It’s apparently browser engine day today. After Mozilla and Samsung announcing Servo, Google has just announced it’s forking WebKit into Blink. Like WebKit, Blink will be open source, and it will also be used by other browser makers – most prominently, Opera has already announced it’s not using WebKit, but Blink. Update: Courtesy of MacRumors, this graph illustrates how just how much Google contributed to WebKit. Much more than I thought. Also, Chrome developer Alex Russell: “To make a better platform faster, you must be able to iterate faster. Steps away from that are steps away from a better platform. Today’s WebKit defeats that imperative in ways large and small. It’s not anybody’s fault, but it does need to change. And changing it will allow us to iterate faster, working through the annealing process that takes a good idea from drawing board to API to refined feature.”
All of you will be familiar with WebKit’s history, and how Blink fits nicely into the circle of code. WebKit was originally a fork off KHTML, the rendering engine built by the KDE project. Apple forked KHTML into WebKit, which was then adopted by virtually everyone else in the industry, save for Mozilla and Microsoft. Blink now mirrors WebKit’s origins.
The reasons for forking WebKit, according to Google, are architectural. For instance, Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than WebKit itself, which leads to a lot of additional code complexity for both Chromium and WebKit. This, in turn, is a hindrance to innovation. Of course, another major reason is undoubtedly that by forking WebKit, Google will be able to implement things and change code around without having to worry about the impact it’ll have on WebKit itself.
In the short term, Blink will bring little change for web developers. The bulk of the initial work will focus on internal architectural improvements and a simplification of the codebase. For example, we anticipate that we’ll be able to remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7.000 files – comprising more than 4.5 million lines – right off the bat. Over the long term a healthier codebase leads to more stability and fewer bugs.
Blink will do a few things differently from WebKit. The most important one I could find, and probably to the delight of many, Blink will retire the use of vendor prefixes, following in Mozilla’s footsteps. “Historically, browsers have relied on vendor prefixes (e.g., -webkit-feature) to ship experimental features to web developers. This approach can be harmful to compatibility because web content comes to rely upon these vendor-prefixed names,” Blink’s FAQ states, “Going forward, instead of enabling a feature by default with a vendor prefix, we will instead keep the (unprefixed) feature behind the ‘enable experimental web platform features’ flag in about:flags until the feature is ready to be enabled by default. Mozilla has already embarked on a similar policy.”
Blink is open source – it’s part of the Chromium project – so others are free to adopt it as well. One browser maker has already announced it’s using Blink: Opera. “It’s great to be able to talk publicly about Blink, the new engine that will power Opera’s browsers (disclosure: my employer, but this is a personal post) and Chrome henceforth,” writes Opera’s Bruce Lawson, “I know a lot of people worried that there would be less diversity on the Web once Opera Presto was retired, and the forking of WebKit into Blink restores that balance. Opera will be contributing to Blink in future.”
Together with the announcement of Mozilla’s and Samsung’s Servo rendering engine, today has been a great day for the web. The web was in danger of falling victim of another monoculture – something we’ve experienced to the web’s detriment before – and today’s announcements make sure that’s not going to happen. As a web developer, your life may have just become a bit more difficult – and that’s a good thing, as it forces you to write as non-rendering engine specific as possible, and both Google and Mozilla dumping vendor specific prefixes will help a great deal here too.
Great news for the web, great news for competition, and thus great news for all of us. Expect Blink in your Chrome soon.
If you are not a fan of Apple, this should bring a smile to your face:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57577850-93/googlers-exultant-over…
“The WebKit browser engine no longer unites Google and Apple, and the Chrome team is clearly excited to be free to move on its own”
Edited 2013-04-03 22:48 UTC
I’m an Apple fan and I’m kinda happy
. I’m not really a fan of Google but if this means faster browsing specially javascript it would be amazing and maybe Apple will worry a bit more about WebKit and Safari.
Well, it will be a lot easier to put Google stuff like SPDY and Dart etc into Blink … we will see where that leads us (I love SPDY btw)
I’ll get hate for saying it but the best thing that could happen is Google make JavaScript extinct.
