"Let's face facts: the Web will never be the dominant platform."
Hewitt's post hinges on that statement, presented without supporting evidence. But actually the Web is already dominant among the platforms Hewitt mentions (Web, Windows, iOS, and Android).
Relevant stats:
Web - 1.7 billion users as of July, given that 880 million people go to the single busiest website publicly measured by Google, and this site has a "reach" of 51 percent. (You can distill this same total from any of the smaller sites listed via simple division.) http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/
Windows - 400 million Windows 7 license sold as of this month, the most popular version of Windows going. http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive... Even if piracy doubles total Windows 7 installs, you're still not halfway to total web users (which means trying to count creaky old XP as the same platform won't get you there, either).
Hewitt is a smart guy, ex Facebook, built their iOS client, so clearly he has a thought a lot about platforms. But he undermines his arguments about the future when he is incorrect about the present.
How does Android only have a reach of 24 million people in that article when they were activating 550,000 devices a day with 130 million devices already sold by July of this year?
You're conflating hyperlinked documents and applications. The web is clearly the dominant document platform, but is the web the dominant application platform?
The answer is in market success of the emerging mobile (and possibly desktop) application platforms, and the kinds of applications being produced there.
Social network, video host, web portal, search, portal, mass collaboration software, and only at #7 do we get to a blog platform - arguably a "hyperlinked document" server, though really more of a an application -- followed by search, software, portal, search, search, software, classifieds, messaging, video, search -- the vast majority of the top 100 page are non document oriented apps.
I migrated from Thunderbird to GMail, and from Word/Excel to Google apps.
The only desktop apps I'm still using, besides development tools and the actual browser, is a PDF reader + Skype + iTunes + the file manager + Gimp / Photoshop for editing my personal pictures (before uploading them to Flickr).
On my Android phone I use native apps for online services, mostly because bandwidth is a problem and native apps have better caching. But the web interfaces for Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are actually usable.
I'm not saying that everything should or will move to the web. It would actually be stupid implementing Photoshop in the browser.
But the web is clearly dominating my time spent with computers.
"It would actually be stupid implementing Photoshop in the browser."
You say that now... In truth I don't think there's a fundamental reason why that's such a bad idea, and I think it will happen in the coming years. JS compilation is getting better and better, eventually it'll reach the theoretical limits, which is to run more or less as fast as client-side C. Similarly, web standards are improving at an amazing rate, given the development base and momentum behind web applications (which are growing to be as big a business as any platform) eventually we're likely to end up with all the bits and pieces for supporting web apps (UI elements, frameworks, etc.) at a level matching that of desktop development.
At some point it's not only possible but indeed very likely that a photoshop web app will be built. But by then it probably won't seem like a crazy idea.
I'm not talking about image editing in general, I'm talking about Photoshop -- the industry standard for professionals, software that should be providing everything needed for professional-level retouches.
This is an important difference -- Moore's law is still applied -- but image resolutions are getting bigger and bigger, algorithms get more complicated and more fancy, people also want to be more and more productive.
What I'm saying is that image retouching for professionals needs every CPU cycle you can spare + screen real estate + really good integration with input devices.
I'm not seeing the browser (which stagnated for years), as a powerful enough medium for that, unless you can make Javascript as-fast-as-C without sacrificing too much RAM (since you need that too) and unless you provide lower-level access to hardware (OpenGL ES is a good start, but you need more).
Now surely, if Photoshop can't be built in the browser, that doesn't mean something less powerful will be less useful. But it won't be Photoshop.
I know what you mean, I mean the same thing. In 20 years time I fully expect that a Adobe Photoshop (or something 100% equivalent) will be a web app. Sure, it can't be done reasonably today, but for every single roadblock preventing it there will be many competent engineers capable of removing that one roadblock and many people (developers and users) providing a strong incentive to do so.
Adobe is already trying to create a web version of Photoshop. Eventually, they'll get to full compatability but I don't think the web adds a unique advantage to Photoshop; likely they're just doing it to cut down on piracy figures.
One place where the web apps can excel is in replacing 3D modelers. Once we get to the point that the frontend can be done quickly in JS, then the entire backend (e.g. rendering) can be done on a server-side cloud.
Imagine being able to lease server time so that what was a 10hour job, is now a 1 hour job?
