Conferences Articles

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.

It is not often that you find yourself in a disused nuclear reactor from the 50s to talk about state-of-the-art web technology. For about a hundred developers and designers this is exactly what happened last Saturday in Stockholm, Sweden.

The R1 reactor played host to the Mosync hackathon organised to get developers to try out the Wormhole and Reload technologies, both of which make it very easy to build apps based on HTML5 or C++ for both feature and smartphones.

Mosync asked Mozilla to participate after a quick brownbag in their office on HTML5 a few weeks ago. So we went and gave an introduction on “HTML5 and the near-future of the web”. You can read the slides here and see a screencast with audio on YouTube.

The topics covered in the talk are:

• Converting C++ to JavaScript using Emscripten
• A few CSS demos:
  • Impress.js for fancy presentations using 3D transformation
  • The CSS book for 3D transformations simulating a book
  • Paperfold CSS to spice up a collapsible list
  • CSS 3D Clouds to render realistic clouds
  • The Box using Sprite3D.js for simulating a 3D environment like WebGL in CSS
• Issues with HTML5 Audio
  • Native audio events
  • Audio Sprites and how it shouldn’t be a problem using them
  • Are we playing yet? as a test platform to see just how much of audio support in browsers is broken
  • Probably, Maybe, No: The State of HTML5 Audio – long video – short video (Scott Schiller explaining in detail what the issues are)
  • Soundmanager 2 as an option to work around the issues with sound.
• Taking audio further:
  • Mozilla Audio Data API (Firefox only)
  • Dance.js – a hack developed by Jordan Santell and Brian Hassinger using the Mozilla Audio API.
  • Web Audio specification (Webkit)
  • Work in progress on syncing the efforts and libraries to use
• Games
  • Are we fun yet? gaming specific efforts in Firefox
  • Browserquest a multiplayer game in HTML5 using WebSockets
  • Building a game from semantic HTML
  • Page Visibility (Chrome)
  • RequestAnimationFrame (Microsoft’s post)
  • Fullscreen API (Demo)
  • Mouselock API
  • Gamepad API
• GetUserMedia:
  • Polyfill by Addy Osmani
  • Introduction by CreativeJS
  • Instant Camera
  • Effects Camera
• Mobile
  • Are we mobile yet? – showing what parts of mobile hardware can be reached via JavaScript and which can’t yet
  • APIs available for testing: Battery, Camera access, Vibration, IndexDB, sending SMS
  • Boot to Gecko
  • WebRTC draft
  • WebRTC efforts at Mozilla

And as I had some time and brought my trusty Competition Pro joystick, I thought I should give the Gamepad API a whirl and created the world’s first joystick powered kitten cube (maybe).

Building on the momentum generated by Mozilla at Mobile World Congress last week, this week we’re rolling into Austin, Texas for South by Southwest. If you’re attending SXSW, please join us at events and sessions.

Reminder: Daylight Savings Time starts on Sunday, March 11 at 2am. Clocks move forward one hour. Sunday sessions are earlier than you expect them to be.

Events

Mozilla is partnering with Samsung Mobile and Twitter to present FEED at Austin Museum of Art—Arthouse at the Jones Center, 700 Congress Avenue. Mozilla is sponsoring events Friday to Monday. Please join us on Saturday and Sunday nights for drinks and music on the rooftop deck. Or, if you’re looking for a quiet place during the day to have a conversation or recharge away from the crowds, please stop by, and see an installation using Collusion. Art hackers Beak Labs will also be creating a Popcorn.js installation live on site. The space is open from 10am to 6pm, and 9pm to 2am.

We’re also participating in the Knight Foundation’s Media Innovation Fair at Brush Square Park on Saturday and sponsoring the Austin JavaScript riverboat cruise on Sunday evening.

Sessions

Look for these Mozillians appearing at SXSW sessions (Interactive Festival, unless noted):

Day	Time	Who	Title
Saturday	9:30-10:30am	Joe Stagner Brendan Eich	The State of Browser Developer Tools
	11am-noon	Gary Kovacs (CEO)	SOPA/PIPA: Why the Open Internet Needs Us
	11am-noon	David Bolter	Accessible HTML5 Canvas? Really? How?
	3:30-4:30pm	Tantek Çelik	The Rise of the Indie Web
	5-6pm	Brendan Eich	Browser Wars V: The Angry Birds Era
Sunday	11am-noon CDT	David Baron	Fast CSS: How Browsers Lay Out Web Pages
	12:30-1:30pm	Elika Etemad, Boris Zbarsky	CSS.next: Current Experiments, CSS4 and the Future
	12:30-1:30pm	Brett Gaylor	Does HTML5 Offer a Montage Moment for Web Cinema? (Film)
	3:30-4:30pm	Dan Sinker	Open Web, Open News: Reporters & Developers Remix
Monday	9:30-10:30am	Ben Moscowitz	HTML5 for Film: Leading Edge or Bleeding Edge? (Film)

SXSW is a long event, especially if you stay for the film and music festivals. Pace yourself, hydrate, and before you go to sleep, remember to plug in all the devices.

At this years “South by Southwest” (SXSW) Interactive event I’m joining Paul Irish from Google, Mike Taylor from Opera, Brandon Satron from Telerik and Javascript Developer and author Garann Means in a panel on “The State of Browser Developer Tools”

The group has a Google Moderator page where you can ask your questions in advance. Please do so.

Not able to attend the panel at SXSW? No problem. I’ll post a collection of the questions and answer right here on Hacks sometime after the event.

