State of the Browser 5

Posted on 14 September 2015 by Steve Workman About 2 min reading time

Dave Letorey at State of the Browser

A short write up on the weekend

Another year, another State of The Browser - now in its fifth year, it's a conference for the London Web development community. It's aimed at the masses, we want it to be accessible to all and have really great speakers, and this year was no exception to those rules.

In its inception, SOTB was a chance for the browser manufacturers to get together and talk about the latest and greatest things in their browsers to a wide audience. A lot of this mandate is being done (very, very well) by Edge conference, organised by our friends at London Web Performance. So, this year, we went back to our roots, the community that LWS is built upon, for talks about the browser, new browsers, new technology, and new ways of working. I'm really pleased with how it worked out, and we had a really high quality of submissions (my fellow organiser Morena Fiore-Kirby covers this really well in her write-up) it's a shame we couldn't fit more in.

This also meant that we could feature more new speakers and I'm really happy that we did. LWS has a long history of being the place where great speakers have done their first gigs (Pete Gasston, Laura Kalbag, and apparently Jake Archibald did a talk in the very early days - to just name a few) and I hope this tradition will continue. We were very pleased to welcome Martin Jakl (@JaklMartin) and Laura Elizabeth (@laurium) to the stage, mentored by Pete and Solé, they both did a great job with their talks. They've both got bright futures so watch out for them.

My highlight

I'm very happy to say that my surprise of the weekend was Chris Heilmann. Other than his incredible generosity in giving away 10 years worth of tech swag (see below) he gave the best talk that I've ever had the pleasure to hear him give. He seemed truly passionate about his new product, Edge, and the people that he works with to make the web better, fixing not just the web that you and I see, but also internal websites, massive SAP systems and changing web standards culture in huge corporations. If I hadn't already been standing, I'd have stood up to applaud him and what the Edge development team have done. Thank you.

Chris' Tech Swag (half of it)

Chris Heilmann at State of the Browser 5

Finally

Thanks to everyone who came along and were such a friendly bunch of people. We got lots of great feedback, and I can't wait to do it again next year!

Check out the photo gallery for the event on Google Photos For more on the event, check out these articles:

p.s. The whole event was live-streamed, and we have videos of the whole event too - the first half is already up on the @webstandards Vimeo page with the rest to follow shortly. A massive thank you to our live events team Pete Wood and company who always do an amazing job. Thank you!

Speaking