Lets assume iOS/android users also have a full computer. Right now i think this is reasonably accurate. So that means all the web users are also computer users. What OS do you think these people are using??
Do you honestly think that the number of people with exclusively OSX/linux outnumber the number of people with unconnected windows PCs? There are a lot of rural areas in the world with poor connectivity, and a lot of people with incomes that make the cost of connection prohibitive (while old computers are litterally dumped).
Having said all that, it matters little to the developer, because those unconnected windows users will be almost impossible to reach and won't have the money required to make development viable anyway.
TL;DR: More people on windows, but doesn't matter.
Sorry if I didn't make it clear I meant the web will never be the dominant platform in the future once the current trends play out. I am aware of current market share proportions.
Using the word "never" saves you from having to state when the web ceases to be the dominant platform. When do you think this will be?
Something like "the web will never be the dominant platform, except for the past 10 years and the next 10 years" does lack a certain punch, but at least it would be specific :-)
(And I appreciate your taking the time to write your blog post, and don't want to be a jerk, but the definition of never is "at no time in the past or future; on no occasion; not ever," so maybe you could rephrase to something like "the web cannot continue indefinitely being the dominant platform," which at least acknowledges its current strength.)
You're right, it's not the best sentence I've written in my life. Thanks for the feedback.
I was trying to convey that the web is always going to have to fight for its survival, contrary to the common assumption that the web has some magical properties that ensure its long-term prominence.
Agreed that the web doesn't have any "magical properties", but it has the "Worse is Better" survival characteristic; or at least it did in its early days. I think the web's continued dominance depends on the extent to which it retains those characteristics.
The web has 1 magical property that no other platform can match (today): launching a website and installing a website are the same thing. This makes the web the most frictionless platform we've ever had, and explains it's widespread usage.
Whenever I see these "the web isn't as good as native" discussions I always think back to the late 90s when web-based email took off. How was the user experience on Yahoo mail in 1998? It was full page refreshes on 56k modems. The web doesn't have to maintain pace with native to be relevant, or even to win. It just has to keep being the easy, ubiquitous platform it is today.
I have to agree. iOS and others are innovating so quickly compared to the web, and the usage of native apps especially on mobile devices is just skyrocketing. The trends are pretty clear.
I find it interesting how you are so quick to separate windows XP from windows 7, but ignore browser differences. 99% of apps work on both windows versions and 95% identically, something that definitely can't be said for browsers.
I am a fan of Joe Hewitt but this is crazy talk, especially coming from one of the heroes of the Mozilla revolution. It's as if he doesn't remember those dark days long ago when he was working on Firefox in what seemed like a lost cause, Microsoft was the defacto standard setter and single-handedly drove innovation in the web, it was awful. We must never go back to those days. I know Joe imagines some benevolent dictator or consortium, but it's just too risky. There's too much power in controlling the web and power corrupts. Look at what's happened to ICANN with the power they've been given. No, we must keep the power spread out, preferably we'd have more browser makers not fewer. The slow pace might be frustrating to the innovators on the cutting edge like Joe, but it's the only way.
Exactly the kind of arrogance I cited. You don't want to risk a bad owner so you'll let the whole thing die from neglect by committee. I would rather have Microsoft be the only browser vendor than have the web shrink dramatically.
The web went through a painful stale period from about 2000 to 2005, during which time IE asserted near total dominance. However, sites are just now starting to phase out IE6 support. That means that the technology that has advanced the web over the past five or so years was there all along.
Interest in the web started to return around the same time Firefox started to gain in fanfare, but why? Was Firefox to thank? Those "Web 2.0" apps could have just as easily been developed in IE6 in 2001. It wasn't the technology that Firefox brought that made the difference.
>However, sites are just now starting to phase out IE6 support.
All this proves is that the IE6 monoculture had such an effect that it took a long time for the effects to disappear. But yes IE4 and particularly IE5.x introduced a lot of new stuff that did not become well known until years later, like the infamous XMLHTTPRequest.