As part of the WIP Jam at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain we were asked to give and introduction to HTML5 so we sent Chris Heilmann and Joe Stagner to set the record straight in terms of what HTML5 is and what you can do with it.

The presentation was on the last day of the conference and both of us had spent long hours explaining all Mozilla technologies on our booth and really not enough hours sleeping in between. In addition to that the room was a boiling 30 degrees and packed with lots of developers. It seems we did a good job regardless as nobody left and we had a lot of great questions afterwards.

The slides (well, the HTML5 document) are available for you to see:

However, they make much more sense when you see them in context, which is why we also provide you with a screencast of the talk:

All in all it was a lot of fun talking to people at MWC and Boot to Gecko showed that HTML5 is the future of mobile as much as it is already the present technology of choice on the desktop.

In this post I round-up my first time at FOSDEM and the two talks I gave during my time there; one on open Web apps and the other on creating games with HTML5.

Continued…

A few days ago I was asked to deliver the first talk of the amazing Beyond Tellerand conference in Dusseldorf, Germany. The talk Breaking the barriers – moving browsers and the web forward introduced a lot of new ideas and technologies that are worked on my Mozilla and others to make the web of the future better.

Here is the video of the presentation with jump points and links to more information. If you want to see the slides of the talk, they are available here and there is also an audio recording on archive.org.

Breaking the barriers – moving browsers and the web forward from marc thiele on Vimeo.

Here’s what is covered in the talk:

1. Modern web technologies of HTML5 and friends that can be used right now (with 64 myself as a demo) [03:50 - 07:19]
   • Rich HTML semantics (HTML5)
   • Self-validating forms (HTML5)
   • Richer form controls with fallbacks (HTML5)
   • Canvas for painting in the browser (HTML5)
   • CSS gradients, multiple backgrounds, animation and transition
   • CSS 3D transforms
   • Local storage and offline storage
   • SVG for scalable and interactive graphics
   • RequestAnimationFrame for secure animation
   • History API
   • WebGL
2. Taking on challenges – we need you to show the world that web technology is good enough to do jobs that in the past were only possible with native or server-side code (with Joe Lambert’s image unshredder as the example) [07:20 - 08:04]
3. Breaking the browser mould – showing that the browser interfaces can be manipulated with HTML and JS (with browser menus, context menus and the Fullscreen API as examples) [08:05 - 10:54]
4. Developing with the web – developer tools in browsers and done in client side technologies (with Hackasaurus, Cloud 9 IDE, Firefox Scratchpad, Firefox Style Editor, Parse error display in view-source and Tilt as examples) [10:55 - 17:24]
5. Online identity and issues with current login systems (with BrowserID as a solution to a lot of the problems we have right now) [17:25 - 29:35]
6. Apps, the shortcomings and myths of native apps and the opportunity to build hybrid apps with web technologies (with Open Web Apps and Web Intents as examples) [29:36 - 37:34]
7. Moving web technologies into the mobile space (with Are we mobile yet? and Boot to Gecko as demos) [37:35 - 40:11]
8. How can you help? [40:12 - 42:33]

This year’s Velocity EU conference had a special presentation round where browser makers talked about the performance of their specific products. I was invited last minute to represent Firefox and originally was asked to show benchmarks, impressive demos and how we compare to others. As browsers get released in very short intervals these days, this doesn’t quite make sense any longer – at least to me.

Funnily enough the other browser representatives took the same approach so I was happy to see that we agreed that we are beyond number-comparisons and head to head browser war on performance.

My talk “Accelerating the overall web experience” covered other things, like that the choice of which browser to use lies with the users and there is not much we can do to change that. I also pointed out that users will find a way to make our browsers slow, no matter how hard we try and that in a lot of cases third party add-ons and debugging tools are to blame for an impression of slowness.

I ended by showing how the new developer tools in Firefox empower developers to perform much better in finding bugs and fixing them – a part of performance that is not easily measurable but very important.

You can see the slides here (left+right to go back and forward, down for next bullet point and N to toggle notes) or read them as an HTML page:

There is also an audio recording of the talk on archive.org:

All in all it was good to see that all browsers are getting faster and faster and we all see this as a given rather than a goal.

A day ago or so we asked who wants to come to Full Frontal with us, and a few people have given good reasons. We used state of the art algorithms also used in social media impact products (Math.random) to pick the lucky winners. And they are:

• Esteban Saiz who will also join us the speaker dinner
• Saqib Shaikh
• Craig Moore

See you all at Full Frontal!

photo by Lily

Full Frontal is a JavaScript centric conference in Brighton, England on the 11/11/11. The simplest way to describe it is “a splendid kick into your lower back side” event when it comes to what’s hot and amazing int he world of scripting.

The Mozilla Developer Network has 3 tickets to give out, one of which also entitles you to attend the speakers dinner the day before the conference. Tickets for the conference are gone, so here is your last chance.

If you want to take part in this, you need to be able to get to Brighton, England on the 11th and be open to also come on the 10th for the speaker’s dinner (one of you). Please say if you can’t come on the 10th – you can still win a ticket. We will need your name for the organisers to put on the list.

First and foremost though, in order to win a ticket add a comment here why you deserve to get a Mozilla ticket and what you can do as a thank you to help the open web.

The best reasons and offers will get the tickets. We will announce the pick on the 9th here and contact you so please leave a valid email in the comment (this will not be shown to the public).

For extra brownie points, why not tell us what new initiatives of Mozilla get you most excited and what we could be doing to make them a reality faster.

See you in Brighton, it rocks!

We picked the winners, now! Let’s get full frontal!