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Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

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Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#101

Post by magicalist »

millstone wrote: post #94
richtr wrote: post #55

What is difficult to argue against, and I'm surprised isn't mentioned in this article, is that Apple have completely eliminated market competition from happening around web standards on the iOS platform. It is impossible to ship e.g. Chromium on iOS right now. We just collectively buy the arguments put forward by Apple to support that position without appreciating the ramifications of not allowing market forces to dr…

To be fair, it's also impossible to ship Firefox on ChromeOS.

Actually, it would take quite some work to port Firefox, but you could run a NaCl-compiled browser just fine.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#102

Post by eridius »

air wrote: post #71
eridius wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it impossible? If you want JavaScript support you have to use Apple's JavaScriptCore, but I don't recall any rule that prohibits using a custom web rendering engine paired with JavaScriptCore. So if anyone wants to build a version of Chromium that uses JavaScriptCore instead of V8, you could presumably ship that.

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ "Apps that browse the web must use the iOS WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript"

Huh. I haven't actually read through that document in a while. I thought it just had the prohibition against scripting languages other than the iOS JavaScriptCore (i.e. WebKit Javascript). I wonder why it now states that you must use the WebKit framework as well?

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#103

Post by r00fus »

Demiurge wrote: post #65
kolbe wrote: post #64

This article's title got me thinking that Apple, as a company, could actually be interested in suppressing the advancement of the web. Their apps are a shockingly effective alternative to the internet, and the store becomes more comprehensive by the year. Even at this point, Apple's apps can replace all but some long-tail usages. So, despite the fact that suppressing the progress of the web will hurt the user experie…

This can't possibly happen because regardless of how big Apple is, it is tiny compared to the Internet and everyone who depends on the open Internet, from Amazon, Facebook, Google, Netflix to whitehouse.gov and data.nasa.gov

I'd like to agree with you on a philosophical basis, but the reality is that Apple is 2x market cap of Exxon and iPhones recently outsold all Android in the US (calendar Q4 2014).

I don't think it's useful to downplay their influence.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#104

Post by rblatz »

Mobile development is tricky, you have to support the most common devices and browsers that are out there. That means Safari on iOS, and Chrome and the bundled browser on android. Since a large percentage of users will not seek out an alternate browser we have to support the bundled browser. In my experience, we've been limited by Android as a platform than we have by iOS.

First iOS devices tend to upgrade their software more often, and are more likely to be running a recent version of the web browser.

Second support for features may exist on Android, but we have been unable to use those features because they did not perform in an acceptable manner for what we were attempting to accomplish. We've had a lot of issues with things like 3D/2D CSS transforms. In fact we've had to sniff out Android user agents and provide a substandard experience for certain features due to the abysmal performance.

Apple may be moving slower than the cutting edge on Android, but the cutting edge is so far removed from the reality of what we have to support and work with that it's basically irrelevant.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#105

Post by bad_user »

frik wrote: post #98
mkozlows wrote: post #27

People are getting really bogged down in specific standards, but you don't need to talk about pointer events or flexbox or indexeddb or whatever, you can look at this at a macro level. Here's the ES6 support table: http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ Safari and IE were laggards, but future IE is going to be very solid while future Safari is still going to be terrible. Here's the HTML5 support table: https://htm…

> you don't need to talk about pointer events or flexbox or indexeddb or whatever But missing functionality is a deal breaker. * WebRTC - web peer to peer connection: Chrome & Firefox yes, IE 11 incompatible by design (bought Skype for 11b, based on it), Safari no (would be Facetime competitor) * WebSQL - web relational database: Chrome & Safari (also 95% of all smartphones) yes, Firefox & IE no (declared dead by Ora…

WebSQL is SQLLite and making that a standard is very hard without including SQLite's bugs and non-standard behavior.

Mozilla had really good reasons for shooting it down. Calling them out on it is meaningless without specifying why you think they've been wrong. You can say anything about IndexedDB, but at least it has a spec.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#106

Post by frik »

bad_user wrote: post #105
frik wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you don't need to talk about pointer events or flexbox or indexeddb or whatever But missing functionality is a deal breaker. * WebRTC - web peer to peer connection: Chrome & Firefox yes, IE 11 incompatible by design (bought Skype for 11b, based on it), Safari no (would be Facetime competitor) * WebSQL - web relational database: Chrome & Safari (also 95% of all smartphones) yes, Firefox & IE no (declared dead by Ora…

WebSQL is SQLLite and making that a standard is very hard without including SQLite's bugs and non-standard behavior. Mozilla had really good reasons for shooting it down. Calling them out on it is meaningless without specifying why you think they've been wrong. You can say anything about IndexedDB, but at least it has a spec.

