I attended the 5th Chrome Dev Summit this week. The talks were all recorded and are available via the schedule (the keynote and leadership panel on day 1 are perhaps of broadest interest and highest bang-for-buck viewing value). It was a high quality, well-produced event with an intimate feel – I was very surprised when Robert Nyman told me it was over 700 people! I appreciated the good vegetarian food options and noticed and was very impressed by the much-better-than-typical-tech-conferences gender representation and code of conduct visibility.

It doesn’t always look this way from the outside, but the various browser engine teams are more often than not working toward the same goals and in constant contact. For those who don’t know that, it was nice to see the shoutouts for other browsers and the use of Firefox’s new logo!

The focus of the event IMO was, as expected, the mobile Web. While the audience was Web developers, it was interesting to see what the Chrome team is focusing on. Some of the efforts felt like Firefox OS 4 years ago but I guess FxOS was just ahead of its time 😉

From my perspective, Firefox is in pretty good shape for supporting the things Chrome was promoting (Service Workers, Custom Elements and Shadow DOM, wasm, performance-related tooling, etc.). There are of course areas we can improve: further work on Fennec support for add-to-homescreen, devtools, and seeing a few things through to release (e.g. JS modules, Custom Elements, and Shadow DOM – work is underway and we’re hoping for soon!). Oh, and one notable exception to being aligned on things is the Network Information API that the Mozilla community isn’t super fond.

Other highlights for me personally included the Chrome User Experience Report (“a public dataset of key user experience metrics for popular origins on the web, as experienced by Chrome users under real-world conditions”) and the discussion about improving the developer experience for Web Workers.

It was great putting faces to names and enjoying sunny San Francisco (no, seriously, it was super sunny and hot). Thanks for the great show, Google!