FOSDEM is the biggest event in Europe dedicated to Free and Open Source Developers that takes place in the first weekend of February, each year, in Brussels, Belgium. It is a tradition already for Mozilla to have there a booth and a dev room dedicated.
I was lucky enough to have a presentation accepted for Mozilla Dev Room so at the beginning of February I joined other 5000 FOSS hackers in Brussels for FOSDEM’13. The event starts always on Friday, with a beer event for socializing. It is the place to be even if you are not a beer lover, so don’t worry about that. Saturday, the first day with presentations started with the keynotes from the organizers. In Mozilla Devroom, the day began with Tristan’s presentation about why Mozilla considers that the web is the platform – why FirefoxOS matters. There were also presentations about Localization, Firefox for Android but also about new technologies like WebRTC – The Real Time Communication through the web – and Firefox OS – learn how to port, build and flash it to your phone or how to automate your testing on it.
Cover for FOSDEM’13 brochure
Photo by Ioana Chiorean
Sunday’s talks in Mozilla DevRoom covered presentations about L20n – next generation localization technology, about Persona – former known as BrowserID, an authentication system that emphasizes user privacy, about SUMO – open source support – and many other topics. There where presentations about technologies behind the product, like audios, videos, PDF.js and also about how to debug your web applications for Firefox OS.
My presentation was scheduled also on Sunday, at 12:30. I talked about Mobile Web Compatibility with an emphasize between Firefox for Android using only open web standards and other browsers. I explained what compatibility means and how bugs of it look like: desktop versions of websites on mobile browser, misaligned buttons, unusable input area, basic html instead of polished websites. I wanted to show how easy the community can help identify sites with compatibility issues while rendering in Firefox for Android or Firefox in our new Firefox OS. To see a status for this you can access arewecompatibleyet.com.
Let’s talk about compatibility, web compatibility, mobile web compatibility.
Photo by Claire Corgnou & Tristan Nitot
Mozilla presence consisted also in a booth in the K building. Our Awesome Reps were giving light talks about Mozilla, our missions, our products and of course – they showed the Firefox OS on some devices. There was a Firefox Clinic too, trying to answer to our users’ problems with their loved browser or any other Mozilla related question. A big thanks to all those that worked so hard for this event, those who presented or helped out at the booth! More photos and presentations here.
Our awesome Reps at the booth!
Photo by Christos Bacharakis