There was a fire in the hole…. By that, I’m just talking about firefox’s London release party last night, which was held in the basement of the Shooting Star tavern.

Who knows what prompted Meg, one of our java developers, to make such an event a “girls night out”, but nevertheless, Mags (another java developer working for Xbridge), Meg and I excluded our nerdy male colleagues in order to… well, hang out with lots of nerdy males.

It turns out that Meg had heard about it from a guy named Rob (aka delineator) who we both randomly follow on twitter. Really nice New Zealander guy… One of those people who try to know face-to-face their twitter followers but thought Meg and I would be alright (saw the safetygoat, and made an exception of me). He is an avid Ruby developer and was nice enough to tell a few java folk what it’s all about.

There weren’t a lot of people there, which meant more swag for us. We had hats, tattoos, stickers, bracelets, but sadly (for meg) no mugs. I think I actually spoke to pretty much everyone who was there. They also had a big monitor displaying the (more than) a million lines of code that make up firefox 3 in the back. Gervase Markham, who was our very nice host, did a little presentation about how many people have downloaded firefox 3 in the first 24 hours. There was talk of burning plastic…pretty crazy stuff! I had to hush Meg a bit from her “USA! USA!” heckling, but besides that, it was nice and relaxed. It turns out Gerv works for the non-for-profit foundation for firefox, but they also own a branch that makes money. Not really sure how all that works, so after a few minutes of explanations, I went to the bar to have another drink to help me absorb my new knowledge. Poor Gerv, I was quizzing him on things about firefox for mac, but he had no answers for me.

This is how it went:
Me: Is there any way of sending different code to mac firefox versus pc firefox for css? The mac is rendering some things 1px off.
Gerv: I hadn’t heard of issues with rendering differently on the two firefox… you’re right, javascript would be messy. Why don’t you submit it as a bug?

Me: Have they done anything in firefox 3 for mac for it eating up memory when you have 25 browser windows open?
Gerv: Anything would run slow if you had 25 browser windows open!!
Me: Safari doesn’t.
Gerv: Err….I don’t use a mac. I don’t know.

Poor guy. He did the best he could, and I was just one of those annoying people with very specific problems.

Most people were very nice, and and am just a lowly “half developer” being a UI coder (I do the layout, they do the logic), most people were nice enough to speak slowly on the complicated bits, and change the subject when my eyes glazed over. Except this one Asian guy. His first question to me was, “what platform do you use?” or something along those lines. When I told him I was a UI developer, and just beginning at it as well, he snobbily informed me that he made “at least 3 times as much as me” and basically began insulting me to my face. You have to save face in front of nerds (who knows what they will do to you once you reveal your weaknesses) … so I made a hasty retreat back to the safety of nicer people.

Margaret was such a Bview champion there. Everytime I went back to talk with her, she was trying to explain to people how BView worked. She really put meg and I to shame. Definitely need to give that girl some cards to give out to people when she’s hyping it up.

All in all, it was a proper nerd fest, and a great way to celebrate the new browser! Yay Firefox!

Tags: firefox 3, launch party