IndiBlogger Meet

Another weekend, another unconference. This time it was a Blogger Meet organized by IndiBlogger. The event was hosted and sponsored by Microsoft (Gurgaon).


I have noticed that all the conferences these days begin with a hash code, and this one had: # indincr. Also a funny thing about this blogger meet was that there were more Tweeters than Bloggers here.

We started the conference with a little intro from IndiBlogger team and attendees, and I realized that most of the entrepreneurs were byproduct of a bad boss. No wonder why I am still working for someone else (boss I hope you are reading this :)

But the main reason, for me being there was a presentation by Microsoft “Internet Explorer 8: First Look”. Though it wasn’t a first look for me because I have been using IE 8 for more than a year now . But I wanted to see how a person from Microsoft tackles so many Firefox fans sitting there (some were even wearing Firefox T-Shirts).

The presentation was given by Abishek Kant and I must admit he did an excellent work in handling questions like “What is the USP of IE 8”, “What is original in IE8” etc. And he was candid enough to express that the main objective of his presentation was to spread awareness about IE8 and not to compare it with any other browser.

Some of the points that he covered during his presentation:

Accelerators:
These are a form of selection-based search which allow a user to invoke an online service from any other page using only the mouse.

Web Slices:
These are snippets of the entire page that a user can subscribe to. Web Slices will be kept updated by the browser automatically, and can be viewed directly from the Favorites bar, complete with graphics and visuals.

Smart Screen Filter:
It is mainly an extension of Internet Explorer 7's phishing filter. If a user visits a site which has been labeled as an impostor or harmful, then Internet Explorer 8 will show a screen prompting that the site is reported harmful and shouldn't be visited.

Automatic crash recovery
A crash recovery mechanism has been incorporated; if the browser crashes, web pages being viewed may be recovered, at the user's discretion, when the browser is restarted.

Performance and stability
IE8 improves rendering of content authored to various web standards. It has complete support for the W3C CSS 2.1.

Version Targeting
Since it has stricter adherence to W3C described web standards than Internet Explorer 7. As a result, as in every IE version before it, some percentage of web pages coded to the behavior of the older versions would break in IE8. To avoid this situation, Microsoft proposed Version Targeting whereby a page could be authored to a specific version of a browser using the X-UA-Compatible declaration either as a meta element or in the HTTP headers. A browser with a newer version than what the page has been coded for would emulate the behavior of the older version so that the assumptions the page made about the browser's behavior holds true.

Nothing from the points mentioned above will make me switch to IE from Firefox but if you are using IE7 then IE8 makes more sense for you.

We also had Priyanka (better known as Twilight Fairy) giving a very interactive presentation on social media and copyrights. The theme was that every blogger has to be protective of their content and they are responsible for the comments posted on their blog. Some important points mentioned were “If it is on web, it doesn’t mean it’s free to use”, “Linking to illegal content is also illegal” etc.

Over all meet was good (any meet is good if it ends with Pizza ). But unlike Mozcamp Delhi, there were no free IE t-shirts here, another reason to like Firefox :)