Lets face it folks, JavaScript was built in a simpler time, security wasn’t even in the top 5 when they made the thing, it was made when power was measured in small degrees of MHz, honestly it should be taken out back and put down as we can simply do better.
All the work that browser makers like Google have to do to try to mitigate some of the risks of its design like sandboxing are just slapping bandaids on bullet wounds but its never gonna stop the bleeding because it just wasn’t built to be in any way secure. I mean imagine if someone back in the day had decided Gopher should be what the web ran on and they just kept bolting more junk on top to make it do what they needed at the time…does anybody think it would be great or even good? Well that is JavaScript.
If any company can do it Google can, they have one of the best engineering teams out there so if anybody could come up with a better and more secure web language it would be them. JavaScript is 18 years old folks, when it came out Windows 95 was just hitting shelves and the Internet was primarily dialup…we can do better folks.
Well even Apple Fans can enjoy because WebKit2 could finally move on.
Retiring Vendor Prefixes … YES!
I don’t really have an opinion on forking webkit, but couldn’t they have chosen a better name than blink? When you think of BLINK and HTML, what does that remind you of? Why associate the name of your framework with what was probably the worst HTML tag ever conceived?
When I was creating my trololo home website in index2.html some weeks ago, I was quite disappointed that only Firefox supported blink tag, to be honest.
Had do replicate it with jQuery…
Atleast <marquee> tag worked.
pro tip for stupid websites:
<span style=”text-decoration: underline; color: blue; cursor: pointer;”>http://very-important-link.com/stuff.html</span>
Edited 2013-04-03 23:52 UTC
Your link is broken, can you provide a cache version? ;-P
I know what you mean. When I first saw this story being mentioned, there was no link, so I had to google “blink web browser”. No surprise, most of the hits were about <blink> tags…
Blink: God’s gift to HTML tags.
I am one of the lucky few 300 million that use opera. It is so darn fast on slow networks, extendable with awesome extensions and crashes far less than IE on the lumia.
That being said, i think we all lost out when they decided to kill presto in favour for what i would call a “mediocre replacement” at best with webkit.
As for forking webkit… sure do whatever you want.. but a browser engine is nothing if it is not comptible.
Why not use a word that is not a common term. They should know their search algorithm by now.
Why not call it something more rare, like “quizzah”, “findashnizzle” or anything else equally rediculous.
Its interesting how people just a few weeks ago were screaming for everyone to “standardize on WebKit” and preaching that a single web engine was great for the web.
Not that I’m criticizing Google’s move, I’m all for doing what makes the most business sense. Google thinks it needs to control its destiny and priorities with regards to its web rendering technology. Thats fine. Thats the nature of these projects and forking is part of the game.
I’m interested into what broke down between Apple, Google, and the planning for WebKit2 (which was supposed to bring multi-process support) to lead to this. Its a rather drastic move.
WebKit development hasn’t been a smooth interaction between Apple and Google who have both contributed significantly but have different technical goals and this has been a source of minor and major irritations now and then. WebKit has 11 different build systems for instance and sometimes merges code from Apple in a heavy handed way leaving little room for consensus among different contributing vendors. Chrome’s WebKit is a very different beast from Apple’s Webkit anyway and this fork will merely make it more obvious.
Yeah, Google wants to dominate the whole web.
And Apple doesn’t? LOL.
“On higher levels than just WebCore, Apple has actually been using WebKit2, which handles things like sandboxing (the feature that allows one tab to crash without bringing the whole browser down). Die hard Chrome fans may be aware, but Google already has its own method for sandboxing tabs and has no need for WebKit2’s implementation. However, WebCore contains a lot of code that is designed to support features like that. How much is “a lot of code,” you ask? About 4.5 million lines of code, it seems. ”
http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/04/03/google-no-longer-cares-for-…
I think this is a given, they disagreed on a large component so Google will excise that component from their fork.
