Last Saturday in London, England the State of the browser conference brought together developer advocates from almost all browser vendors to give the audience an overview of what is going on in the world of browsers.

My involvement was to talk about the state of HTML5 when seen from a native market’s perspective, show some cool new technologies that need our input and take part in the browser panel to discuss current issues. Here are the talks and screencasts. Videos recorded by the organisers should follow soon.

Talk “Broken HTML5 promises – are we ‘appy?”

The main Mozilla presentation was about feedback on HTML5 we got at Mobile World Congress from mobile developers, how we as an HTML5 community fail to answer their questions and get tangled up in petty bickering over details instead and what Mozilla does to make HTML5 work across the board.

The slides with notes are available here and the screencast (with bad audio, sorry) is on vid.ly.

Breakout session: “The bleeding edge of HTML needs blood donors”

The breakout session (which was repeated twice) was much less of a “talk” but more of a show and tell in a smaller room. Therefore the screencast is a bit more raw but shows what you can do right now.

The slides with notes are available here and the screencast is on vid.ly.

The conference

All in all the conference was great value for money. All the speakers had great information to give and there was no “marketing talk” promising things that don’t work outside lab environments.

• Michael Mahemoff did a great job introducing the day with a “native vs. web knockout” talk.
• Paul Kinlan showed what is coming in Chrome and how Web Intents can change the way we solve app communication over the web
• Martin Beeby gave a glimpse of how the web can merge with newer devices and UX needs of users

Seb Lee-Delisle took all the browsers to the performance test to end all performance tests by animating millions of 3D particles and seeing which browser would be the one that can show the most without slowing down. In the end Firefox was the winner with 3695244 particles at 10FPS. Of course this is not a real measure (especially seeing IE10 was run in a VM) but it is always fun to see Seb code live.

I guess my favourite piece about the conference was that the browser panel was very much about answering people’s questions instead of trying to beat each other in being the browser that people should use. British understatement at its best.