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Besides the XULRunner session, we also had a developer tools session at the Mountain View developer day. There was a lot of overlap between the two sessions with respect to development tools. That not really surprising since the technologies used in XULRunner applications and Firefox/Thunderbird extensions are the same. Here is a summary of initial discussion:

The Mountain View Developer Day was a blast. We covered a lot of topics. A great bunch of people showed up and the high level of crowd participation helped out a lot. The Songbird and Flock folks gave lots of good feedback regarding their development experiences. More on that later. A quick recap of the lightning topics:

We have the schedules for both Mountain View and Boston Developer Days up on the wiki. We are planning some short, fast ’lightning’ talks on various topics. The lightning talks should give the group a broad view of different projects and experiences. Afterward, we plan on breaking out into longer discussions or hacking sessions based on the groups interests.

I just read Jeff Atwood’s Are Web Interfaces “Good Enough”? post. He explores why web (RIA) versions of desktop applications are “less satisfying” than the desktop versions. He makes some good points and I’d like to build on his post. I see it the other way around: Web versions have less bloat than desktop versions. Let’s state the obvious right up front: I am talking about good desktop and good web applications. You’ll find crappy versions of both.

I have been using the prototype WebRunner for a few days to access GMail and Zimbra. Overall, I am quite happy with the results. The webapps load fast and I like having them appear in my ALT+TAB list. I am using Firefox for browsing and not running webapps, which feels better too. Firefox stays snappy and I have not had to “kill” its process because of speed or hung webapp problems.

Offline cache support was added to the Firefox trunk last night. Check out bug 367447 for details. This is a major step in Firefox 3’s offline webapp support. There is still some more things to add, however, including an API for web developers. I’d expect the API to “feel” like some of the WHATWG APIs for web applications. I’d also expect drafts of any APIs to be ready for review soon. In fact, bug 371432 does have some API discussion.

The Mountain View Developer Day is approaching (Mar 25th). Looks like we’re getting a nice mix of people and interests. Since Mozilla is such a distributed company, its good to get together and be in the same room. I am looking forward to that.