Mozilla DevDay 2010 - The best day I remember so far!

I was too excited about Mozilla's DevDay when my sister told me about it. Fired up my browser and registered from the Mozilla website for the event three days ago. Started from home by 5:45 AM to Bangalore. Reached KR Market in Bangalore by 8:00 AM, the event was scheduled by 9:30 AM, I just wanted to be there in time. This seemed perfect. I got into bus number 269 to reach JRD Tata Auditorium, NIAS. I probably misread the address and reached JRD Tata Institute instead. This was a mistake, I walked into the institute for almost half an hour and couldn't find the venue. Arun, a 3rd year student from Bangalore joined me in the trail. After desperately looking for the venue inside the campus we entered the Neuroscience department. There was a kind lady, a research assistant / scientist I assume, she offered a ride to the venue. It was around 2 kms down from there.

We thanked her and marched towards the hall. I was simply excited looking at the Mozilla banners. Had a very nice feeling about it. I was expecting Rajesh to join me but he didn't show up yet. After registration we were given a Mozilla tag with ID, a cool Mozilla badge, and stationery for taking notes during the presentation.

Seth Bindernagel, Director - Localization, started off with the presentation welcoming everyone at the auditorium. He made a very important point about speed, power and scalablilty. He gave us a nice and about quick facts about Firefox. His responsibility is to make Firefox available in Indian languages and seems he's doing a great job. Firefox is available in 10 Indian languages currently. They are planning for more localized versions of it.

Since Mozilla enthusiasts were trickling in slowly Seth decided to change the schedule a little bit. Instead of Arun's Mozilla Web Standards, the stage was handed over to the drumbeat guys. Drumbeat was a combined presentation by Lucian Teo, Singapore and John Britton, NYC. John Britton threw some light about the P2PU (www.p2pu.org) initiative and his course "Mashing up the Open Web". Seemed John Britton had a flight to catch and he left a little while after the presentation.

The centerpiece of DevDay 2010 was Arun Ranganathan's Open Web (Mozilla's web standards). Arun is a Technology Evangelist at Mozilla. Arun's session stressed on the point of Open Web, having no plugins, no proprietary codecs, no constraints - just install your browser and surf the web. He showed us some nice and crazy stuff involving Cross domain XHR, HTML5, JavaScript, Canvas and Video tags, WebGL. He took almost 90 mins for the presentation and indeed it was amazing. I never looked at my watch even once.

We we a bit behind schedule but Seth was always there to keep things in place. He kicked of with his Firefox.NEXT presentation. We were really excited about the upcoming version of Firefox. We were shown some mock ups for Firefox 4 (Seth, I really liked the concept of the Application button and the Tabs on top ideas). The goal is to make Firefox's design less intrusive and more intuitive to use. A new and more intelligible design for the Add-on manger was also showcased.

I was 1:00 PM and we broke up for lunch. Indeed lunch was great. Mahiti and Centre for Internet and Society did a wonderful job organizing the entire event.

Here's a description about Mahiti from their website - www.mahiti.org,

Mahiti is a 'Social Enterprise' based in the 'Garden City of India, Bangalore'. We empower clients to reduce the cost and complexity of Information Technology through the strategic use of Free/Open Source Software.

Sree took over the stage after the lunch. He gave a presentation about Mahiti and its ventures. He ended his presentation brilliantly showing a photo of a auto rikshaw using Mahiti's banner as a rain cover. His statement for the picture was - "This is what open source software is, your end users can customize it and use it the way they like it." Every one filled the auditorium with applause.

Pranesh Prakash, CIS enlightened us about software patents and showed us the fine lines between copyrights, trade marks and patents. Vineel Reddy, indeed rocked the stage too. He made a viral video for Firefox 3.5 release and has conducted several promotional activities to promote Firefox across the globe. He indeed got a job offers from 3 companies across the globe. Vineel was an example for people are only limited by their imagination. He was a guy with a Mechanical Engineering background. He still doesn't know much of the internals about Firefox but yet, he is an active supporter and promoter for Firefox.

Then came another killer presentation form Ragavan Srinivasan, Product Manger - Mozilla Labs, I was really thrilled two Indians Arun and Raghavan for being a part of the Mozilla Team. Ragavan showed us the features of Weave, the new add-on for Firefox. Weave allows you to sync your browser history, bookmarks, passwords and open tabs with all your Mozilla installations. You can still have access to all your browser history, bookmarks, passwords and open tabs from any of your devices. You can also use it along with Fennec, the Firefox browser for smart phones. Ragavan also made us aware of Personas and Jetpack addons. Jetpacks introduces a all new paradigm of writing extensions for Firefox. Jetpack extensions are easy to write and maintain. You don't even have to restart Firefox after installing a Jetpack addon.

At the end of the day we had the Hack Session again presented by Arun. Arun began with a question related to Cross Domain XHR and a fluffy Firefox was given away. The next hack session was on the video tag. Since Mozilla is keen about their web standards they support only the OGG Theora and Vorbis encoding. You can use Firefogg to transcode your videos to OGG Theora in order to view them using Firefox. Mozilla is pretty stubborn on their standards. They surely will achieve their vision in the future. Till then web developers will have to do some extra work for the end user experience.

The wonderful DevDay 2010 reached the dusk, goodies were distributed to the participants. We got some nice posters, a Mozilla T-Shirt and a band. Finally had some nice conversation with Seth, Arun and Raghavan.

I asked Seth about how Mozilla generates revenue, he told the main stream of revenue was from the search providers like Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Baidu. Seth gave his business cards and we had some casual talk with him.

Next I talked to Arun about the Acid3 test, coz Firefox scored only a 93. He told about the inconsistencies involved with the test. The test author's failure to communicate with browser vendors. And personally he feels passing a test is not important when it was not written according to the standards. Mozilla guys knew they were doing a nice job and they didn't need approval for the things they knew they were doing well.

Finally I approached Ragavan to strike a conversation, man he was amazing. It was just a casual talk and the easter egg was, Ragavan's native is Tamil Nadu. He spoke to us in Tamil. That was mind blowing. It was 6:00 PM and the Mozilla Team had to leave. Ragavan bid bye bye to Me and Rajesh. And I finally told him - "I'm the last person you meet and probably you should remember me."

That was the end of DevDay 2010 and am eagerly awaiting for the next one. Seth, Arun, Ragavan, Lucian, John, Vineel, BB, Sree and Pranesh. Thank you guys for giving us a wonderful day. Thank you very much.