I’m more interested in why, and I don’t think this would’ve been a chief motivator for a fork. I think its a good bullet point on a list of reasons why, but the overarching goal here seems to be to have the freedom to set the agenda for their rendering engine.
well, they state that they couldn’t do certain security fixes in webkit (but only relevant to chrome) because it would break things for others. So freedom to do anything they want without worrying about others certainly seems like the main reason.
Yeah, and I’m glad Google is doing this. Google being free to experiment with Blink due to more freedom = more proposed standards and faster movement in the web overall.
After all, WebKit was a fork, and look where KHTML is now. Sometimes these things spur innovation.
Translation of the Blink FAQ
http://prng.net/blink-faq.html
Translation of the translated FAQ:
“Crap, now Apple has to do all the work again.”
While the fanboy wank is…well wank, there is a kernel of truth we old guys can pick up on. Anybody remember “This site requires IE” back in the bad old days?
Well what is to keep us from seeing “This site requires Blink” in a year or two? Lets face it Android is blowing up all over the place, thanks to the fact that anybody can use it you see Android on everything from $50 tablets to over $500 convertible devices…that is a pretty damned big demographic to ignore.
We have already seen the problems with sites using Webkit specific extensions but at least with Webkit I did NOT have to use Google or Apple for that matter, there are a dozen browsers out there using Webkit as their base so if I don’t trust either company? I don’t have to. In fact I’m typing this on Dragon which is based on Chromium and before I switched to Dragon I was using SWIron.
So while I agree that Apple fanboys are frankly irritating and self absorbed this change DOES give me pause. The LAST thing I want is to have no choice but deal with Google and their phone home datamining BS just because Android means websites will be designed for Google products.
What a PoS.
Jesus, Apple fanboys really are a sad bunch aren’t they?
Worshipping Google isn’t any better. Just waiting to see Google finishing another project if they don’t like it anymore 🙂
The ‘screaming’ sound you heard was apple marketing machine trying to prevent the knifing … forking of webkit
No it wasn’t.
and in other news, webkit is dead.
Dead is a bit strong, but it probably will become an Apple only show once again.
Which means about 500 millions users for Webkit: a healthy dead engine.
Isn’t health of a project predicated on the number of developers working on it and not the number of users?
It depends which code the smaller players use. I imagine Maxthon, Dolphin, Boat, etc will fall either into the Webkit or Blink camps based on practicality.
A day ago WebKit was alive and well, and according to some, posed to become the One Engine to Rule Them All.
I don’t think its fair to call WebKit dead, just another important player in an industry of important players.
Really? Wasn’t Apple still contiburing about half of the code to the project still? IIANM, Google and Apple basically contributed about the same amount each.
Microsoft was explaining reasons of doing IE by exactly the same words.
Except this:
But yeah, Google is the new evil Microsoft. /s
The innovation was exactly Microsoft’s argument. It is a common argument, as if users want innovation from browsers.
Others are explanations, maybe reasons, but it is not what will happen. What will happen is contributors will split between two engine. Google hopes, that most of them will work on Blink, and so less will work on Webkit. Another reason, that Google does not have to port changes back to Webkit themselves. They just want to reduce their direct contribution to Apple, thats it.
What I see as a problem for myself is that I’ll need to support one ‘innovative’ engine more.
Of course they want ‘innovation’ or rather new features, better performance, etc for their browsers. How do you think Mozilla managed to take a huge chunk of the browser market share from IE to begin with?
Microsoft paid no heed to standards and could get away with that because they had leveraged their desktop market dominance to being the ‘de facto’ standard browser, with appalling results. The situation we have today with several competing browsers is nothing like that.
Adding new browser features does not equal breaking standard compliance, tab process separation has no effect on web standards, faster javascript has no effect on web standards, neither does plugins architectures, mouse gestures, customization, automatic updates, private browsing etc. Yet these are ‘innovations’ which are popular with users.
And as for standards, delivering the best support for existing standards is also a feature with which to attract users, like HTML5, which will lead to better standard adherence all around when the browser engines have to compete.
Thats nice and pie in the sky and all, but its not what happens in practice.
The W3C throws a wrench in all of this with their lethargic standard setting process.
