Guest post by “In a move that has raised eyebrows, Microsoft has submitted a patch to the WebKit project to extend the open source rendering engine with a prototype implementation of the Pointer Events specification that the company is also working on together with Google, Mozilla, and Opera. WebKit is the rendering engine used in Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome browsers, making Microsoft’s work a contribution to products that are in direct competition to its own.”
This is awesome, and not bad, but I do await the reasons as to why this will be the death of everybody’s firstborn.
Maybe Microsoft are finally giving up on their own rendering engine, and getting ready to move to WebKit… wouldn’t be the end of the world if they did that, would it?
I don’t think so. It is already the most widely used HTML rendering engine.
Well, they need it an open standard to aid with adoption, and it also helps if they are the first out the door with an open standard like this.
Releasing the API in an unencumbered form is cool, but by patching WebKit themselves, they’re making sure that the only reason for not supporting it is that it came from Microsoft – which is what Apple is doing.
Actually, I like the fact that there remains competition in the rendering engine space. If everyone standardised on WebKit, Apple would have de facto control of Browsers, and I trust them even less than MS.
Try to visit ‘HTML5’ websites and you’ll find they have standardised on WebKit, and I for one am pretty sick of getting ‘Your browser doesn’t support HTML5, download a new one’.
“Standardised on WebKit” is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard today. Thanks for the laugh.
And this is exactly how Apple has turned WebKit into the IE6 of the Mobile Web using their proprietary vendor extensions (and then refusing to work with Mozilla and MSFT or the W3C on Pointer Events spec).
I guess this is what people want.
And even better, there hasn’t been a single peep about that from the iFanboys who rambled on about how Apple’s crusade against Flash was purely for the greater good of web standards. I guess that, in their minds, it’s A-OK when Apple willfully ignores and undermines established standards – but the same behavior is unacceptable from any other company.
Haven’t you heard? Everything is Magical when Apple does it
I hate to burst your bubble here but it’s google who has really driven the adoption of WebKit.
There are way more Chrome (and it’s Android ilk) installs out there then there are Safari installs.
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I’m totally uninformed here … what extensions are you talking about?
Without getting too specific, there are several extensions that are specific to Apple’s browsers that cover things like drawing a beveled edge on an element. Nothing really groundbreaking. Google has their own in Chrome that cover much of the same stuff, and Mozilla has their own in Gecko that cover much the same stuff. Frequently the only difference is the syntax.
These extensions exist generally because they’re new features, and the HTML spec hasn’t standardized on the specific implementation. However, these aren’t meant to be used on production web pages. The problem arises when a site uses them on public-facing pages, and is even worse when they don’t put the time in to degrade gracefully, so they tell users that they either “need to upgrade to HTML5” or they just serve a broken page.
Web designers seem to tend to do this more with Safari extensions, but that’s merely anecdotal observation on my part.
But, Google did it in a big way with their super-frickin-awesome WebGL star map with WebGL detection code that seemed to not work on my Firefox install.
its a little more than this in my opinion:
Apple’s extensions to provide touch interactions within HTML5 is troublesome, especially in light of the fact that they refuse to work with the W3C to standardize what they have (because it involves royalty free use, presumably) and they refuse to get behind Microsoft’s Touch efforts.
The amount of the mobile web that uses proprietary prefixed touch extensions is scary. It isn’t a mobile web, it’s a WebKit web, and other vendors namely Mozilla, Opera, and Microsoft are left out in the cold.
It is very convenient for Apple to lock-in the mobile web using their touch model, (and more, a lot of the mobile web also uses prefixed CSS transitions and text scaling properties specific to WebKit)
Google by virtue of using WebKit gets these things for free, but other vendors don’t. That’s what is fundamentally broken about Apple’s approach.
If you think being a Web Dev is hard, try doing Mobile Web development. A complete nightmare.
Yes. I was speaking more generally, since the linked article covers the issues with touch quite well, and it’s broken rendering that most users will see when they go to a “Designed for WebKit” website.
Much of that stems from a fundamental flaw in the mindset behind the steaming pile of pointless nonsense known as HTML 5.
I come from an engineering background — where I’m from you make a specification BEFORE you start implementing it. It’s called an authoritative document for a reason.
HTML 5 is NOT authoritative, it’s documentative. That’s what the whole ‘living document’ and even trying to get rid of versioning idiocy is about. Let the browser makers do whatever it is they want, and we’ll just document it. Some “Specification”!
Combine that with the loosened structural rules, presentational elements they are trying to sell people on being semantic, and re-introduction of redundancies, and HTML 5 is NOT an improvement, it’s carefully crafted to undo all the progress of 4 STRICT, and bring us back to the WORST of HTML 3.2 and the peak of the browser wars.
In that way I suspect it was built almost entirely to satiate the wants and desires of the inept fools who haven’t pulled their heads out of 1997’s backside, and for the past decade have been writing HTML 3.2 and slapping 4 tranny on it. Now they just wrap HTML 5’s lip-service doctype on it while still crapping out the same broken methodologies — net improvement zero… Such developers missing that transitional markup means you are in transition from 1997 to 1998 coding practices.
Which is where a lot of my series of articles here:
http://techtalkin.com/Thread-So-what-s-wrong-with-your-website
Comes from… broken, outdated or just plain wrong site development practices, much of which stems from people failing to pull their heads out of 1997’s arse — even when writing HTML 5… as if the advantages of leveraging caching models and accessibility through building using progressive enhancement and separation of presentation from content is ‘evil’ or ‘harder’. Last time I checked, using less code with clear strict rules telling you how to do it isn’t “harder”… probably can be blamed on the *WAH, WAH, I DON’T WANNA LEARN, I JUST WANT A WEBSITE* idiocy… which is how fat bloated broken overpriced crap like Dreamweaver continues to be promoted as the industry standard tool… when the only thing about it that can be considered professional grade tools are the people promoting it’s use.