* The argument that WebSQL was tailored to a specific SQLite version is nonsense. SQLite supports the official SQL92 standard, as do several other SQL embedded engines like the SQL engines from MS Access, MS Outlook, MS SQL Embedded and many others. Also Firefox already ships with SQLite for its "awesome bar" and bookmark feature. SQLite is in public domain, so every company can use it (even Microsoft products already use it!)

* Also the argument of them that it's "hard" to sync a client side database with a server side database is nonsense. But the two argument basically stopped Web SQL as HTML5 API :( The developers who voted against Web SQL were (former) employees of two big server side SQL db vendors (see the related mailing lists and blog).

Nowadays with the rise of NewSQL movement of people who burnt their fingers with NoSQL, one can only hope someone gives some love to Web SQL.

To sum up, NoSQL has it's place and SQL has one too.

We had this discussion already this week, hopefully W3C board members and Mozilla devs read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9082847

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#107

Post by saidajigumi »

bad_user wrote: post #105
frik wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you don't need to talk about pointer events or flexbox or indexeddb or whatever But missing functionality is a deal breaker. * WebRTC - web peer to peer connection: Chrome & Firefox yes, IE 11 incompatible by design (bought Skype for 11b, based on it), Safari no (would be Facetime competitor) * WebSQL - web relational database: Chrome & Safari (also 95% of all smartphones) yes, Firefox & IE no (declared dead by Ora…

WebSQL is SQLLite and making that a standard is very hard without including SQLite's bugs and non-standard behavior. Mozilla had really good reasons for shooting it down. Calling them out on it is meaningless without specifying why you think they've been wrong. You can say anything about IndexedDB, but at least it has a spec.

> SQLite's bugs and non-standard behavior.

"Bugs" I get, but what do you mean by "non-standard behavior" mean here?

My perspective, having had some experience with some pretty sophisticated DB adapter layers in the past: SQLlite and other nominally-SQL DBs all have only a very superficial level of SQL-level compatibility. Aside from closely related DBs (e.g. forks) it's not like there's any actual ability to exchange character-for-character identical SQL or DDL between DBs. All kinds of things like quoting, namespacing, and so on have subtly different syntax. It's pretty easy for a human to switch between SQL-x and SQL-y systems, but not so much when you're talking query generation. Even Rails has a pile of different backends for Active Record, and AR's backend is pretty darn simplistic.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#108

Post by Tloewald »

mkozlows wrote: post #27

People are getting really bogged down in specific standards, but you don't need to talk about pointer events or flexbox or indexeddb or whatever, you can look at this at a macro level. Here's the ES6 support table: http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ Safari and IE were laggards, but future IE is going to be very solid while future Safari is still going to be terrible. Here's the HTML5 support table: https://htm…

Seems like a weirdly anti-Safari summary, including assumptions about "future Safari" being inferior to "future IE".

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#109

Post by Tloewald »

frik wrote: post #98
mkozlows wrote: post #27

People are getting really bogged down in specific standards, but you don't need to talk about pointer events or flexbox or indexeddb or whatever, you can look at this at a macro level. Here's the ES6 support table: http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ Safari and IE were laggards, but future IE is going to be very solid while future Safari is still going to be terrible. Here's the HTML5 support table: https://htm…

> you don't need to talk about pointer events or flexbox or indexeddb or whatever But missing functionality is a deal breaker. * WebRTC - web peer to peer connection: Chrome & Firefox yes, IE 11 incompatible by design (bought Skype for 11b, based on it), Safari no (would be Facetime competitor) * WebSQL - web relational database: Chrome & Safari (also 95% of all smartphones) yes, Firefox & IE no (declared dead by Ora…

I've done a ton of work with contenteditable and it's not especially good on IE (it was especially bad on IE up to IE8) nor especially bad on Safari (it's kind of horrible, but it's horrible everywhere).

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#110

Post by mcintyre1994 »

kolbe wrote: post #83
xyby wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> apps can replace all but some long-tail usages Yeah some long-tail usages like everything those 90% of phone and tablet users do that are not on iOS. And 100% of what desktop users do. And 100% of what laptop users do.

Are you kidding me? 90% of what people do in iOS is in an app. Email (app), chatting (apps), Facebook (app), dating (app), Instagram (app), Twitter (app), news (app), games (apps). I could go on for quite a while until I start to encounter things that aren't in an app (e.g. Hacker News).

To be fair, the actual claim was "Apple's apps can replace all but some long-tail usages." which is blatantly false.

I'm not an iOS user so I might be a little off - but of your list Apple's apps do Email, chatting (for their protocol anyway), maybe they have a news app?

You can do pretty much everything outside the long tail with apps - usually with the better experience (outside of the long tail again) but they're mostly not Apple's apps.

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