WebKit is a wild beast from version to verson, browser to browser. Its basically a “Browser stack” where vendors choose shelf made components, substitute others (v8 instead of JSC) and generally this leads to a bunch of incompatible implementations with varying degree of standard support.
We had one IE6. We have a ton of WebKit splinters running on various mobile devices, some having varying syntaxes for the same feature and others being so chocked up on vendor prefixes that its not really the web anymore.
This isn’t WebKit’s fault per say, and other browsers suffer from this to an extent — its just the most prominent example.
What web standards needs is a more nimble process that doesn’t take ten years per standard.
The W3C is sabotaged by infighting between vendors. Fix the W3C, instead of sneaking in a “de facto” standard.
Which Modern IE has taken back. Firefox was a good kick in the backside for Microsoft and with modern versions of IE are excellent. The jQuery Team recently said that it had less shims for Modern IE than Other browsers.
Oh like any browser actually followed standards at the time. It was shit, especially if you were doing JavaScript development back in 2003/4 like I was doing.
IE6 was better than every other browser at the time and was free. There wasn’t a reason to download something better. Firefox got market share because it was free and better than IE6.
So you can’t say it is entirely because Microsoft leveraged their desktop dominance, because many of the first firefox users were Windows users.
Yes because it improves the browsing experience.
Most users do not care if there are better standard supports. The user-interface, add-ons and extensions is what made Firefox Popular.
Standards compliance is a great for developers but it does not drive acceptance.
Edited 2013-04-04 17:39 UTC
What exactly have they taken back? Hardly the market share they lost as Firefox still has a good chunk, and so does Chrome.
If the browser you are using fails/works poorly on an increasing amount of sites due to poor standard support then you will start looking at alternatives.
HTML5 could be such a standard where the one who delivers the best experience can stand to gain lots of users. That of course depends alot on the rate of HTML5 adoption.
IE is still well over 50% and actually been climbing recently. Lrn2 recognise trends.
Yes you will. However all the current browsers in use work fine on most sites unless someone has used -webkit.
This isn’t 100% to do with standards. It also how browsers deal with bad code and general performance.
Can we stop pretending it is about standards support. Yes standards support is part of the experience but it not a conscience choice made by most people when choosing a browser.
Edited 2013-04-04 19:15 UTC
So you’re actually saying that IE will take back the market share it has lost to Firefox and Chrome?
It doesn’t matter if it’s a conscious choice as in ‘aha, lots of sites work poorly in this browser because of it’s crappy standard support’ or simply ‘this site works poorly in this browser, it works in the others I’ve tried’, the net result is the same, they will use another browser.
No I didn’t say that, I said it had fought back quite a lot due to the newer IE versions being very good.
I do think that because the new versions are quite good both interface, speed and reliability we will have less people looking for alternatives like they did back when Firefox/Pheonix was initially introduced.
I doubt it will get back to 95%, but claiming IE is losing market share is ridiculous because it isn’t any more because they have upped the quality of their browser offering to include the features that most people care about.
It does matter.
On mobile webkit is king and any browser that isn’t Webkit doesn’t work. So users use the webkit based browsers (if they change them at all).
If web devs choose to support -webkit hacks and other similar things it won’t work say on Window Phone 8 with IE. This is about consumer choice, this is flat out about the web not working.
Standard support has never been important, rendering in the most common browsers has always been most desired. It is foolish to think otherwise.
You are foolish to think otherwise.
Edited 2013-04-04 19:47 UTC
My god. Microsoft used this argument. And, obviously, they were the only ones to make this argument, of course; because neither Apple nor Mozilla nor Opera ever claimed their engine would bring more, better stuff. I mean, even webkit never claimed they would be better than everybody else. So now that Google makes the same claim, that puts them in the same league as Microsoft.
QED.
Oh please, the whole purpose of the forking, is to take control, and do thing without hampering.
I can provide the same kind of BS from MSFT about IE in the 90s…your point? Words are just that, its deeds that count. We’ll have to see how much they change and how compatible it is with standards, if we start seeing “this site requires blink” we’ll be too late so we have to be vigilant NOW.