Even if you don't want to blame generic "browser monoculture", I see no problem in blaming the stagnation of "the web" on Internet Explorer. They had no interest in pushing the web forward, they had no innovative ideas for how web technologies could or would evolve. Shit, IE6 barely satisfied any reasonable expectations of a web browser from a "web specs" perspective. Chrome and Mozilla have pushed IE to become better and in the meantime, they are investing in new technologies CSS3, WebGl, Web Workers, Web Intents, Server Sent Events, (I shouldn't mention it, but) NaCl, etc. These are all initiatives started by Google and Mozilla to make the web a richer platform. Those probably wouldn't happen in a "browser monoculture" and they certainly wouldn't happen in an "IE only culture".
I clearly stated you need more than just a single owner, you need a single owner that is competent and cares. We can't just snap our fingers and have that, but I'm hoping to at least help people to start thinking about it.
So you want to have a benevolent dictator, basically. If you look at actual dictators ('single owners') and the ratio between "benevolent" and "not-benevolent" you'd see that those are pretty rare. Singapore had one. Steve Jobs was one. But usually, I guess, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I have very little real-world development experience so know these questions are relatively innocent: If there is one browser vendor do they not also control what is the cutting edge of technology? Wouldn't you be completely limited by them? Specifically, could you really imagine Microsoft setting the standards for the experience you have day to day on the web?
Well, I'm only 22 and we didn't even have a computer until I was around 12, so my experience with web standards is relatively naive. I <3 the internet as it is today, and I at least, do have to imagine how atrocious it must have been with Microsoft setting the standard.
IE 4.0 was a revelation and IE 5.0 was fantastic as well - effectively it was death knell for Netscape and all competition (earned MS a monopoly suit, but in truth it was a vastly superior browser to anything out there).
They won the browser war. Then, check out the time difference between IE6 and IE7. 5 years. That's where innovation goes absent credible competition.
> Browser vendors are innovating in some areas, but they are stalled by the standards process in so many areas that is impossible to create a platform with a coherent, unified vision the way Apple has with Cocoa or the way Python has with Guido.
Nobody actually wants that web; we'd have somebody's "coherent, unified vision" circa 1995, with a handful of updates every year or two. I like my web as a fierce competition between browser vendors to desperately catch up to their peers in terms of speed and features.
>>"Browser vendors are innovating in some areas, but they are stalled by the standards process in so many areas that is impossible to create a platform with a coherent, unified vision the way Apple has with Cocoa or the way Python has with Guido."
Personally I don't think he has anything meaningful to say on this particular topic. Hard to tell because he can't even keep his examples consistent. "... the way Apple has with [a product] or the way Python has with [a person]."
>>"Even if WebKit was the only game in town, it would still be crucial for it to have competent, sympathetic, benevolent leaders."
This statement, as well as others in the article and his apparent association with Apple-related things makes me wonder if he has this point of view because of the whole Steve Jobs thing they have/had going on. The fact that he doesn't even mention the W3C or the WHATWG shows his point of view is skewed.
While there are a couple of minor bits I agree with, overall I think Joe's off on this one.
The web has five organizations pushing really hard on it at this point (Mozilla [my employer], Google, Apple, Microsoft and Opera). The web almost had HP. We'll see what happens with WebOS.
The one part of his article that I somewhat agree with is that under the guidance of several entities (and lots and lots of people) the web may not have quite the same coherence as, say, Cocoa. I'm not sure that will be a problem.
"The Web has no one who can ensure that the platform acquires cutting edge capabilities in a timely manner (camera access, anyone?)."
Five years ago, even two years ago, would anyone even be questioning adding camera access to the web? I think there's been a huge shift in terms of how people view web technology.
gmail was the original "holy crap" app that started us building information apps with better user experiences. It proceeded from there to add things like canvas and svg and, more recently, webgl and audio, making apps well beyond "information apps" possible.
The "Boot to Gecko" (B2G) project which Mozilla kicked off a couple of months back is going to push quite firmly on adding all of the APIs needed for a modern mobile device. And, I might add, in conjunction with others in the standards bodies who are interested in such things.
And what about the Metro announcement from last week? Sure, Microsoft's ideal scenario is to build on the web and lock people into APIs that are tied to their platform... but, seriously, wouldn't people just write shims? Wouldn't Microsoft ultimately have to follow the standard because they are not quite the monopoly they were before?
The end of his post is telling:
"The closest thing we have to that today is Chromium, but they have no foothold in mobile and are likely years away from having one. And so I end on a sad note"
So, the crux of it would seem to be that Joe sees the world going mobile. I certainly agree. I got my start on a TRS-80 model III, and the stuff happening in mobile is the most exciting stuff I've seen in my entire career.
