What to Expect from Browsers in the Next Five Years: A Perspective
There is no greater time than this to discuss what browsers will look like in the future. We are at a point where the browser is the most important piece of software you will ever use and it is moving to platforms other than just your desktop: in places like your mobile device, your TV, your game console and even your refrigerator.
As browser technology advances and with the emergence of so many competitors what new innovations will we see? Will the same players dominate on mobile devices as the ones on desktop? What will be some of the features that will be important for users? Is it speed or security? Or something else? One vision of the future is the browser controlling all your devices: TVs, home automation, microwave, fridge, etc.
Browser makers are taking Web standards more seriously and it will be interesting to watch which specifications will be implemented by who in the coming years– more precisely HTML5, CSS3 and SVG. What kind of advances will we see in rendering engines and JavaScript engines in the next couple of years?
Top players in the browser world come together on one panel to butt heads and predict the future of browsers.
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Dion Almaer
Set Direction
Dion Almaer is the founder of a brand new company named Set Direction where he has the pleasure of working with Ben Galbraith. The pair co-founded Ajaxian.com together and they are now focused on helping developers deliver fantastic experiences and working to set the direction of the software industry as a whole.
Dion has been a technologist and a developer writing Web applications since it took over from Gopher. He has been fortunate enough to speak around the world, has published many articles, a book, and of course covers life the universe and everything on his blog at almaer.com/blog.
He has been called a human aggregator, and you can see that in full force if you follow him on Twitter @dalmaer.
Ben Galbraith
Walmart.com
Ben Galbraith, together with his long-time friend Dion Almaer, forms one-half of the dynamic “Ben and Dion” duo that founded Ajaxian.com, headed Developer Tools at Mozilla, ran Developer Relations at Palm and is now running mobile architecture and engineering at Walmart.com after being acquired along with their start-up team in early 2011. Ben’s been writing code since he was six and starting businesses since he was ten; he’s written books, given hundreds of award-winning presentations world-wide, produced a few technical conferences, sold three companies, and has held CEO, CIO, CTO, and Software Architect positions in the medical, publishing, media, consumer electronics, advertising, software and internet industries. He lives in Palo Alto with his wife and six children.
Douglas Crockford
Yahoo! Inc.
Douglas Crockford is an Architect at Yahoo! Inc. He discovered JSON while he was CTO of State Software. Previously, Doug was Founder and CEO of Electric Communities, Director of New Media at Paramount, Director of Technology at Lucasfilm Ltd., and a Researcher at Atari, Inc.
Brendan Eich
Mozilla
Brendan is responsible for architecture and the technical direction of Mozilla. He is charged with authorizing module owners, owning architectural issues of the source base and writing the roadmap that outlines the direction of the Mozilla project.
Brendan created JavaScript, did the work through Navigator 4.0, and helped carry it through international standardization. Before Netscape, he wrote operating system and network code for SGI; and at MicroUnity, wrote micro-kernel and DSP code, and did the first MIPS R4K port of gcc, the GNU C compiler.
Charles McCathieNevile
Opera Software
Charles McCathieNevile (better known to the world as “chaals”) has been Chief Standards Officer at Opera since 2005, and is responsible for Opera’s leading role in ensuring that the best of Web development is available to the world in the form of open standards. With more than two decades of experience in both commercial and academic hypertext systems, his personal interests are broad but include accessibility of the web to all people from all devices, and better ways to make information help people reach more of their goals more easily. He is co-chair of the W3C WebApps working group, and involved personally in several W3C working groups. Before joining Opera Charles worked on the Staff of W3C. In his spare time he is Vice President of the Iberoamerican Web accessibility group Sidar, tries to learn languages, and cooks.
A constant traveller, he currently speaks English, French, Spanish, Italian (but not very well), and is still learning Norwegian, Portuguese and Russian. Originally from Australia, he would like to see every country in the world and eat dinner in them all, but has so far only managed about a quarter of them.
Alex Russell
Alex serves on the Board of the Dojo Foundation and OSAF. He helped develop and lead the team that built the Dojo Toolkit, the JavaScript toolkit that organizations turn to when performance, accessibility, and internationalization concerns finally come home to roost.
He currently works at Google on Chrome, a Webkit-based browser that is helping the web evolve faster.
Giorgio Sardo
Microsoft Corporation
Giorgio Sardo is a Sr. Technical Evangelist at Microsoft, focused on HTML5 and Internet Explorer. He loves working with the community, pushing the limits of technology and solving complex challenges. In 2006 he won the Imagine Cup worldwide championship with a futuristic project; one year later he has been nominated Best Consultant of the Year from the British Computer Society. Early 2009 Giorgio moved to the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond to focus on the future of the Web. Giorgio is a popular speaker worldwide and in the last 5 years he has presented at many conferences about HTML5, the Web and Mobile Platform. He is the mind behind many beautiful HTML5 applications and games at www.beautyoftheweb.com.
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Comments
Dittos John Fukuda, another hour would have been great. I thought that hearing from these guys’ real-world perspective juxtaposed to the promises of HTML 5 was very enlightening.
Thanks for all of the comments. Much appreciated. I wish we had more time. We didn’t get into Open Video or many other things… thanks SO much to the panel members for coming.
Excellent panel. It could have continued for another hour and still been very interesting.
One of the highlights of the entire conference.
This was an interesting panel. Great speakers. As a web strategist and developer, this is the type of info that helps me plan long range.
We need more sessions like this in Web 2 Expo, at least in the development track.
Its rare you can go listen to individuals engaged in these products talking in a public forum in a fairly candid and non-confrontational manner. I really enjoyed this. They did even manage to sneak in some MS and Apple bashing
*hear [ugh]
I here that my colleague Alex Russell, who works on WebKit, will be on the panel. Concern: addressed. Thanks for reaching out, Brady.
Suggestion: recruit someone who is contributing code back to WebKit. The panel seems incomplete without WebKit representation. Regardless, I will be at this session. It should be interesting.