Interview: Fluffy Bunny

Many of you might have already met Opera's resident Bunny. A dedicated moderator and avid blogger, Fluffy Bunny has the reputation for being one of MyOpera's more active members.

Opening the Web

by Opera's David Storey

Soon after touching down from Oviedo, Spain, where I took part in the excellent Fundamentos Web, London was calling. This would be our first Backstage event, and my first serious speaking engagement. It was with much trepidation that I boarded the early morning British Airways flight.

For those of you that are not aware, Backstage are events where we meet with the people who we feel we need to reach out to, from press and bloggers to Web developers and fans. These people are so important to our mission to build a better browser, and a better Web.

The night before the big event was a beehive of activity, from last minute preparations and rehearsals to much behind-the-scenes work at the Opera HQ, all to ensure that the event would be a success. We managed to take some time out to meet up with some community members to watch a game of football, and have a pre-event meal in the city.

The big day arrived, and the event was about to begin. Just as we finished setting up, Yahoo! arrived with their small army of developers, followed by the BBC, Last.FM, Ask and many others. It was truly a "who's who" of the British Web development scene, and it was great to see people I'd already met on the road, such as Daniel Appelquist from Vodafone, who does so much work pushing the mobile Web. After things had calmed down, the show got underway. First up was Opera's CEO, who gave an impassioned speech about Opera's vision, why we are here today and doing what we do best.

One of the most impressive things was that his entire presentation was done using Opera Show presentation mode to show slideshows - and all the graphics were drawn and animated using SVG. Next up was Christen Krogh, Opera's VP of Engineering.

Christen Krogh is the guy that's responsible for seeing that our browser gets built. He gave a very interesting speech on what we have been up to at Opera, from the days of Opera 3 to the present day and beyond. He touched on new things coming up in Opera, from anti-fraud protection to new developer tools, that should make testing for Opera a much easier task, and a development I most welcome. This was followed by a couple of talks from external speakers, including a great speech by Jeremy Keith on the past and future of the Web. Calling it a speech is a bit of a injustice, as Jeremy reeled it off like poetry in his unique style.

Jeremy was a hard act to follow, but it was time for me to step up and do my thing. Unlike many of my colleagues, I ditched the suit for a t-shirt and presented my team's vision for an open Web. A vision where site incompatibility and browser sniffing will be a thing of the past, and browsers will be judged on how well they render a page and not what broken code they are sent differently from the rest. I tried to put across the business reasons for "doing the right thing" and explain why it makes sense. As a parting note, I introduced browser support policies, a project our Open the Web team are working on with a number of big companies. I hope to share more on this project in a future issue.

With the talks drawing to a close, it was time to party and mingle. Fortunately, there were more than enough drink tokens for everyone! I would also like to mention that it was a particular pleasure to stop to chat with Nick Holmes from the BBC. He's the guy that helps define which browsers the BBC support on their site, and puts a lot of effort into ensuring that Opera is included and that their pages work in our browser. We owe him a big thank you, and it certainly makes my life easier, along with our many users that visit the BBC regularly. Eventually, as the night wore on the lights went out and the curtain came down on a successful event. Thanks to everyone that was able to attend, the night was fantastic and we hope to learn from it so we can make the next event bigger and better.

Thanks to everyone for coming, and I hope to see you soon.