We’re doing so darn much with the Web platform these days, from cross-domain access mechanisms to new drawing and graphics tools. But in the end, we still have to deal with different web browsers. This discussion brings the leads from Mozilla (Firefox), Microsoft (IE), Google (Chrome) and Opera (Opera) together for yet another incendiary discussion about the future of the web.

Our morning started with Browser Wars III - The platform wins with panelists:

• Arun Ranganathan - Mozilla
• Chris Wilson - Microsoft
• Brendan Eich - Mozilla Foundation
• Charles McCathieNevile - Opera Software
• Darin Fisher - Google

As we begin in the webs’ 20th anniversary this year, 20 years on we are all in a very interesting position with regrads to browsers.

Open discussions from the panel about their history and work in browsers over the past few years, from Mozilla, Opera, IE and new to the panel Darin Fisher from Google working on the Google Chrome working group (to which he was received with a nice friendly round of applause from the attendees). Talk was much around various problems that developers are constantly hassled with regards to rendering and why have not all the browser working groups just got together to resolve a global problem. A steady declining market share of IE brought a round of cheers from the crowd and I must admit Chris still continues to appear in support of IE and still stands his ground really well. He takes a lot of stick, but keeps going. I remember seeing Chris in @media2007 in London when he was asked when IE7 was released, will it be another 2 years of absence until a new IE release is made.

Discussion around IE6 and IE8 brought up the Silverlight project and why is this (and has to be) any different to HTML5? Why did IE introduce Silverlight, yet another possible problem we as developers have to cope with? Although Chris doesn’t work at Silverlight, he still tries to drive open web platform standards forward.

To cover a whole market, you have to base it on standards instead of using technologies like sliverlight and flash, said Charles from Opera. Pushing platforms that makes them do whatever Silverlight or Flash can. Also, he brings to the topic that you can’t develop stuff to extend the power of the browser in a closed environement, it has to be open source. With regards to open source Brendan from Mozilla talked about the continued problems with making these platforms standard and that it’s a lot more complicated than people imagine due to various reasons, including politics within companies to try and agree solutions with each other and in a collaborative way.

The hot topic of JavaScript was discussed at length with the variety of different JS engines on their platforms, surely this should also be standardised also? Brendan mentioned that beyond performance, people are building large codes and libraries to manage large chunks of code. The TC39 working group is trying hard to do something, but one good thing is to share code, but for the web that’s just not an easy task. Questions were raised as to why IE doesn’t just use Webkit, and in all fairness, why don’t we just ALL use Webkit? Apple who were not in the panel had commented saying that this may not be a good idea.

Charles from Opera talked about their JS engine and at the time, nobody seemed to care, but now as people are thinking slightly differently about this issue, they only now want to know. He likened JS like batteries. Your device can be at the top of it’s range and perform like no other, but without batteries, your device is pretty much rendered useless. I liked his thinking.

Safety and Security was raised and although IE still do their own thing, perhaps they should have a more attitude towards working together for a similar outcome especially due to the increase of fraud online. Why don’t IE share?! Chris mentioned, that the reason why they do this is that they have to work on security changes and patches really quickly to make sure their user’s are secure online. Discussion continued into Click Jacking.

Web security and O/S security was raised. Darin from Google mentioned that in Chrome 1.0 it was just used shipping the webkit security. The new webkit that’s being used in FF4 Beta has a new Beta security engine enabled.

Jeremy Keith stood up and asked the panel a question about CSS. He took the element @font-face as an example and questioned why IE had to have a different font-type extension from other browsers. It sounds like DRM for fonts on the web. he likened this approach to a background image. You wouldn’t protect it from the server even if you bought the image legally from a stockphoto site for example, so why do it for fonts? IE’s response is that it was protecting the owner of the font from it being stolen and the argument that both Jeremy and the attendees agreed is that, OK, but that’s not Microsoft’s decision. It’s not the browser’s decision to make them examples. Personally, whilst i kinda applaud MS for protecting fraud and copyright, I totally agreed that they can’t make that decision when they’ve not been asked to provide a solution.

Unfortunately, the talk finished far too early as it was starting to get very interesting.