Portland Web Innovators is a monthly meeting of web designers and developers in Portland, Oregon. One of the founders, Adam Duvander (of Best Places and WifiPDX), invited me to come speak about Firefox 3. I was told that the turnout was 3x normal, which was cool. iSite Design provided the venue, and the pizza, thanks y'all :)
My hastily-made presentation is basically an overview of the user-facing features planned for Fx3 (with Schrep's #'s slide thrown in to end on). Here are some impressions and take-aways:
- The group is mostly designers and web developers from small (1 person) to medium (40 people) sized companies. There were some independent contractors, and a few other people from various software/web-related fields.
- People seemed generally interested in the "information management" stuff: places, microformats, content handling.
- Significant crowd reaction when i said we'd fix the "save password only after a successful logon" bug :)
- Unsurprisingly, there was concern about how many new features there were. Several people asked whether the new features would be able to turned off entirely. Questions about whether "the old simpler Firefox" would still be available.
- Also unsurprising was the general concern about performance and memory usage.
- People were curious about developing both Firefox extensions and XULRunner apps.