State of the Browser 2013 TL;DR
A roughly chronological regurgitation of a browser evangelist fugue.
- @mollydotcom and londonwebstandards.org thinks we should be more worried about the expanding "webkit monoculture".
- @atoker pushed a plausible "it's not webkit, it's lazy developers" defence, carefully paraphrasing to "webkit multiculture" and finally accepting the role of oppressor with "webkit is an ecosystem so it doesn't matter".
- @thebeebs showed IE's multi-fondle support. Aparently Bill has 100 hundred points of touch in his office, and they have work in the pipe to let mutliple users touch and mouse at the same device at the same time. It's gonna be an MSVendorPrefix party.
- @paul-kinlan showed which fancy features we can use on mobile, today, via onmobile.iwanttouse.com. No word on Blink or Chrome futures though.
- @andreasbovens did talk about Blink, and for no doubt the hundredth time, reminded us that webkit is a genric term, Opera was always moving to Blink, please stop going on about it. That and Opera Mobile 14 will be able to do everything.
- @codepo8 metaphored that mobile HTML5 apps are Sea Monkeys, promising a rich ecosystem of proud, co-operative mini beasts but delivering the lazy brine shrimp of poor experience. It's ok though because FirefoxOS is upon us to blur the native vs html5 debate with open API's for all the things and any site is a manifest away from becoming an installable mobile app.
- In accordance with Apple's community interaction guidelines Safari and IOS didn't turn up.
Lunch
- @jaffathecake gave a concise history of cinema, demonstrating beyond all reasonable doubt the value of requestAnimationFrame over timeouts as "animation is like orange juice milk and farts, lumpy bits are not acceptable..."
- @laurakalbag showed the art and science of typography, grids, colour and icons for the web, and won massive respect for including a clause in her contacts that can be formulated as "Design without content is frivolous decoration"
Hugs
