Did these guys just reinvent the Web?

> Welcome to famo.us

> a javascript engine and framework that solves HTML5 performance

And doesn't work in Firefox. Aweso.me!

This may have something to do with "We use the CSS3 primitive -webkit-transform: matrix3d, which lets us compute the composite matrix and skip the browser's renderer. No plug-in, no download, no hack."

Yeah... "the vendor specific CSS3 primitive" and "no plugin, no download, massive hack". Would be a closer representation.

Since when did 'the web' involve giving away all the source code and not charging people for things? Did Google open source their search engine and let anybody advertise on their site for free while I wasn't looking?

I really don't understand this meme about the web being 'open'. Much of the native desktop software I use is open source. Practically none of the web services I use are open source. There is not much chance of a 'GNU project' for the web (i.e. reimplementing an open google and twitter and facebook and so on). Open source web services of significance are few and far between and when it comes to controlling our data usually the best we get is a proprietary API that may or may not get shut down or changed tomorrow.

The web gave us RSS which was good[1] but since then it has been pretty much a non stop stream of proprietary APIs and platform lock-in. Even things built on RSS tend to be proprietary APIs rather than open standards: take Google Reader for example. Before it shut down it should have been trivial to pull your subscriptions out of it and point your clients at a new replacement rss-syncing server (like you can do with an email client). But it wasn't because there was no damn standard for that, just proprietary APIs as various people wanted to lock you into their cloud service. The standards that have emerged have been, of course, ones that generally involve lock-in to proprietary platforms, like OAuth.

[1] interestingly many of the new generation of web developers seem to dislike RSS.

They are using CSS3 3d-transforms to create visual interfaces with good performance on modern browsers (including mobile). See:

http://famo.us/

(BTW: It took me a while to figure out that if you close the dialog window, you can click the buttons at the bottom for more demo's.)

Unfortunately they are only using the webkit-prefixed properties, so their demo doesn't work in Firefox or IE. I'm guessing they wrote their demo a couple of years ago and never updated it.

There are some problems with CSS3 3d-transforms: 1) Text looks blurry, just look at the dialog window in the demo. 2) Some mobile devices (e.g. old iPads) have limited GPU memory. If you use too much (by setting 3d-transforms on large surfaces), the browser (or your app) will crash.

By the way, the answer to the question in the title is: No. And if they don't open source their code, they won't get a lot of traction.

Ahem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5742893