I've been working with the web for 16 years. There has never been a time in the past when so much effort was being put into pushing the web-as-a-platform forward. It's huge and I, for one, think the best is yet to come.
It didn't take a seer to imagine that having camera access was a good idea, but it takes a pretty boneheaded committee to wait this long to do it. Hell, Adobe put camera access in Flash years before iOS even existed. I don't love Flash, but even they benefitted from have a single owner.
Lots of good things coming to the platform now, but progress was even faster in the mid-90's when Netscape and IE were growing up. IE4 and IE5 in particular had a lot of great features that have since been forgotten, and are only now being reconsidered for standardization. Remember behaviors, image filters, CSS expressions, and data binding?
They had data binding? I don't remember that (that's a pet feature of mine ;)
From what I've seen, things don't really start in the committees. They start with people at browser vendors scratching their own itches and eventually escape out into the committees. In some ways, that's why it's good that there are 5 organizations pushing forward. One with an itch for camera access will help force the others to take action.
Data binding aside, I do remember the mid- to late-90s and I think the pace is faster now. Perhaps I'm biased since I work for a browser vendor... but I'm not actually a browser developer myself. I'm a web developer. And, I see interesting new capabilities popping up pretty rapidly.
I realize that my reply didn't address the fact that camera access took a long time. You're right... I don't think it's because of a boneheaded committee, though. I'm just guessing, because I have nothing to do with this directly, but I'm guessing that people either:
1. weren't really thinking that the web needed camera access
2. thought there were higher priority things
And yes, Flash had camera access first. How's that working out for them relative to web technologies?
For years Flash held a dominate position on the web. Without Flash YouTube who knows how long it would have taken for something like YouTube to be created? That stagnation is a fundamental problem.
The one part of his article that I somewhat agree with is that under the guidance of several entities (and lots and lots of people) the web may not have quite the same coherence as, say, Cocoa. I'm not sure that will be a problem.
It's already a problem. In fact, it is the problem. The web application 'platform' is poor, incoherent, and its proponents highly resistant to the sweeping changes that would be necessary to compete with a native, proprietary platform like iOS.
The best chance the 'web' has for success is with projects like NaCL, but even that will only fix the execution environment -- we'll still need higher-level platform frameworks upon which applications can be built. Perhaps Google will supply usable application frameworks, as they've done (if poorly) with Android.
The browser makers (especially Mozilla) seem insistent on leaving us in the lurch, stuck with JavaScript, the DOM, and the painfully long lead times of standardization.
"It's already a problem. In fact, it is the problem. The web application 'platform' is poor, incoherent, and its proponents highly resistant to the sweeping changes that would be necessary to compete with a native, proprietary platform like iOS."
Which "sweeping changes" are those?
Changes like the ability to draw pixel-by-pixel? Vectors? 3D? (Canvas/svg/webgl)
Changes like higher level form controls? Got some in HTML5. New component model is under discussion now. Better layout of controls? The flexible box model helps a great deal, is already in lots of shipping browsers and is getting further cleaned up now.
Drag and drop? Yep.
How about the automatic data binding that's so cool in Cocoa? Not only are there application frameworks that do this (SproutCore, Knockout, Batman), there are also proposals like "Model Driven Views" (MDV) which use ECMAScript Harmony Proxy objects to make it cleaner.
What about files? Yeah, there are file APIs. Databases? localStorage is a simple key/value store. There's also WebSQL DB and IndexedDB which will hopefully be resolved in one way or another soon.
APIs for audio and geolocation are there now. Camera and other device APIs are in the works.
So, which sweeping changes do you mean? The ability to compile C code? Sorry, but I don't think most apps need that.
"The browser makers (especially Mozilla) seem insistent on leaving us in the lurch, stuck with JavaScript, the DOM, and the painfully long lead times of standardization."
I can't say this for sure, but I'd be willing to bet that:
a. standardization is moving faster than it has in more than a decade
b. many APIs become usable in the real world well before the standards are complete
To be sure, the web-as-a-platform is not perfect today or in the future. But, its evolution is real.
Yeah, the checklist of web technologies is getting longer, but that's only part of the solution. They don't all work together very well. For example, Alex Russell has been opining recently about the way DOM interfaces are awkwardly adapted to JavaScript due to the committee's insistence on targetting IDL. That's why the W3C could never have invented jQuery.
