Interview: with UndoTV's Chris Pirillo.

We caught up with former TeckTV host, Chris Pirillo, to chew the fat. From his latest venture into the realm of television with Leo Laporte, to his thoughts on Web 2.0, Chris was more resourceful than Wikipedia.

Opening the Web

by Opera's David Storey

A day in the life of a Web Opener is never predictable. One day we might wake up in a strange city, ready to attend the latest web conference. The next, talking with some of the biggest names in the industry on how they can better support Opera. Not to mention trying to decipher how to contact a site in any number of different languages. With all that said, nothing prepared me for the surprise of being invited by Microsoft to Redmond recently, just two days before the rest of our group was due to fly out on a Vista compatibility trip.

As you may well know, historically Opera and Microsoft Web sites haven't exactly played well together. Remedying this is one of the core challenges Opera has identified. Things have started to improve since we contacted Microsoft's Scott Laster, and I had high hopes as I set off for Seattle, still unsure of the exact purpose of the trip.

As it turned out, Scott had set up some meetings with key personnel who could help us with our goal. We talked with the IE7 Evangelists on the common issues we face, and how we could best combat these going forward. The key meeting of our trip however, was with Scott Isaacs. He's in charge of many of the key technologies in the Live series of Web site properties at Microsoft.

After an introduction to the approach they take, we sat together with Scott in our make shift office. With a huge amount of help from an Opera colleague, we hacked away on the Live.com source code and made some magic. Before our eyes, live.com loaded up in Opera with huge improvements from what we had before. While not everything works, we will keep working on fixing the issues as Live.com evolves and the changes we made go live. The files we worked on are used across the range of Live properties, so the improvements made will spread across these sites in time. Other sensitive issues were discussed, and hopefully in the not to distant future we can announce further good news on work we are doing with Microsoft.

After a lot of negativity towards Microsoft, it feels good to be able to report some positive news on the browser battle front.