One of the cool things about this conference is that they had the 4 major browsers represented: Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Opera. Yes, Opera is a major browser, and it's a really nice one too (see earlier posts about my Opera experiment).

I missed part of the Chrome talk, but I did hear about some prefetching of link data to help provide a snappier response when you navigate around the web. The obvious question of ad tracking came up. I also worry about the poor site that happens to be featured on a major page on the web. They not only get the clickthroughs, but they also get the pain of the traffic that never actually arrives, as it were.

The Firefox talk focused a lot on the features of HTML5 and customized JavaScript APIs that are being added. The upgrades are looking really good. Apparently Firefox 5 is going to be launching in a couple weeks. 6 and 7 are later in the year, but they are apparently only 6 weeks apart. I appreciate the faster development cycles and getting upgraded browsers into users' hands quickly. However, I don't like the break from Firefox's sensible numbering scheme. Chrome does the versions like this, but I like that Firefox, IE, and Opera all come with really visible changes to the end user when they do major version bumps. In any case, the version number doesn't really matter. What I want to see is if Firefox will suffer the same problem that Chrome does with the upgrade path for its users. I don't want to have to support 10 versions of every major browser, all at different points in the implementations of the really neat upcoming features.

IE was up next with some nice graphs and demonstrations of IE9 performance, especially against IE8. This is really the second time I have seen this talk. The last time was before IE9 was actually released as a finished product. The leaps are definitely impressive. I have to compliment the two presenters I've seen on their poise. It is difficult to walk into a room of people who are almost always using Firefox and Chrome to talk to them about IE. For the actual content, the most notable part for me was the background compilation of the JavaScript. This uses the other cores that so many computers have these days to compile JavaScript even as you may be running the exact same code. The next time through, though, it will be faster because it will be running native code.

Finally Opera got some time in the sun. The funny thing is that Opera has actually implemented most of these things already. They don't have hardware acceleration in their browser yet, but they have done a lot of forward-thinking things since some relatively early versions. The talk was mostly about how Opera owns the mobile market. I like the idea of selling the typically reluctant developers on this by showing them how many of their users actually use Opera on mobile devices (whether mini or mobile). He also talked about some of the difficulties of sites that do not respect the X-Forwarded-For header. In any case, it was good to see Opera getting some time on stage to talk about their product. He had to rush through the Firefly information and mobile debugging towards the end, but those are both great features if you have never tried them before.