I’d be remiss in pointing out much of what people CALL HTML 5 — isn’t HTML — in that it’s not MARKUP. It’s CSS3 or new javascripted stuff. There’s a reason they up and decided to slap those under HTML 5’s banner — and it’s that without them the emperor is standing bare for all the world to see. All the ‘cool’ stuff is in either of those, and there is NOTHING preventing you from using them in the older STRICT recommendation HTML 4 or XHTML 1.0 documents!
There’s a reason I have zero plans to use HTML 5 for making markup, plan on sticking with XHTML 1.0 STRICT for the forseeable future — though I AM using the new scripting and CSS3. HTML 5 offers few if any real world advantages, undoes all the progress of the past 15 years… leaving me asking “Benefits? What benefits?!?”
As I explain here:
http://techtalkin.com/Thread-So-what-s-wrong-with-HTML-5
Oops, should say “remiss in FAILING to point out”… Past edit limit.
Too later for that
So no, they won’t although they have indicated in the past that if they could go back in time and take today’s webkit with them, they would have chosen that instead. However it is took late now. Keep in mind that less that 1% of the world knows that there are browsers other than Internet Explorer and the fact that many windows applications are built around the internet explorer html renderer.
Edited 2012-12-21 16:41 UTC
Luckily, that isn’t true anymore. Europe, South America, Asia (sans CJK) has long since left IE behind. And IE usage share is miniscule on smartphones. Also, at least around here, non-computer-savvy people no longer call any browser “Explorer”. The world has come a long way in the last five years or so…
Confirmed. People still tend to get a different picture when looking only at the northern american market or at companies that focus there browser-stats mainly on that market. Reality is, that IE lost huge last years and today its a WebKit and Firefox world.
IE is not even available for most of the today’s computer devices sold with Android and iOS. IE is Windows only and the relevance of Windows continues to shrink faster and faster.
Edited 2012-12-25 14:00 UTC
How do you know that? And even if so few people know what they use, what matters is that a lot more than 1% do use non-IE:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Countries_by_most_used_web_browse…
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-200807-201212
When I see news like this, I always wonder, what are Microsoft’s intentions?
In this case, though, the guy who posted the patch, Scott Blomquist, happens to be a friend of mine. Puts a completely different perspective on things: it’s no longer a big corporation – just a developer who wants to help out.
It is in Microsofts interest to have the web, especially the mobile web, interoperate with IE. Too many mobile websites are written using Apple only Touch extensions with Apple-isms baked into it.
WebKit is by no means only used by Apple. Its also used on Android, in Chrome, on Blackberry, on Tizen, in Sony entertainment systems, in WebOS and so on and on.
Also the cooperation among Opera, Firefox and WebKit seems to be rather good. IE was always out of this being Microsoft Windows only and following there tendency to block standards that may undermine there vendor lock in (like WebGL) and introduce Windows-only extension to make the Web Windows only (like ActiveX). Very good they failed that and are forced to cooperate now. Hope stays Microsoft is going to make IE more compatible to all the other browsers out there. The touch-event patch is good sign that something happens within Microsoft.
Edited 2012-12-25 14:16 UTC
Well it’s Microsoft, the company that’s cool to hate*. Since when has the Anything-But-Microsoft crowd ever needed a better excuse than that?
*Excepting iFanbois, who have done a complete “Ministry of Truth”-style flip-flop in the last few years. After more than 2 decades of impotent sound and fury at directed Microsft, Google is now the company that’s cool to hate – and Microsoft is now the bee’s knees, because they’re at odds with Google too.
It’s kind of like having someone spend years advocating for the eradication of something they see as a terrible problem… and then doing a 180-reversal of that position, because someone they dislike becomes afflicted by said problem.
What are you talking about?
We are at war with Google… We have always been at war with Google.
Also, the chocolate ration is about to be reduced from 30 grams to 20 grams.
Personally I am a huge fan of Apple and delight in every Microsoft misfortune because I despise them. Unlike the Microsoft ugly kludgey shite that I was forced to use back when they mattered I quite like a lot of the stuff Google gives away for free. I don’t particularly want the tech world dominated by an advertising agency but Google is not much of threat to anything I hold dear and are facing some big structural challenges. I wish they could come up with something new that was a commercial success, they have only ever had two great ideas, PageRank and Adsense, and both are over a decade old and only one actually makes any money (although admittedly it does make a lot of money).
Holy shit, are you really? There a turn up for the books …
Also, a quick Google search ( site:osnews.com tony swash “I write to defend Apple” – memorable
) gives us the closing part of http://www.osnews.com/thread?507152 post, perhaps even more telling…
…and sad (not the least because being a fan of Apple for 3 decades includes the decade when they sold clearly inferior and more expensive stuff)
It’s a new time starting.
Maybe this is what the Mayans meant.
Happy doomsday everybody
Microsoft tried to own the desktop web browser market. Apple is trying to own the mobile browser market. Pages that only work on IE or the iPhone will exist, but both sides are willing to use open standards to make sure they don’t get shut out. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and as long as these big players keep fighting it out for web dominance, whoever collaborates the most by having the most open standard wins. Or put more bluntly, we the consumer win. An open web is inevitable.