BTW can we stop this “Microsoft was an evil genius” bit I’ve seen too many times about their history under gates? Because honestly the best they could be called would be a bumbling henchman that caught a break. if you look at the history of the company objectively every success is preceded by “And then the other guy did something REALLY dumb”. Just look at IE owning the web for so long for an example…how did it happen? Some genius at Netscape decided to rewrite the browser at a critical time and made a giant crashy mess, so people were actually downloading IE because while it wasn’t as nice as NS at least you could look at more than 2 pages in a row without a crash.
So I never understood why MSFT was looked upon as evil geniuses, if anything they were just blessed with REALLY stupid competitors. The freefall of the company can be directly laid on the fact this is 2013 and their competition isn’t pants wettingly retarded. But you name ANY success they’ve had and I’ll show you a “and then the competition did something REALLY dumb”…Xbox? Sony pricing the PS3 at $600 which was twice what the market would bear. MS Office? Wordperfect ignored Windows and put out a lame DOS port that sucked resources and crashed a lot. Windows? Apple was run by one bad CEO after another that stuffed the channel with junk while BeOS stuck with one failed CPU after another and by the time they realized X86 was gonna win it was too late.
So we really need to kill the whole “evil genius” myth as history just doesn’t bear it out. All those memos with buzzwords like “EEE” sure sound good but in reality it was just a company trying to sound like what they did on accident was really on purpose. I mean what did you expect them to say? “Wow we sure got lucky the competition was so dim”?
It was caused more by a race towards new features (at the expense of fixing bugs) during the first browser war, not any large rewrite. The old Netscape was generally poorer than IE, and in rapid decline during the relevant timespan:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Browser_Wars.svg
Edited 2013-04-10 21:27 UTC
But IE was not standards compliant, and contained all kinds of crap. Blink is actually one of the most standards compliant engines out there (since Webkit is).
Also, Google got Opera on board which means that they do believe that Blink will remain standards compliant.
IE was more standards compliant than the old Netscape, when it took over from the latter…
Won’t make much difference to me because Chrome 26 onwards no longer supports CentOS 6 (and brings up a banner to tell you that), which is what I use on both my home and work desktops.
My primary browser is Firefox anyway, but I believe several other actively maintained Linux distros are now seeing the same non-support banner with Chrome 26 too, so I guess it’s time to kiss goodbye to Chrome, at least until CentOS 7 comes out 🙂
Changing their rendering engine to Blink, I wonder if Opera will keep their compression technology in Opera Mobile. Using Opera Mobile or Opera Mini on my phone is a must since I have a small data plan. It also loads pages faster with compression enabled.
Yes, Opera will switch to using Chromium (which will mean Blink) to render content in their Opera Mobile backend servers.
Google may need a little more freedom to develop ChromeOS.
Also, this bit of news:
http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/4/4181708/apple-was-awarded-a-regist…
But I do not know if it could be relevant. Still weird.
This is about Google watching out for themselves…
which in this case (only) means it’s better consumers. Rejoice
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/google-going-…
Edited 2013-04-04 08:56 UTC
Apple does not allow any other browser engines on iOS and Apple didn’t seem all that committed to development of webtechnologies anymore.
So does this mean iOS is gonna be left behind more than it is already ?
“… and Apple didn’t seem all that committed to development of webtechnologies anymore.”
Can you elaborate a little bit?
“So does this mean iOS is gonna be left behind more than it is already ?”
Can you elaborate a little bit?
Seriously, the amount of commonplaces one can read nowadays concerning Apple or iOS without any argumentation is amazing.
Edited 2013-04-04 12:32 UTC
Well, for starters they ones said their platform would be great for HTML5-apps, now they have the most restricted environment of any platform to run HTML5 apps on. And they don’t allow any other browser engines on their platform.
They have no participation in the newest developments like the development of WebRTC or the HTML5-specs.
They have an editor at W3C with a Microsoft editor, but the HTML5-specs aren’t really being developed at the W3C. Most of the text comes from the WHATWG.
That gives me the idea of less interest.
I could be wrong of course.