I've been trying to duplicate native scrolling in iOS recently and I'm getting killed by details that the specifications don't cover and WebKit authors don't document. For example, tons of trial and error uncovered the fact that CSS keyframes animations are unusable for elements wider than 1024 pixels, due likely to OpenGL issues on iOS. If the W3C and WebKit had any clue how developers would actually use the stuff they design, they would have made this fact clear by at least providing a way to query the optimal texture size used under the covers.
Over and over you find little examples like this which demonstrate that the web's "leadership" is completely disconnected from reality on the ground.
I just want to pick one illustrative example, because the other replies cover most of the ground:
What about files? Yeah, there are file APIs. Databases? localStorage is a simple key/value store. There's also WebSQL DB and IndexedDB which will hopefully be resolved in one way or another soon.
In native-land, we've had SQLite for over a decade. If I want "WebSQL DB" today, I simply link sqlite into my project and move on.
Before SQLite, we had bdb. When the next new thing I want to use comes along, I'll simply use it, and I won't have to wait around for standardization, and the for browser makers to wrap it up in a JavaScript API.
It's not enough to list the things that web does well. There are many areas in which web hasn't caught with capabilities available for a decade in Windows or Mac
Just one example that is particularly painful for me: it's still impossible to build a high quality code editing component on web platform. There are many valiant attempts but none that approaches the speed, quality and convenience of the best desktop editors from 10 years ago.
Another one: you can't build an ssh client as a web page because there is not enough socket support. You can do it by going through your own proxy, but that's not secure from the user point of view (you could spy on his traffic without the user knowing it).
Those are just two relatively simple things that you can't do on the web and there's much more.
Also, the velocity of change in the iOS/Android/Windows compared to velocity in web is not in favor of web. The (only recently added) capabilities you cite are just web catching up with old technologies. Amiga 1000 was doing excellent sound in 1985. Windows XP had vector graphics in 2001 etc. There's nothing to be proud of that we get those things in 2011.
iOS/Android/Windows/Mac OS X are being evolved much quickly than the web. They improve on the strengths they always had over web (speed of the apps, more capabilities, new paradigms like touch) and incorporate the best features of the web (integrating cloud storage in latest Mac OS and Windows etc.).
Also, the recent increase is standardization is caused mostly because the problem outline by Joe has been partially addressed: Google stepped up as the "owner" of the web and most of the recent advances are driven by Google (web sockets, spdy, webm, html5 spec being maintained by a Google employee, V8 forced everyone to raise JavaScript perf etc.).
Standard process was a disaster for a long time when it was done by W3C with working groups populated by employees of big companies with conflicting agendas. All the recent good changes originate from single companies (most of them from Google, Canvas was done by Apple).
> Just one example that is particularly painful for me: it's still impossible to build a high quality code editing component on web platform. There are many valiant attempts but none that approaches the speed, quality and convenience of the best desktop editors from 10 years ago.
Cloud9 and nide are really pretty competent editors, just because someone hasnt built the one application in a way that satisfies you does not mean the platform is dying.
> Another one: you can't build an ssh client as a web page because there is not enough socket support. You can do it by going through your own proxy, but that's not secure from the user point of view (you could spy on his traffic without the user knowing it).
I don't understand the argument. Joe is saying that the web stack (that is, HTTP/HTML/JS/CSS) deserves to be saved. And that the only way to save it is to have somebody own it.
But what makes the web stack special if someone owns it? Why is it worth saving? Let's face it, if you actually bought The Web(tm) from a vendor, you'd ask for your money back.
Ultimately, I think there is some truth to what Joe is saying. We have already seen the web stagnate under the reign of IE6 - almost a decade of no real innovation.
As web developers, we are limited by what the browsers are capable of. That's not to say we don't desire more... hence why a good proportion of devs and designers are using the very latest technology even though it hasn't been fully ratified by it's standards bodies.
People _want_ to innovate on the web. With every single one of the other platforms, the web comes for free - they have a browser and a working HTTP stack.
I think the challenge is protecting users. The fact that web is such a widely-used platform means even small changes to the supporting technologies can have vast security repercussions.
