Last week the fourth edition of the yearly Parisian Open Web conference, Paris Web took place in the state-of-the-art IBM business tower.This year Mozilla was represented by Tristan Nitot , Mozilla Europe president, and Paul Rouget , Tech evangelist and demo-hacker extraordinaire.

The sessions were focused on the Open Web, one Web for desktop and mobile and the need for standards. Also the new web technologies, like CSS 3 and HTML 5 were a big focus of the event.

On the first day Tristan Nitot participated in the mobile web round table together with people from Opera, Orange Labs and the W3C and spoke about Fennec, Mozilla's project which brings Firefox to the mobile phone.

Tristan_and_Paul_at_Paris_Web.jpg

On Friday, the second day, Tristan and Paul had a talk about the new web standards and their implementation in modern browsers. In explaining the need for new, open standards, Tristan argued they are essential in ensuring the future of the Open Web and its success over proprietary platforms. Not only that, but they are also important for the mobile web in order to make sure it remains a viable choice and not lose ground against native phone applications. Last, but not the least, the need to make web developers' life easier is also important.

Paul and Tristan then demoed several new features of upcoming versions of Firefox, including:

  • Access to peripherals such as the built-in accelerometer
  • the ability to harness the power of multi-core processors using Web Workers and accelerated JavaScript (thanks to TraceMonkey), which enables video special effects
  • New CSS 3 properties such as filter, transformation and clip-path

For the actual demos go to Paul's blog and make sure to use a nighly.

The slides have been published . Photo credits: Yannick Croissant