On Tuesday, February 17, 2015 at 8:34:44 PM UTC+10, Fabrice Desré wrote: > I agree with Dale here. > > Also, we can't afford to wait for standardization to happen to move > forward.
Why? what do we win by creating a proprietary ecosystem whose apps don't work anywhere outside a relatively tiny set of devices? specially when the web at large (hell, even our own Firefox browser) doesn't benefit? Wouldn't improving the overall capabilities of the web be a much more worth while investment? If the web doesn't improve along side, then what do we gain by "moving forward" (what are we moving forward)? Put in perspective: there may be say, 10,000, hell even 100,000 proprietary apps in our market place one day - but there are 200,000,000+ active domains out there that can be accessed today because of cross-browser standardization. I'm not saying we shouldn't move forward on the OS: sure, do that, but not with an eye to creating yet another platform that competes with the Web for developers. > It took *many years* to come up with a solution to the offline > issues with Service Workers. So? We are talking about solutions that need to work at "web scale". I.e., these are solutions that need to work well for 10-20+ years, across multiple browsers, touching billions of people - so it makes sense that these APIs are not gonna be slapped-dashed together in a couple of days. We don't have the luxury on the web of deprecating APIs at a rapid rate - that's a feature of the platform, not a bug. Besides, standards take time because implementers are slow at implementing. Not because standards processes are slow. There are more specs available than have been implemented. > It also took years to standardize the > vibration api, which is pretty simple. And which applications have really suffered because of it? Also, if you compare the first proposal: http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-vibration-20111117/ And the final version: http://www.w3.org/TR/vibration/ The API is virtually the same. > I guess we should not have > implemented anything before the whatwg gatekeeper gave their approval? No, this is not about getting approval: it's about having cross-browser commitments for collaboration and implementation. What speeds up standardization is having agreement across browser vendors to implement something (and actually going through with it). A standard is marked by having 2 or more interoperable implementations of an API - and *not getting stamps of approval from the W3C or WHATWG*. So, if standards are slow, we have to take some blame for either being slow at implementing stuff or not collaborating better with other browser vendors. > Mozilla is the only significant browser vendor that doesn't have a > 'native' OS. That means that all other players may have a vested > interest in keeping the web a step behind. Well, we can treat other vendors with suspicions (hell, we would be right to do so given past history [1]). However, I'm yet to meet a browser engineer who is actively trying to screw over the Web, or actively neglecting it. Even Microsoft have come around - the IE Team is doing phenomenal work, the Google folks are amazing and driving large parts, the Apple/WebKit folks are a little shy, sure - but they deliver (e.g., WebGL on iOS) - and of course, we, Moz, are all over this Web platform thing: from installable web apps, the DOM, web audio, to ECMAScript, etc. I might be blind, but I don't see much evidence of anyone acting to keep the web behind (or they are just doing a really bad job at driving the web forward, 'cause all I see is awesome browsers everywhere that are all implementing web standards). We even trust Apple so much to do the right thing that we are going to build a Firefox browser version using WebKit. That says something! Now, imagine how sad it's going to be when FxOS apps don't work in Firefox for iOS. > Do we want to play this game by abiding to consensus? I hope so. The network effect (i.e., massive reach) of cross-browser web applications is the main competitive advantage we have on the Web. If we throw that away... :( [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp. _______________________________________________ dev-b2g mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g