It's not ownership that's the problem - it's fear. What we need is a browser vendor that's prepared to stick it's neck out, to be daring with the technologies.
Also fear of accountability... as soon as you become the leader in the browser wars you become accountable for a huge proportion of the world's web experience. This was why IE stagnated.
So as a browser vendor, who do you cater for? The billions who just use your software, or the few-million who want to innovate on it?
This is why taking ownership is not an option. I would argue that browser vendors would actually prefer to have an equal proportion of users. If Android and iOS had that sort of reach, they would face the same problem. The difference being that some platforms actually make more money out of a wider reach.
This changes the dynamic somewhat - of course the owners of those technologies want to innovate, it's a huge income stream. But if someone took charge of the web, who would get all of the money? Who would pay?
So there's little incentive for ownership and in fact the last few decades have proven that there doesn't need to be ownership of the web to make it work. All we need is someone to stick their neck out - just like Apple did with the iPhone.
I disagree that the web tech should be owned by a company. It seems to me the "committee" has done a much better job the Microsoft alone, so far.
But if there was to be such company, it should clearly be Google. Both Apple and Microsoft don't really have their interests aligned with the web. They make money from hardware or from selling OS licenses. By default, that means that their #1 priority is to do that - and in many cases at the expense of the web. If they would own it, and they would ever have a conflict of interest between the web and their main platform, they would choose their main platform.
But Google have their interests much more aligned with the web. They care about making the web faster, more advanced, and so on, because they indirectly make money from that.
But of course, even Google owning the tech would bring it's own set of problems, and this will happen with any company owning it. Any company who would own it would "corrupt" it in some way, if only to be better for their own products or less good for the others.
That's why the Internet is decentralized in many ways, and it's the beauty of the Internet. We've had many closed platforms before, but none like the Internet. And the Internet is the greatest one by far, and I doubt it's by coincidence.
If you look at other "cross-platform" technologies, like Flash for example, they ultimately fail, because a single owner can't make sure it works on absolutely every platform and browsers, with no problems. It requires too much work.
And again, that's one of the beauties of the web technologies, that every browser has to do their own implementation of the spec as good as possible, and compete with each other for that.
One more thing. Yes, iOS and Android did help bring back to popularity the native applications, but this is not an "ultimate" win. It's just a cycle. We've had native apps when the PC's emerged, then we had web-apps becoming popular. Then the smartphones emerged with slow processors (compared to PC's) and native apps started being popular again. But HTML5 is already starting to become popular on mobiles, and with at least 3-4 platforms, you can be sure the web will "win", at least this cycle, until a new low-performance tech comes along and native apps are back.
One thing these discussions seem to be slipping into is "the web" vs. "native" while skipping the fact that "native" is not a thing, it's a collection of (competing!) things... and they all also run web apps.
Until one native platform captures more usage than the browser, which is impossible unless platforms start to drop the browser, the web will by definition be dominant if dominance is measured by addressable market.
The W3C writes specs, not code. They do not own the actual rubber that hits the road, and so they are only indirectly responsible for what happens on the real web. I want to remove the separation of architecture from implementation and have one entity control both.
Irrelevant, if you consider their decision to promote XHTML2 while the rest of the world committed to HTML5 - incidentally, a development that puts to rest the fear that the web can't evolve and stay relevant without a single BDFL.
They may be crappy but they are still the organization in charge of the development and standardization of web technologies, which he is arguing doesn’t exist. It does. It just isn’t as good as we’d like.
My point is that the W3C is most successful as the agent that documents retro-specs of the broad consensus among browser makers and developers and calls it a standard. The community is more or less self-governing.
Why can't it be both native and web apps sharing the application space together? Each have their own strengths and one does not necessarily have to dominate over the other. There will always be use cases where a native app makes more sense and vice-verse. There is enough depth and breadth in the applications domain to allow both of them to thrive.
It's kind of amusing to read an article complaining about the walled garden of Facebook, and at the same time demanding central ownership for web technology.
It's not only a possibility that a centralized web will be bad, it's inevitable. A central owner has _no_ incentive for improvement. The only reason e.g. Cocoa keeps improving is because it needs to compete.
Linux doesn't own the OS market - far from it. Python doesn't own the language sector. jQuery doesn't own the JS library sector. They are all independent projects, and it's _good_ for them to have a BDFL.
