Browsers Mash-up

The Global Web Technology Workshop was held by the Future Web Forum in Seoul, Korea on Mar. 16. It was sponsored by Microsoft Korea, Mozilla Corporation and Opera Software Korea. Over 200 people attended this meeting. Please refer to the press release in English and this event. I’ll write an atmosphere and response of people in workshop.

Mr. Channy Yun gave Firefox-based presentation using S5 and tab browsing. He spoke Firefox has played important role in emerging web as like Web2.0, Ajax and IE7 and user-driven innovation based on GreaseMonkey and Extensions. He emphasized Mozilla is open source community to lead Web as public resources in view of the neutral platform. It means that its activities are for all browsers not just Firefox. Also he introduced Firefox 3 supporting off-line application platform, Javascript 1.7, SVG and CSS3. Also some of useful HTML5 spec. of WHATWG were very impressive for web developers.

Mr. Goodhyun Kim, Microsoft evangelist talked about Korean web ecosystem in view of Microsoft as a platform provider. He said that it’s very normal the extending desire of user-experience using emerging technology. But, the alteration of structure is very dangerous because of making home-brew system. He spoke Korean ActiveX issue was originated by that over extensions in user experience. Also he said that Windows Vista prohibits change of structure and offers rich web technology crossed over operating systems.

Mr. Suyong Wang, CEO of Mint Technology introduced Safari’s feature and development. He said Apple is not browser vendor and want to offer various rich web gateway such as Dashboard, RSS feeds based on excellent desktop platform.

Mr. Manyoung Cho, Opera Software Korea talked the present and future of Opera browser. He said that Opera has been focused on standards implementation and evangelism and introduced Opera Widget using pure web standards as like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and efforts of device-free web browsing using same rendering engine from mobile phones to settop box. Attendee were impressive to view Opera’s demo in embedded linux TV settop.

After each speech, four speakers talked about Korean situation and trends of global web technology. Mr. Jonghong Jeon, W3C Korea and ETRI was the moderator in this panel discussion for one half hours.

All of them discussed domestic Active X issues and how to solve that problem. All agreed that alternative technologies must be offered and the social and legal changes are essential. According to postscripts of attendee in blogosphere, they could recognize the trend of global web technology and the way for Korea to go in future.

p.s. Microsoft Korea prepared t-shirts with logo “open”. “e” meant the IE.

You can see more photographs in Flickr for this event.