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Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

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Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#81

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

dragonwriter wrote: post #22
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #2

Are they really? Other browser vendors also refuse to implement things sometimes. IE has taken its sweet time on certain technologies, entirely deliberately. Google have tried to force standards with their marketshare. Pointer Events is an odd case. It's a Microsoft-backed spec that only Microsoft supports. Apple won't implement it, Google won't, Mozilla's implementation is unfinished. Touch Events is also weird: onl…

> Pointer Events is an odd case. It's a Microsoft-backed spec that only Microsoft supports. Apple won't implement it, Google won't, Mozilla's implementation is unfinished. Google, per the Chrome rep quoted in the article, prefers PE from a technical perspective, and only doesn't support it because it won't be universal because of Apple's resistance. Unfinished means WIP, it doesn't mean that Mozilla doesn't support i…

> Google, per the Chrome rep quoted in the article, prefers PE from a technical perspective, and only doesn't support it because it won't be universal because of Apple's resistance.

See below: the Chrome team have other (performance) objections.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#82

Post by Transfinity »

It's not just browsers. I work in storage, and their NFS client (a 25 year old protocol) is without question one of the worst we've seen. The number of hoops we have to jump through and spec violations we've implemented just to get the server to play nice with Macs is a little disgusting.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#83

Post by kolbe »

xyby wrote: post #70
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…

> 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).

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#84

Post by robmcm »

kolbe wrote: post #69
Demiurge wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's not what I'm saying. Amazon, Facebook, Google and Netflix would be victims of this. People would still use their services, but they'd use their services through the dedicated iOS app, not through a browser. Then Apple will have become a necessary middle man for the consumption of the content that those companies distribute. And who knows what Apple would be able to get away with at that point. Charge Facebook…

This would be anti competitive as soon as the app store had a majority market share.

If it became too difficult for them "Charge Facebook $100mm" they would replace support with a lower quantity web app and blame Apple.

The reality is that Apple don't have as much interest in the web anymore, they have achieved their goal with web standards (removing enough of a dependency on Flash so they didn't have to support it). They have no need to make the web a successful app platform, so why waste effort on it.

For Google it's part of their core business, look at Angular, Closure tools, Dart, GWT etc...

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#85

Post by phatfish »

munificent wrote: post #76
Demiurge wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

That sounds great, if we can silo all the mobile users into their own instance of Facebook/Youtube etc. I might start using social media!

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#86

Post by streptomycin »

anon1385 wrote: post #39
streptomycin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have Apple historically dragged their feet on mobile Safari? Yes. Here's another example: http://www.raymondcamden.com/2014/09/25/IndexedDB-on-iOS-8-B... Every other browser supports IndexedDB for years, then Apple finally releases support for it and it's completely broken in multiple unfathomably bizarre ways. Still hasn't been fixed.

That's hardly exclusive to Safari. IndexedDB seems to be a buggy mess in all browsers: http://pouchdb.com/2014/10/26/10-things-i-learned-from-readi...

No, it's very exclusive to Safari. Add up all the other bugs in all the other browsers and it's about 0.1% as bad as Safari. It's almost unfathomable how huge and severe the bugs are in Safari. That's why the PouchDB solution was to simply not use IndexedDB on Safari: http://pouchdb.com/2014/09/22/3.0.6.html

Here's my experience from building a fairly complex app that VERY heavily uses IndexedDB. If you follow the IndexedDB spec, you'll wind up with something that is 99% working in Firefox and Chrome. If you happen to run into that 1%, you'll find that Firefox and Chrome devs are very responsive and want to make it work. IE is a little buggy and is missing a couple features, but it's not impossible to work around them. Unfortunately the IE dev team is less responsive and it's not clear if/when they will fix things. But to support Safari, you'd have to do things that are utterly horrifying. It's basically not worth even trying.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#87

Post by sbochins »

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).

There are some pretty nice HN apps on iOS.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#88

Post by smhg »

munificent wrote: post #76
Demiurge wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> If the next version of iOS didn't even have a browser, you would be astonished at how little that impacted most users.

If time spent in an application is your criterion, true.

But that way you hugely underestimate the importance of, for instance, that daily (or even weekly) Google search the average user performs in their browser. It takes little time compared to your average social feed, but definitely impacts their lives. Just one quick example: a local business' phone number lookup.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#89

Post by ytpete »

frou_dh wrote: post #31

As far as I'm concerned, Apple still have a bit of time left to bask in the afterglow granted for mortally wounding Flash by keeping it off of iOS.

Do you think perhaps the same motivation could have been at play there - stifling web competition to their native app store?

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#90

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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