Yes an independent small-time developer cannot create a browser engine from scratch today, but Apple does not fall into that category. Their choices with Safari are not born out of lack of resources or expertise but deliberate planning.
Yes large companies have seized control over the web from W3C. Apple is one of those large companies. They refuse to follow standards that they themselves dictate for others.
Yes pushing more features to the web is going to result in loss of privacy. But Apple doesn't want vanilla websites, they want developers to make iOS apps (gated behind their store) which are worse in every way.
Plus it doesn't address the biggest argument, which is that even if you say Apple can do whatever it wants with Safari, what is their rationale for blocking other browsers on iOS? It sure isn't because Apple loves the open web.
> Yes large companies have seized control over the web from W3C
The W3C is a consortium, that's what the "C" stands for. Said consortium is comprised of "very large companies" and it always has been. That's the point: cooperative game-theory.
That is not how it has always been. For most of its history W3C was run by scientists, universities and government agencies. Google/Apple/Microsoft came much later.
Umm, I was a member of the CSS, XHTML, and XForms committees back in 2001, and most of my fellow committee members were from big corps, including me, representing Oracle on the committee.
Perhaps you're thinking of the IETF. The W3C was always more corporate than the IETF, but even the IETF had lots of corps, it just had more university reps than the W3C did.
As a Consortium the W3C's members are mostly corporations. For much of its existence individuals couldn't even join, now they can but it's expensive. If Bob loses his job at Big Corp, Big Corp are the W3C member, Big Corp gets to send Bob's replacement to the W3C meetings to represent Big Corp interests. Big Corp votes on W3C work, albeit via Bob or his successor, but Bob doesn't have a vote unless Bob joins individually at his own expense he has no voice.
The IETF doesn't have members. IETF participation is an individual activity for people. Your employer can (and many do) pay you to participate, but they're not the ones participating, you are. The IETF doesn't vote on anything, it doesn't have members so a vote wouldn't mean anything, it is looking only for a "rough consensus".
I mean, it's true, but it's kind of a semantic difference. I also served on the IETF Lemonade IMAP group on behalf of Oracle, and although there's no implicit vote structure, one or two committee members can pretty much torpedo stuff, although my experience was more positive, because even though they torpedo stuff, people tend to be more consensus/cooperative driven, and look for common ground solution.
So for example, we were seeking to make extensions to IMAP that gave standards based email something competitive with the Blackberry experience. Some of the proposals specified protocol proposals specified yet another tunneled protocol for real time notifications over 25 or 143, but I objected that deploying this widescale was more difficult due to firewalls, I counter proposed a HTTP based solution which also was shot down. But the group did consider my concerns over deployment, and shipped a BCP document to encourage network admins to be prepared for Lemonade specs: https://tools.ietf.org/search/bcp143#section-6.1
That said, this whole thread really bothers me, because people's attitude isn't "well, Apple should counter propose improvements to achieve use cases, but with better battery/security/privacy", but just "Google bad, don't work with them, essentially boycott the W3C/WHATWG and freeze the web in place. Oh, and let's keep the web like it was 1998."
The Web has changed a lot, people's requirements and use cases have changed a lot. Just take e-commerce or passwords. We all know that sending your credit cards or password credentials to Web sites is bad for security. So login and payments need to be solved and THIS REQUIRES NEW STANDARDS.
You simply can't say "HTML4 was good enough. " because HTML4 meant cookie hacks, HTML4 meant storing your credit cards and password credentials on the server. If Apple cared about these things, they'd make sure to work with Google, and Mozilla, and Microsoft to ensure standardized, secure, private payments and logins were widely deployed and implemented for example.
I really tire of this tribalist fanboyism.
If you think Google is evil or shouldn't control the web, the solution isn't to boycott the standards committees, or to cheerlead a stagnant unchanging web platform (an unchanging platform is effectively a dead platform in the face of changing hardware and user demands), it's to get involved. And therefore, the proper court of action is to demand Apple fully fund their Safari team. It's obvious they's skimping on them, as the accumulated bugs alone are not a philosophical choice, but one based on resources.
The internet (Arpanet) was invented by the US Government and Universities that worked with them. The www (Tim Bernes-Lee) was created at CERN (scientists) and won out things to other things like Gopher and BBSes.
The telcos almost won the wires for voice instead of IP based systems. It’s been a mix of Government, Scientists, University Academics, and corporations since the late 80s/early 90s if not sooner.
AOL got the masses on the web and things like Prodigy existed before them. AOL is more akin to Facebook nowadays.
Follow the money. For most of its history you had to pay to participate. Yes, their work products and discussions were fully in the open, but you had to be invited to participate if you weren’t employed by a funding enterprise.
> Yes an independent small-time developer cannot create a browser engine from scratch today, but Apple does not fall into that category.
What do you think of Mozilla and Servo? Because quite honestly, I think a moderately sized team should be able to accomplish it with enough time. Yet Mozilla canned the Servo team. It feels like practically nobody can create a standards compliant browser engine from scratch these days.
