled developers to do it, so it’s “solely” a matter of business strategy (to complement this, they should offer multiple side-by-side versions of Internet Explorer, something I am sure they can technically do, but unfortunately it will never happen)

Either way you see it, Microsoft, the gauntlet has been thrown. Time to step up and act.

I hadn’t checked the statistics for some time for my getElementsByClassName code, so you can just guess my surprise when I saw it has passed one million downloads!

At the time of writing, the code has been downloaded 1 029 433 times! Last time I looked, sometime during spring, I vaguely remember it was somewhere between 100 000 and 200 000. It might have gained some recent popularity, but still, that’s quite a push. With one million now, it kind of leads me to suspect it has been hot-linked, but as far as I know, hotlinking to the provided download at Google code (which holds the download statistics) isn’t possible, since it should prompt you with a dialog. And it’s Google – I have to be able to trust them, right?

So, until I learn more or something else is proven, getElementsByClassName has been downloaded a million times. Yay!

What?

My dear friend Molly Holzschlag will be coming here exclusively just to talk to you! I take for granted, most, if not everyone, of you already know who she is, but basically all you need to know is that she’s awesome.

I have told her that you’re a smart bunch (you are, right? ), and that I want her to delve deep into the future (and now) of fascinating web development with HTML 5 and other assorted features. Molly will hold two presentations, with a break in the middle, to inspire you to be part of, and shape, the future of the web!

And, as always, there will be beer and food (as Tim says: Mexican pizza topping, which means Chili con Carne. Yes, for real.), and the admission is completely free.

Where?

The event will be held October 20th at the bwin premises at Klarabergsviadukten 82 in Stockholm. Doors open at 18.00, and we expect to go till 22.30.

Limited seating and signing up

At this time, there are a limited number of seats: 120. There’s a minimal possibility there will be a few more, but please don’t count on it.

Sign up now to be sure to get a seat; just write a comment below!

And also, please only sign up if you are sure you can attend.

I enjoyed some of his movies and performances, and Dirty Dancing is definitely the most appreciated chick flick of all times. From what I have heard, he was always a very nice and likable guy, and I must admire someone who found his love when he was young and they stuck together for the rest of his life.

What makes me sad, except for his terrible fate, of course, is that there have been a number of people from the era I grew up, who have died recently (Patrick, Michael Jackson etc). And that, in turn, makes me so much more aware of our inevitable fate. One day this will all be over, and what are we actually wasting our lives on?

Thank you Patrick for your time. I hope you will find peace.

Development target #1

I believe that, beyond a nice, consistent and well-designed interface and impressive hardware, one of the major strengths of the iPhone is that it has become the number one platform choice for developers for mobile phones. Virtually any developer or company interested in developing something for a mobile phone will do it for the iPhone first.

Extending – the way to go

This is pretty much the same strength as Firefox has. With the abundance of add-ons on offer for it, it’s hard to compete. But what if something happened that made, let’s say, it easier or better to develop an extension for Google Chrome? Something that made people look somewhere else than the iPhone?

Slowly moving towards a dangerous line

To me, it seems like Apple are, or always have been, heading in that direction with their App Store and its requirements to get approved to be on that vital platform. According to my personal values, anyone should be possible to install whatever they want on their computer, mobile phone etc. And while App Store is a financial success, both for Apple and developers, and naturally it’s good and easy for end users to have one place to look to for applications, they don’t allow any app there.

The Apple approval process

The problem is the approval process. Some apps seem to almost go straight through, some takes quite a long time, and some are just rejected. And according to the well of feedback on the Internet, a lot of that rejection seem to be based on weak or irrelevant arguments. Or it might just be that they’re competing with already existing, or soon-to-come, Apple applications.

That’s where I think they go wrong. As opposed to Mac OS X, where Apple has a good base selection of software but I can choose to install whatever I want, the iPhone locks you in. And given the price you pay for it, that’s not how you want to feel.

Also, looking at high number of photo apps that stopped working with the release of OS 3.0, listed in Broken iPhone photo apps, it really makes me start to wonder. For example, I, for one, was a very happy user of the Darkroom Premium app (App Store link), which offered a great way to make sure the phone was being held stable enough for a non-blurry result.

However, as outlined in Darkroom and OS 3.0 Compatibility Issue Update, they have repeatedly been rejected by Apple for doing something which they have always done. The claim is that they are “using an undocumented API”. Problem is, a number of apps have been blocked for this with the 3.0 release, but as always, there are some apps who do the same thing, but have been approved…

And, if they are using an undocumented API which evidently works and offers great features to the phone owners, just bloody document it then!

My suggestion

Keep the App Store, the reviews of applications and everything that goes with. Offer a safe haven, if you so will, for users so they can only install what Apple approves of. But, for those who want to, give users the option to install whatever software they want, from whatever source they want.

Seeing the popularity of jailbreaking iPhones, and trust me, that interest will not decline, just give people what they ask for – the freedom to install anything to their liking. Because in the long run, if you don’t, I think someone else will take that spot.

What do you think?

Do you believe in the free choice of the end user, or that software dictatorship is the only way for Apple (and any other company)?

Which was fair enough, I was driving 9 kilometers (approx. 5.5 miles) faster per hour than I was allowed to. Quite a hefty fine, though: 1500 SEK (214 USD), where I don’t even dare to wonder what I would have to pay had I been going faster (still, as opposed to Finland, ticket amount is not based on annual income here in Sweden…).

I was caught by a speeding camera, and the interesting part was the letter I got home with a picture of me speeding:

If you look closely, you can see that I am, in an overly curious manner, looking out at something. What the hell was I looking at?

Secondly, believe it or not, the big white square over the passenger’s seat is not my doing; the picture came like that. So, when Fredrika saw it, she didn’t bring up the speeding or the ticket – she asked who I had had sitting next to me! To her, it was a cover-up with a secret passenger, and she demanded to get to know who it was!

So, thank you dear police, for creating these kind of conspiracy implications and possibilities…