Asking for one for the entire web is not a good plan because it would exclude competition. That's where the flaw in the argument is.
And while it'd be nice if browser vendors could just go off and improve along (from a browser vendor's point of view), it absolutely sucks for every single developer and the users. Surely, you remember "this website runs only on...". This is exactly what you see in the apps market - applications only running on certain devices, locking in the users. Sure, for you as a developer it's convenient. For users, it's a bad idea.
My point wasn't that Linux or Python or jQuery own their sectors. I responding to your claim that a single owner promotes stagnation.
It's important to distinguish the Internet from the collection of web technologies. The Internet is the thing that needs to remain open and uncontrolled.
My point is that a central owner _without competition_ stifles innovation. There's only one web, so a central owner would be a bad thing - for the web. To quote your article "To thrive, HTML and company need what those other platforms have: a single source repository and a good owner to drive it"
The only other way to read that is that you're advocating splintering web technology into HTML-Moz, HTML-IE, HTML-Cr and so on. While that might make for a better developer experience for somebody who develops apps for _one_ of those platforms, it's a disaster in terms of interoperability. Which is kind of one of the key points of "The Web".
We were heading down that path for a while with browser-specific extensions, and it lead to large problems. For users, because they needed to have "just the right browser". And for many backend services, because actually extracting data from web pages required understanding all competing standards.
I care mostly about the users. The web of yore, with "best viewed with" stickers was a debacle in terms of UX.
Python pretty much has stopped improving; the world is still largely on Python 2.x. In fact, there was a highly-publicized moratorium on new features that lasted for a long time.
The Web doesn't have an owner, it has several. Competing against it other. That's why it is thriving.
It had no owner and it suffered when MS had 95% of the Web's market share, cause MS's platform is Windows, not the Web. Controlling it was MS's way of keeping Windows relevant.
Well, Apple, Google, Mozilla and MS control the browser scene, and that's what I think Joe meant by platform. Things are a little more complicated in the backend.
You could add Facebook to the pack but, though it has changed how people use the Web, it didn't contribute much to improving the platform.
And in a sense, although it may sound idealistically foolish, all of us. A long time ago, I helped fixing a bug that prevented Webkit and Gecko from connecting to my bank's crappy site, making me launch VirtualPC just about everyday. A few years later, I wrapped a perl script in a GUI that spared the users of a broadband provider from having to manually login in on the carrier's “portal” just to use the Web. A lot of people used it and they eventually changed that annoying behavior. There's nothing stopping you from trying to have an influence.
Well, I agree that WebKit should probably be adopted in Internet Explorer, so Microsoft can once again innovate in the browser space while helping everyone. Maybe they should join Google and Apple in embracing open source software and committing their changes into a free project. Because then everyone wins, including Microsoft. No more IE6 nonsense.
We always have this question of centralized / decentralized. Whether it's social networks, or government, or the web. Flash was a centralized platform, and so what? Many people complain that iTunes and Flash etc. are not super accessible, and also that companies which exert influence tend to lock up their customers (except maybe Google and Yahoo :) The best example of this when it comes to the desktop was Microsoft. They wanted to get everyone into their ecosystem. Now Apple is the new Microsoft.
I personally think that "open source" should always be a competitor to proprietary stuff. Whatever the centralized effort would be, it should be open source. I personally think javascript-based technologies like the browser, jQuery, like PhoneGap and like Node.js are going to become more and more important. So what we really need is a standard ECMAScript that is implemented correctly everywhere, and we're pretty much there.
The web has already crushed a bunch of 'owned' platforms that had strong-willed, deep-pocketed stewards. A good run for iOS, and a few features where the web lags, doesn't change the immense power of the web commons platform. The things proven-out by adjacent proprietary platforms will be assimilated, in a few years' time — plenty of time for multivendor adoption and mass-market usership.
(It won't be standards bodies that lead the way — they never do. At best they can codify consensus after the fact, and lightly shame laggards. Instead a rotating selection of innovators, in different categories, will drive change.)
I think he is underestimating the quantum leap that web technologies have made in the past 2 years.
Between canvas, audio & audio data, video tag, css3, websockets, webworkers, webgl, touchscreen events, and new server tech like nodejs... there are now so many new API's to learn and work with that most web developers haven't even started to catch up yet. There's a lot of room here, the capabilities of the permutations of these technologies together will take years to fully realize. It will take years to write libraries to build the power-features necessary to really take this stuff to the next level.
