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Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

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Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#111

Post by integraton »

towelguy wrote: post #50
integraton wrote: post #38

Microsoft significantly stifled progress on the web for a decade. Now, after WebKit's progress wrestled away Microsoft's dominance and eventually forced Microsoft to spend years trying to catch up, Microsoft wants everyone to get out the pitchforks because Apple isn't supporting Microsoft's latest pet standard fast enough.

s/fast enough/at all/

You can't predict the future, the standards process is messy, and Apple hasn't actively taken a public position, so at this time your comment is disingenuous.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#112

Post by wavefunction »

Tloewald wrote: post #108
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".

I consider Safari to be the worst browser out there, especially when you include "Mobile Safari" in that assessment of Safari.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#113

Post by kolbe »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #110
kolbe wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Read again. I'm not saying that they're Apple's native apps.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#114

Post by josteink »

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…

> It is impossible to ship e.g. Chromium on iOS right now. We just collectively buy the arguments put forward by Apple

No. Some people buy androids too. Quite a few, last time I checked.

Developers limiting themselves to support apple's modern msie are not allowing the market forces to drive healthy competition.

What? When androids browsers were lagging, locking them out from websites en masse was OK. By the same standards we should be locking out apple laggards this time around? Or are we going to be hypocrites about it?

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#116

Post by chc »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #12

Honestly, not yet. Apple might one day be fairly accused of holding up web standards, but so far they're still at least 80/20 implementing new proposals. It might be unpopular but it is actually the responsibility of browsers to somewhat govern what standards do or do not move forward. For example when IE decided not to do WebGL due to security concerns and then successfully got the standard altered as a direct resul…

It's hard to imagine that battery concerns are the reason for their extremely spotty ES6 support.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#117

Post by thristian »

frik wrote: post #106
bad_user wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alread…

> 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.

Nobody ever said WebSQL was intended to require a specific version of SQLite. But nearly every browser would have used SQLite, and experience has shown that when you expose functionality to the web, sites start depending on specific implementation quirks - check out all the gibberish people used to feed to IE6's CSS parser to trick it into behaving.

Also, note that SQLite is not what most people think of when they talk about SQL databases, if only because of its very "manifest typing". Maybe SQL92 is flexible enough to permit such things, but code written for SQLite is very likely to break horribly on other SQL implementations.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#118

Post by EdSharkey »

cwyers wrote: post #77
realityking wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, if you compare IE11's with other browsers at the time of its release, they have stellar support. There is still no other stable browser that supports let, and the only other browser with support for const is Firefox 36 (released yesterday). For better or worse, Internet Explorer has a far longer release cycle. But right after release IE is often ahead of the other browsers in some regard (CSS calc and the…

The kindest thing you can say about IE is that they seem to be well aware of the problems with their release cycle, and are taking steps to remediate this -- they refactored out large amounts of compatibility code from Trident to make EdgeHTML, and I think they plan to up the release cadence of updates to EdgeHTML significantly once they release Spartan. Apple doesn't seem to be doing much of anything to keep up with…

I thought Mozilla said they were going to land some form of Firefox on IOS.

Yep, here's the press release: https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/12/designing-a-firefox-e...

The actual work is going on here, but it sounds like it's only at the experimental stage: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios/ I'm kindof curious to build it and see if it works.

I read that the only issue with getting competing browsers onto iOS is the developer agreement says you can't provide a program with a proprietary javascript engine in it. Frankly, iOS is so big now, I would argue that that restriction strays into competitive advantage territory, and the OP is proof of that. If I were a lawyer at Apple, I would suddenly become magnanimous and get the developer agreement changed such that competing web browser programs _only_ may host their own JavaScript engines.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#119

Post by frik »

Tloewald wrote: post #109
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…

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).

I edited my text, I meant: Safari on iOS. The touch interface introduces bugs that haven't been fixed for years. Desktop Safari is as buggy as Chrome, both originally based on the same Webkit code.

GoogleDocs v2, Word WebApp and iCloud Pages use a JavaScript based page layout engine that renders one DIV per line and don't use the contenteditable. Even the blinking cursor is a DIV. Though, even they do not support text-columns - something that would work out of the box with contenteditable. (GoogleDocs v1 used contenteditable, as well as SharePoint content editor and its first Word WebApp incarnation)

Implementing such a complex page layout engine plus internal document format (XML based?) is a lot of work and afaik there is no such open source JS library exists.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#120

Post by pcwalton »

magicalist wrote: post #101
millstone wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not realistically. The NaCl APIs to support dynamically-generated code have to revalidate every time, so they're too slow to support the heavily self-modifying nature of compiled JavaScript.
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