Browsers on the move: The year in review, the year ahead

In the year-long span since last year’s XTech and this one, we’ve seen not only the Web on the move, but also the browsers that Web developers rely on to bring their content and applications to users.

This session looks at some of the important changes in the browser landscape since XTech 2007, and at what those changes mean for developers.

One area of change that the session covers is the increased availability of more powerful mobile browsers and browser engines on mobile devices, and what new possibilities those browsers bring to Web developers. Highlights:

• a major refocusing of efforts Mozilla on developing a competitive Gecko-based mobile browser (we’ll take a look at the design goals and development priorities of that effort)
• Opera Mini 4 released with many improvements in its standards support (now with tables! more CSS, more Javascript)
• iPhone released with Safari preinstalled (waking up many to the reality of full browsers on mobile devices); oh, and iPod Touch, too
• Google Android with Webkit as its Web engine (the same engine that powers Safari on the desktop, iPhone, and iPod Touch)
• Nokia acquires Trolltech (whose Qt library includes Webkit as a component)
• WebKit ported to Windows Mobile

Along with the availability of new mobile browsers and browser engines on new platforms, we’ve also seen new and improved support for key standards (and draft standards, and de facto standards) of vital importance to Web developers. Some of the highlights of the year covered in this part of the session are:

• CSS-related improvements (CSS3 selectors, CSS2.1 improvements, CSS animations, downloadable fonts, and more)
• discoveries on how to teach old dogs new tricks (for example, how to make IE render CSS on elements it doesn’t recognize)
• support for the HTML5 video element and its associated API
• better SVG support in more browsers
• client-side XSLT/XPath — now with more document() and node-set(), as well as scripting APIs (across browsers)
• added/improved support for de-facto standards such as getElementsByClassName (now part of HTML5), DOMParser, and XMLSerializer
• implementation of native browser support for the Google Gears-like client-side database storage API from HTML5
• Acid2 compliance across browsers (reported to now include IE8)

The session will wrap up with a discussion about what further additions and improvements we might expect to see in the coming year.