Stats on who contributes what to Webkit can be found here
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/09/apple-and-google-still-lead-webkit…
Bottom line: Apple and Google contribute about the same amount.
Can’t quite see how iOS could be left behind in mobile web rendering given this;
http://allthingsd.com/20130403/safari-still-winning-the-mobile-brow…
What’s interesting is that not only does iOS and mobile Safari have a bigger mobile web share than all other mobile browsers combined but that it’s lead over the others is actually increasing.
The reasons for the iOS domination of the mobile web are many and complicated but I suspect the biggest reason is the success of the iPad, and the relative failure of Android tablets to make much of a dent, because tablets are such perfect browsing devices. Everything seems to indicate that a significant proportion of iOS and mobile browsing comes from the iPad.
For some reason Google decided not to push the development of Android apps specifically designed for the tablet format and instead gambled (a gamble it appears to have lost) that scaled up Android phone apps would be good enough on smaller form factor tablets.
I also suspect that the relative failure of Android in the tablet market, a market crucial to Google given that tablets seem to dominate mobile browsing, was part of the reason that Rubin was dumped.
Is Blink Open Source? I have looked for some sort of official Google statement on this but not found it but I may just be looking in the wrong places so if anyone can post a link to something official from Goggle I would appreciate it.
Not sure what I think about this move by Google. My concern is that it is connected to the continuing domination of the mobile web by iOS and Safari.
http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&qpc…
Obviously Google would like to see Android mobile browsing use catch up with iOS and one way to do that would be to leverage Chromes desktop domination in some way. I am not saying that is what they are doing, just that I would feel happier about the Blink initiative if there was some evidence that Google was not using it as a way to leverage a mobile advantage.
I guess the whole IE era left me paranoid and one reason I like Webkit was that it seemed to fasten the main mobile players to a commitment to open web standards.
I think the moment Google introduces a single proprietary and closed element into Blink every alarm bell in my head will go off
As said in the announcement and every article on this subject on every website of the web in every universe, yes.
It’s part of the Chromium project and the code is linked to in the announcement.
The fork is well-announced and well-documented, and yet I read so many stupid comments about it… *facepalm*
Did it go off when Apple led WebKit introduced -webkit extensions?
Yes, for a lot of us it did. Vendor extensions are not so bad themselves, they’re bad when they linger for long after the standard is ratified. This is especially annoying given how long it takes standards to be ratified.
There needs to be a bigger fuss made about the fact that a lot of these vendor prefixes linger long after a standard reaches CR or PR.
It’s always amazing how much NetApplications and StatCounter stats can differ…
http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&qpc…
vs
http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-201203-201303
The interesting thing about StatCounter, though, is that they did publish a detailed explanation of why it is the case in their opinion. And if what they say is true, NA’s metrics do indeed suffer from some major methodology issues.
http://gs.statcounter.com/press/open-letter-ms
Edited 2013-04-04 15:15 UTC
It’s certainly hard to find a way to objectively and accurately measure mobile web usage by platform and so it is hardly surprising that NetApplications and StatCounter stats differ. One way to try to work out which of these estimates is more accurate and which is the outlier is to look at other sources and methods of measuring web usage by platform. I am thinking of these sorts of data sources,
http://allthingsd.com/20130311/watching-a-video-on-your-phone-youre…
http://www.fortune3.com/blog/2012/11/cyber-monday-2012-ecommerce-st…
http://blog.gogoair.com/?p=193
I would say that the balance of the reports of mobile OS web use using different measuring systems is that iOS over performs in relation to device numbers and Android under performs in relation to device numbers.
That in itself is not particularly surprising when taken in the context of the mass of separate independent data sources that show that iOS over performs as a general computing platform and Android under performs as a general computing platform.
One key facto in all this is of course the iPad, which is the mobile device most used on a per capita basis for mobile internet usage, and which continues to sell in very high numbers compared to other tablets. Android tablet sales continue to be weakish even if you include forked Android platform such as the Kindle.
I’d say that you do have a remarkable talent for picking examples that mainly target the core iOS demographics. That’s perhaps not so surprising, though, since as an Apple user you probably belong to one or several of those demographics yourself.