The power to build a amazing new apps is now here. It took 10 years for this leap to happen. Just give it some time for web developers to catch up.
Compare that to the progress of native development. Apple comes out with new cool things on iOS every year, whereas on the web it takes 5 years to get something new that is 10 years behind the native counterparts.
Everything the web runs on now is much more advanced than the computers of 10 years ago.
Joe's point he made a year ago is still true today, but it hasn't happened. "Browser makers need to go nuts with non-standard APIs and let the W3C standardize later"
Isn't this similar to what happened with opengl (industry consortium, no clear driver) vs directx (ms owns; highly motivated; actually pretty decent a couple revs in)? Carmack seems to now find DirectX superior [1]. Note I'm not a graphics programmer so this is just my superficial understanding of the matter.
The quote from AMD's dev relations manager is damning: "AMD's GPU worldwide developer relations manager, Richard Huddy, agrees. He added that the actual innovation in graphics has been driven by Microsoft in the last ten or so years. 'OpenGL has largely been tracking that, rather than coming up with new methods,' he said. 'The geometry shader, for example, which came in with Vista and DirectX 10, is wholly Microsoft's invention in the first place.'" [1 also]
I think Joe is spot on.The web is already miles behind native mobile platforms.Personally I can vouch for iOS.The kind of stuff you can do on iOS now just in terms of UI is just impossibly hard to do with HTML5 or any other web platform.
But then if you think about it.Its not surprising at all.Of course you will have a much more power on a native platform than a web platform which is built on top of a native platform.
In my opinion in the future you will have a browser and type in a url but a native app will open in the browser window.These native apps will be built for different platforms.The web app will be shown by default if a native app hasnt been developed for that platform.
WebGL is picking up steam. Supported in Webkit and Firefox, with IE being the laggard (as usual). Once you have WebGL you have the building blocks needed for any kind of UI you want.
Yes WebGL is the first step....like OpenGLES ...next step would be something like CoreAnimation and CoreGraphics....then something like UIKit....(then something like Three20 haha!)
Although I think its very hard for any company including Google or Facebook to make something the matches the design quality of these frameworks....The real problem is that no one company or person is going to take this responsibility...and hence even a good attempt will end up looking like a clusterfuck....and that is exactly what Joe is trying to say!...the Web needs its Apple!
Not to mention that by the time something like UIKit exists for the Web Apple would be miles ahead!
> In my opinion in the future you will have a browser and type in a url but a native app will open in the browser window.These native apps will be built for different platforms.The web app will be shown by default if a native app hasnt been developed for that platform.
That's basically the present, where sites detect your platform and prompt you to install an app if they wrote one. Is it so great? Are we going to write HTML/JS, Objective-C, Java, and C# versions of all of our apps?
Yeah thts true...But how cool would it be if the objective C code was loaded dynamically and run on the browser(or something like the Web Browser for apps)....No need to load any apps..just use em when you need them....Just like the Web...On the Android similarly the Browser will send Java Code.
I have thought a lot about making something like this...With the power of the Objective C Runtime I think it should possible!
Check out the pulse app or the flipboard app or even the twitter app for the ipad!....its hard to even come close to the UIs of these apps on web platforms!..although Joe is doing some cool work on that front!
Hewitt's post hinges on that statement, presented without supporting evidence. But actually the Web is already dominant among the platforms Hewitt mentions (Web, Windows, iOS, and Android).
Relevant stats:
Web - 1.7 billion users as of July, given that 880 million people go to the single busiest website publicly measured by Google, and this site has a "reach" of 51 percent. (You can distill this same total from any of the smaller sites listed via simple division.) http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/
iOS - 38 million people as of April http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/04/19/a-look-at-ipad-users-...
Android - 24 million people as of April http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/04/19/a-look-at-ipad-users-...
Windows - 400 million Windows 7 license sold as of this month, the most popular version of Windows going. http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive... Even if piracy doubles total Windows 7 installs, you're still not halfway to total web users (which means trying to count creaky old XP as the same platform won't get you there, either).
Hewitt is a smart guy, ex Facebook, built their iOS client, so clearly he has a thought a lot about platforms. But he undermines his arguments about the future when he is incorrect about the present.