As I announced earlier the Fronteers 2009 conference will be held in Amsterdam on the 5th and 6th of November. Today we announce two speakers, and we also have extended the early bird period by one week (ends 10th of July instead of 3rd). The conference will be held entirely in English.

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Recently I held a presentation at a local Microsoft conference in the Netherlands. Slides are here. Fanatical followers will recognise most of the topics I discussed from earlier slide shows, but the last one, about the changes to the market share of IE6, 7, and 8, is new.

Basically, IE6 will continue to exist when IE7 has all but disappeared, and, contrary to what you might expect, this situation will create exciting opportunities for Microsoft’s competitors.

Besides, last week the news came that Microsoft is going to voluntarily de-bundle IE from all Windows 7 machines that will be sold in Europe, and I continue to have my doubts about that affair.

So it’s time for a special State of the Browsers IE edition.

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I have started an HTML5 compatibility table today. For now it only contains a test of HTML5 Storage in all desktop browsers, and a short report is in order. I also retested the DOM HTML; no changes.

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Just as we did last year, Fronteers, the organisation of front-end engineers in the Netherlands, organises a front-end conference. Ticket sale has started, and two more speakers have been announced.

The Fronteers 2009 conference will be held on 5th and 6th of November in Amsterdam. In addition to Nate Koechley and Steve Souders , John Resig of jQuery and Nicole Sullivan will join us to discuss JavaScript libraries and object-oriented CSS, respectively. The line-up will consist of twelve world-class speakers; the other eight will be announced later.

Ticket sale has started; currently we’re in the early bird period that will expire on the 3rd of July. A two-day ticket costs € 250; a one-day ticket € 175.

Additional discounts are available for Fronteers members (who have meanwhile received a mail), and Dutch educational institutions.

The conference is sponsored by Vodafone, and we’re currently negotiating with other potential sponsors.

I hope to see some of you at Fronteers 2009!

Last week I’ve done the DOM Core tests in new browsers: IE8 final (in both IE8 and IE7 mode), Firefox 3.5b4, Safari 4.0, Chrome 1 and 2, and Opera 10a. I found no surprises.

After that I decided to continue with mobile browsers, of which I have 15 lying around on my desk. Unfortunately I could not test IE Mobile (old) because it supports only inline event handlers, Skyfire because it does not allow you to remove alerts, and the Opera runtime in the Vodafone widget manager for terrifyingly complicated reasons I still have to describe properly.

Still I managed to test the other twelve and found a few surprises.

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In his recent Feature testing CSS properties entry, Juriy Zaytsev (Kangax) discusses the possibility of detecting CSS support by means of JavaScript. Although he rightly points out that this method has its drawbacks, as far as I’m concerned he doesn’t go far enough.

This sort of testing should not be used at all. Ever. The methodology is plain wrong. Browser compatibility tests are to be done by hand. Any automated system is useless, because it will give false information.

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Phew, the last two weeks have been a blast, but also a bit tiring. I went on a visit to San Francisco in order to speak at the Voices That Matter Web Design Conference, and since I was in town anyway both Yahoo! and Google invited me to do a tech talk. I returned home on Friday, and on Saturday I spoke at the Amsterdam Widget Dev Camp organised by Vodafone NL. Fun, but wearing.

As you may know by now, I’m currently heavily engaged inW3C Widgets research, so it’s no surprise that three out of four of my presentations treated this topic. As usual I’ve put the slides online.

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