The evening started off with Giorgio speaking about IE8 and how it relates to HTML5. He showed a few demos of implemented HTML5 features but spent most of his time showing off the impressive amount of work that the IE team has done to come up to speed with current standards. We got told a particularly sad story about the poor guy whose sole job is to write CSS tests – of which he has so far written ~7200 of. Giorgio gave a very enlightening presentation which I believe effectively illustrated a major shift of attitude within Microsoft towards the web and related standards.

After Giorgio’s talk, all 200 of us feasted on hot pizza from Pizza Hut and drank the nectar of gods, Epic Pale Ale.

Next up were Robert and Chris with some very impressive – though sometimes exaggerated - demos. Don’t get me wrong, all the demos were extremely cool, I just had trouble imagining real world uses for some of them. Overall it was an interesting showcase of the cutting edge technologies being baked into Firefox – all of which can be played with right now if you get the latest daily build.

To end the evening a panel was held and preselected question were posed to the speakers – which resulted in some interesting discussions. The biggest topic though was the video tag and Mozillas reluctance to use the H.264 standard. Chris made some good points, one of which even got applause – but I still believe that they are fundamentally gimping the future of the web with their decision to not support H.264. Robert made a point about not breaking the web earlier in the evening, but their refusal to incorporate this widely spread codec, I believe is going to do just that.

After the meetup finished I think everyone was glad to get out into the fresh air – let me tell you, 200 odd developers/designers in a small room with no air conditioning gets pretty hot pretty quickly. What a great evening though