Title:  FOXHOLES: News From The Front Line Of The Browser Wars
Speaker: Robert O'Callahan, Mozilla Corporation
Date: Thursday, 9 August 2007
Time: 11:00am to 11:50am
Room:   I.G.09       (NOTE THE CHANGE OF ROOM)

Once viewed by some as technologically stagnant, the World Wide Web is
being refreshed by renewed competition in Web browsers and the
popularization of advanced "AJAX" Web applications. Yet the Web's future
is darkened by severe security threats and competition from technologies
that seek to replace the Web as we know it. As a contributor to Firefox,
I will discuss challenges facing our project: competition from Internet
Explorer and other browsers; changes to fundamental assumptions about
code-level security vulnerabilities; sustaining and evolving a complex
and fragile codebase; and the successes and failures of our tools and
processes. Looking forwards, I will discuss our efforts to keep the Web
vital, in concert with like-minded browser vendors and standards
organizations, by enhancing the Web platform with vector and 3D
graphics, offline Web applications, accessibility, richer typography and
layout, enhancements to the Javascript language, efforts to improve
cross-browser compatibility, and more. I will talk about why everyone
should care and what people can do to help.

BIO:
Robert O'Callahan obtained his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University with
the help of Daniel Jackson and Jeannette Wing. After three and half
years at IBM Watson working on programming languages and tools by day
and Mozilla by night, he volunteered for full-time duty in the browser
wars, with the substantial fringe benefit of returning to the most
lovely country in the world -- he now runs a Firefox development team
based in Auckland, working for the Mozilla Corporation.