Firefox at Mix08

I've been watching the Videos of Microsoft's Mix08, some of it's been very interesting and some of it's been just plain boring. Miguel De Icaza's presentation on Moonlight – the FOSS version of Microsoft's Silverlight was one of the boring presentations. Deadly boring in fact, the bloke couldn't do a presentation to save himself.

One thing I did learn is that Moonlight is not ready and the code Miguel presented was apparently quite buggy (confirmed by comments from Miguel like “this has got a bug in it...”). On the other hand, in spite of all the issues of openness and potential patents surrounding Silverlight it is actually a pretty impressive piece of technology.

But what caught my eye was the presentation on SEO, which actually was the point of me viewing the videos in the first place. The presentation started rather slow, with lots of self congratulatory rhetoric – I was about to give up on it when we finally got to the point, Search Engine Optimization. That's a subject I need to know more about. The talk mostly revolved around Microsoft's Live Search and Yahoo search, with Google getting passing reference. It was obvious Microsoft wanted to generate some interest in their search engine.

So as we're going through the presentation I began to notice a couple of things, the bloke was using both IE and Firefox, but every time he needed to demonstrate some technical point, like showing and us how the page code looks and why it's right or wrong in terms of SEO, he'd switch to Firefox and use tools like Firebug or the Web Developer tool bar that are add-ons to Firefox.

But even more interesting than this, is that I know you can get similar tools for IE, they're available through Microsoft Marketplace..... at a price. But obviously even Microsoft partners aren't willing to pay that price, and prefer the Free (and open) tool sets that are available for Firefox.