Out of the way

I was at South by South West, a music and film and interactive (that's a fancy way of saying nerd) festival. Naturally, I was there as part of the nerd contingent - although I had the pleasant surprise of discovering beforehand that my sister would be there as a filmmaker. I even went to see her film, but since I go to the cinema every 5 years I think that deserves a post of its own.

For the third year in a row, I was on the Browser Wars panel. Although I think it was slightly less brilliant than the other years, it was once again a great panel (in my humble opinion). I am hoping that despite his protestations Arun comes back for another effort at moderating it, and that we get the bestest panel ever next year. On the plus side this year was the presence of Darin Fisher from Google, who has worked on both Mozilla and more recently Chrome. On the minus side was being the only person who worked on mobile browsers, and having too little of our time available for the audience to ask the huge number of questions they were interested in.

The panel is a really great opportunity for developers who don't have much time to spend hanging out with browser makers to get a peek into how browsers are made, why they are different and how we work to make them consistent so that web developers or end-users don't end up being the casualties in the browser wars... (really, I think there is a clear agreement that this is a goal).

For the second year in a row (at least), the Friday night start of SxSW featured a lot of pouring rain and cold weather - something Austin isn't really famous for. By the time of the Browser Wars panel it was getting warm in Austin - something it is famous for. Turns out I am more comfortable in what they think is cold weather (it isn't that cold). But the whole idea of the festival hotting up as it went seemed a nice touch. Congratulations to whoever was conference co-chair for weather.

For the first year in a row, I moderated a panel there myself - on the mobile Web in the developing world. It was interesting, because I was unsure what to expect. Gratifyingly, a number of the people at the panel lived in the "developing world" (for all sorts of reasons a lot of the US might be considered part of that, but I excluded it specifically in asking the audience). Gratifyingly a number of them came up afterwards and commented on the panel, in particular thanking us for explaining how things actually are in their world, and how that relates to the rest of the world. This was very gratifying because although we have experience working in various places, the panel was people who come from big cities in big "first-world" countries, so there is always a risk that we would be making stuff up in our misguided idealism.

And at South by we got to show off Opera Turbo. I thought that this would not generate a lot of interest. Turbo is designed to cope with low bandwidth, and make your browsing faster (and cheaper) by being more efficient. Typically that doesn't describe the situation in large cities in the US. But SxSW is a special case - thousands of people are hammering on the connection all the time, so in fact it doesn't work like a typical high-speed connection in Austin on a normal day.

Turbo degrades image quality by default - this is one of the simple compression tricks it uses. I would have expected the audience at SxSW to be really upset by that. It has to be the world's largest concentration of iPhone owners, although the density may be less than an official Apple fanboy event or a meeting at companies that force people to have one willy-nilly, and such a crowd is the sort one expects to care deeply about presentation issues like sub-pixel rednering problems. But they had no real complaints at all, they just liked the way it went faster on the congested network.

So I am really looking forward to seeing what it does for people on genuinely expensive connections that are also slow.

It's also interesting to think about what it means for the One Web ideal. Mobiles are known to use compression and various tricks to deal with low bandwidth. But there are also people using this for desktop connections, and using Opera Mini on the desktop, and there are a number of mobile browsers that offer a "full desktop experience" (Mini does this as well as "Mobile View", an "adapted to your device" mode for serious users). What we are seeing is a blurring of the distinctions. So while at the bottom end, mobile web usage isn't as pleasant as desktop usage, we are seeing the industry mature to the point where the leaders understand how to make things that *work* for everyone, and area as pleasant as they can be for any given device, but are easily maintained across a wide range of delivery platforms.

And as a final note for all you widget developers out there, have a quick look at Vodafone's BetaVine developer space. As Dan Appelquist says to everyone he meets, Vodafone are offering £20,000 prizemoney for a widget that runs on Opera Mobile. That's a beer a day for 25 years in the UK, or a way to save a lot of people from starving for a week, or whatever it is you do with money.