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Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

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Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#71

Post by air »

eridius wrote: post #68
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…

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"

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#72

Post by randomfool »

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…

The security issue noted appears to be https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2011/06/16/webgl-graphics-..., from June 2011 (FF bug was actually fixed May 26th, 2011).

It was a Firefox issue, not a spec issue. AFAIK, Microsoft never explicitly detailed what their security concerns were.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#74

Post by greggman »

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…

That's quite the spin there. I wouldn't say that's why ms originally decided to bash WebGL. It's far more likely they wanted to both scare users away from browsers supporting WebGL and at the same time try to prevent an OpenGL like API from gaining any traction vs directx as targeting directx makes your app ms platforms only.

It was only later they finally caved and implemented WebGL in ie. If they truly were only concerned about security but otherwise ok with WebGL they would have joined the WebGL committee and cooperatively influenced the spec.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#75

Post by kenferry »

Touche wrote: post #41
matthewmacleod wrote: post #9

The answer is a gritty, in-your-face "no". We have a recurring situation where all vendors (save for Apple) show interest in standard, but because Apple does not express that same interest, the standard gets waylaid. That is literally not true – Google, by some metrics the biggest vendor, has also shown no interest in PE. Frankly, I don't see that much of a problem with Webkit and its' adherence to standards. Broadly…

They released IndexedDB several years after everyone else (I believe at least 3 years) and major bugs. They have shown no interest in Web Components. They have shown no interest in WebRTC. They have shown no interest in Service Workers. They have very little ES6 support. Let's not focus on the one example given in the article, this is a pattern.

Have you seen the WebRTC code? It's 1.1 million lines of gnarly C++. It's cool in terms of features, but that's the essence of bloat. One of the reasons Safari was built off of khtml in the first place was manageable code size.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#76

Post by munificent »

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

> it is tiny compared to the Internet

This depends entirely on how you measure scale. If you do it just by number of apps/sites, sure, the vast majority of web URLs don't have a matching iOS app.

However, if you scale each app by the total amount of time users are on it, you'll find that most of humanity is spending their time on a very heavily weighted small slice of the Internet.

From that breakdown, the fraction of human-hours that is covered by sites that also have native iOS apps is much larger.

If the next version of iOS didn't even have a browser, you would be astonished at how little that impacted most users. As long as they can still run Facebook, Instagram, Threes, etc., they'd be fine.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#77

Post by cwyers »

realityking wrote: post #60
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…

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 Firefox and Chrome on those charts. Which isn't even the problem! Apple will not allow Firefox or Chrome's rendering engines onto iOS. Even in the darkest days of the IE/Netscape war, Microsoft never even contemplated not letting users install Netscape.

It's the combination of "lagging behind standards" and "wholly locked-down platform" that threatens to stagnate the web, and it's only Apple that's in that position.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#79

Post by matthewmacleod »

Touche wrote: post #41
matthewmacleod wrote: post #9

The answer is a gritty, in-your-face "no". We have a recurring situation where all vendors (save for Apple) show interest in standard, but because Apple does not express that same interest, the standard gets waylaid. That is literally not true – Google, by some metrics the biggest vendor, has also shown no interest in PE. Frankly, I don't see that much of a problem with Webkit and its' adherence to standards. Broadly…

They released IndexedDB several years after everyone else (I believe at least 3 years) and major bugs. They have shown no interest in Web Components. They have shown no interest in WebRTC. They have shown no interest in Service Workers. They have very little ES6 support. Let's not focus on the one example given in the article, this is a pattern.

I specifically didn't focus on the one example given.

Safari is now the "third best browser" behind Chrome and Firefox, looking at this through the prism of adopting web standards. That's irritating, especially when Webkit did so much to push standards forward.

I don't disagree at all about Safari lagging behind — like I just said. It also seems like this has got worse lately — but I suspect a lot of that is down to the Blink fork, and the subsequent reorganisation that is taking place.

I expect this will get a little better soon, otherwise it's a valid point that web developers will start complaining more and harder.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#80

Post by [deleted] »

kevincennis wrote: post #11
antimagic wrote: post #5

"Apple has shown no interest" Um, that's an assertion, without which the rest of the piece makes no sense. I would have expected a little evidence to back the assertion up, or are we all supposed to get our pitchforks out on Tim's say-so? That being said, let's assume that Tim is actually right, and that Apple are being capricious and trying to hold back the Web, because they can. Apple are within their rights to dec…

> Um, that's an assertion, without which the rest of the piece makes no sense. I would have expected a little evidence to back the assertion up... How, exactly, would you expect the OP to present evidence of Apple not showing interest? What would that "evidence" look like? I can't provide evidence that my golden retriever doesn't have an advanced understanding of quantum mechanics, but I don't think that would get hi…

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