Web Technologies Need an Owner

What’s the W3C then?

> Browser vendors are innovating in some areas, but they are stalled by the standards process in so many areas that is impossible to create a platform with a coherent, unified vision the way Apple has with Cocoa or the way Python has with Guido.

Nobody actually wants that web; we'd have somebody's "coherent, unified vision" circa 1995, with a handful of updates every year or two. I like my web as a fierce competition between browser vendors to desperately catch up to their peers in terms of speed and features.

Well, I agree that WebKit should probably be adopted in Internet Explorer, so Microsoft can once again innovate in the browser space while helping everyone. Maybe they should join Google and Apple in embracing open source software and committing their changes into a free project. Because then everyone wins, including Microsoft. No more IE6 nonsense.

We always have this question of centralized / decentralized. Whether it's social networks, or government, or the web. Flash was a centralized platform, and so what? Many people complain that iTunes and Flash etc. are not super accessible, and also that companies which exert influence tend to lock up their customers (except maybe Google and Yahoo :) The best example of this when it comes to the desktop was Microsoft. They wanted to get everyone into their ecosystem. Now Apple is the new Microsoft.

I personally think that "open source" should always be a competitor to proprietary stuff. Whatever the centralized effort would be, it should be open source. I personally think javascript-based technologies like the browser, jQuery, like PhoneGap and like Node.js are going to become more and more important. So what we really need is a standard ECMAScript that is implemented correctly everywhere, and we're pretty much there.

I am a fan of Joe Hewitt but this is crazy talk, especially coming from one of the heroes of the Mozilla revolution. It's as if he doesn't remember those dark days long ago when he was working on Firefox in what seemed like a lost cause, Microsoft was the defacto standard setter and single-handedly drove innovation in the web, it was awful. We must never go back to those days. I know Joe imagines some benevolent dictator or consortium, but it's just too risky. There's too much power in controlling the web and power corrupts. Look at what's happened to ICANN with the power they've been given. No, we must keep the power spread out, preferably we'd have more browser makers not fewer. The slow pace might be frustrating to the innovators on the cutting edge like Joe, but it's the only way.

"Let's face facts: the Web will never be the dominant platform."

Hewitt's post hinges on that statement, presented without supporting evidence. But actually the Web is already dominant among the platforms Hewitt mentions (Web, Windows, iOS, and Android).

Relevant stats:

Web - 1.7 billion users as of July, given that 880 million people go to the single busiest website publicly measured by Google, and this site has a "reach" of 51 percent. (You can distill this same total from any of the smaller sites listed via simple division.) http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/

iOS - 38 million people as of April http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/04/19/a-look-at-ipad-users-...

Android - 24 million people as of April http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/04/19/a-look-at-ipad-users-...

Windows - 400 million Windows 7 license sold as of this month, the most popular version of Windows going. http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive... Even if piracy doubles total Windows 7 installs, you're still not halfway to total web users (which means trying to count creaky old XP as the same platform won't get you there, either).

Hewitt is a smart guy, ex Facebook, built their iOS client, so clearly he has a thought a lot about platforms. But he undermines his arguments about the future when he is incorrect about the present.