Mozilla has expenses and revenues approaching a billion dollars a year, employs 1000+ people, and can still barely keep up. I wouldn't classify them as moderately sized.
To Downvoters: So this is not true? After looking at this again, this goes back even before Google became a direct competitor.
In 2007, Mozilla was actually going to walk away from Google's millions since they said "We've spent a lot of time and energy making sure that Google understands that it cannot turn us into an arm of Google" [0] This was an effort to make money without the reliance on Google.
Maybe this was the scare that made Google paranoid enough to create their own browser. which first released in 2008.
Since then, Mozilla knew that they were in trouble and Google became a direct competitor whilst they were still funding them and they ended up not walking away from Google's millions. Ever since Chrome came along, Firefox usage was struggling ever since. [1] Google's millions made up for 75% - 84% of Mozilla's entire revenue.
Now today, it has become a two horse race with tons of Chrome-based browsers and only Safari competing against it. With users switching to the Chrome ecosystem, Mozilla (and Firefox) is still on life support and dependent on Google. Even Microsoft Edge even jumped ahead of it [2].
Just like how Nintendo turned Sony into a competitor out of a partnership gone wrong, Mozilla turned Google into a competitor all by themselves and given they are still unable to walk away from them, they have to deal with a partner that is against their entire mission statement.
> Their choices with Safari are not born out of lack of resources
Eh, depends what you mean by "resources". Apply is (in)famously a relatively frugal and small company, given it's worth and value. Even it's native platforms, its crown jewels, suffer from this.
That's their stated rationale. I believe the poster was asking for their true rationale.
I would guess it has much more to do with Apple wanting to exert control over webapps running on the phone. This makes sense considering how much money they make from native apps coming from the app store.
That’s also the rationale why a lot of people pick Apple and use iPhones. It just works. It’s secure. You can’t break it. Your mom won’t call you on a weekend to fix some dodgy apps or uninstall malware.
"iPhone shouldn't allow 3rd party keyboards. It's secure and just works."
Then they added support for custom keyboards, and everything still works.
"iPhone shouldn't allow changing the default email app. It's secure and just works."
Then they started allowing you to change the email app, and everything still works.
"iPhone shouldn't allow widgets on the home screen. It's secure and just works."
Then they added widgets, and everything still works.
Same with changing app icons, adblock extensions, dark mode, and so many other user-requested customizations. Every time they have made the phone more open, overall user experience has become better, not worse.
People continue to say the same thing about browsers, locked app store etc., but one they they will open up as well and – guess what – iPhone will benefit from of it.
Someone once asked me how to do a simple task with an iPhone— plug it into a Windows machine and copy pictures from it. It turned out to be impossible without installing iTunes on the PC.
If you have an Android phone, Windows recognizes it as being a USB drive and everything just works. No shitty, bloated, slow, difficult-to-use, third-party app required.
> That's their stated rationale. I believe the poster was asking for their true rationale.
It can be both.
Another example is that Apple believes native apps are the best end user experience. Generally I agree. Native apps also make Apple money by going through the store.
Steve Jobs was talking about privacy since (at least) 2010:
> Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for, in plain English, and repeatedly. That’s what it means. I’m an optimist, I believe people are smart. And some people want to share more data than other people do. Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely what you’re going to do with their data.
> But Apple doesn't want vanilla websites, they want developers to make iOS apps
These are not the same category, and that's very much the problem. Well, a problem at least.
Have a website? Make a website! Please! Don't make a web-app, don't make me download megabytes of JavaScript, consume my bandwidth and power, and make me insecure just to read your content and maybe do some minimal form filling. Just give me some HTML+CSS.
If you have something that's an app, please make a real app. Don't make a web-app, don't make me download megabytes of JavaScript, consume my bandwidth and power, and make me insecure when I could be having a native app instead.
I'm on the complete opposite opinion. So many things are native apps but shouldn't be. Not to mention i have no desire to download a random app just to see if it does what i need it to ( consuming bandwidth and power in the process). A website is much more accessible, and can usually do the job.
If you think even basic websites/web-apps can replicate even 60% of their full functionality without JS, you are terribly mistaken. JS lets you do way more things than <form> lets you do.
Yes an independent small-time developer cannot create a browser engine from scratch today, but Apple does not fall into that category. Their choices with Safari are not born out of lack of resources or expertise but deliberate planning.
Yes large companies have seized control over the web from W3C. Apple is one of those large companies. They refuse to follow standards that they themselves dictate for others.
Yes pushing more features to the web is going to result in loss of privacy. But Apple doesn't want vanilla websites, they want developers to make iOS apps (gated behind their store) which are worse in every way.
Plus it doesn't address the biggest argument, which is that even if you say Apple can do whatever it wants with Safari, what is their rationale for blocking other browsers on iOS? It sure isn't because Apple loves the open web.