Gogoair only provide services to large, and thus highly expensive air companies. This means that their data will have a bias towards people which have lots of money to spend in plane tickets. Perhaps an extra $20000 of average household income in the US could have an influence in this area? http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/26/forrester-iphone-app-users-young-a…
Another thing worth noting about Gogoair is that it solely provides service to northern american companies, which may tend to artificially inflate the specificities of the american population. Since a picture is better than a thousand words… http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201303-201303-map
The Oolaya example chosen by AllThingsD is also interesting, since that company does not take care of any major video website like Youtube, Dailymotion, or Vimeo, instead providing smaller “inline video” services to various online newspapers. Depending on how said services are implemented, it may well happen that they do not get the full share of Android video views because those are displayed a Flash video player without ever seeing Ooyala tech (remember, the Flash Player plugin is still installed on a large number of Android devices).
Also, this selectivity towards use cases where video is a “bonus content” rather than the main thing that people want to see may again bias towards the iOS user base, but experiment would be needed to check if and why this is the case. All that I say for now in this area is that specific examples may come with specific results.
And then there’s Fortune3, which is nothing less than an e-commerce company. Bias towards e-commerce was one of the main criticisms of StatCounter regarding the methodology of NetApplications, and in the specific case of mobile ecosystems (where, again, iOS users tend to have much more money to spend), it’s easy to see why it would be a problem.
Just as an aside, I don’t think that no matter what each of us says, we are ever going to agree on this matter. You have an Apple agenda that you feel an unhealthy need to push no matter how ridiculous it gets, and myself I find that company remarkably irritating for various reasons ranging from moral opinions to design philosophies. Because of this, and because we manipulate data that is as hard to measure, and thus far away from hard facts, as usage statistics, it appears to me that this discussion cannot go anywhere. So perhaps we should just switch to some other conversation subject which we can agree on, such having a good laugh at Microsoft’s attempts at going touchscreen.
Edited 2013-04-04 18:26 UTC
Exactly. iOS supports greater commercialisation and hence is a per capita a more effective platform. A platform is just something upon which other things stand and almost every one of those things that stand on a platform do so for commercial reasons. Android has been and remains a much weaker commercial platform and much flows from that. Platforms rise and fall, are successful or failures, are weaker or stronger, on the basis of the commercial activity they support. Currently iOS supports considerable more commercial activity per user than Android, therefore to a third party entity interested in commercialising some aspect of the various mobile platforms an iOS user is worth considerably more than an Android user.
Nonsense. An effective platform is one that makes it easy to get things done. You just described an expensive platform. Or profitable, depending on which side of the table you’re on. For you, it’s merely more expensive.
I think you are confusing why one chooses a platform for oneself and why one platform is a more successful platform in the world at large.
Think of it this way. One of the successes of the Windows platform was that it had a much larger developer base and hence better and more varied software. That was because Windows users out numbered Mac users and both sets of users had very similar per capita software purchasing profiles and thus the extra Windows users translated into the Windows platform being a large, much more lucrative and hence attractive platform for developers.
Now imagine a situation where Mac users spent on average, say, ten times as much as Windows users on software. Under those circumstances Mac would have equalled Windows as a commercial target for developers and the result would have been equal developer investment in each platform and Windows would have not had any software advantage
I am only using software as an example, in fact almost all additional benefits of any given platform ultimately flows from third party investment in that platform which in turn hinges on the commercial attractiveness of that platform. Remember also that we are talking about a mobile related commercial ecosystem which is already bigger than the PC commercial ecosystem and will grow much larger. Hundreds of billions are at stake. The commercial per capita utilisation rate of iOS is no small thing.
Yes, and you’re still wrong. Windows got where it is because it’s a powerful platform to Get Things Done (especially for developers), not because it’s got an app store. With iOS, there’s plenty of commercial activity because the platform is so poor. For just about everything, You Need an App for That. But wait, for so many things, there’s no app at all, because Apple won’t allow it. You can’t even get a half-decent keyboard, for instance. So it’s more expensive, and a less efficient platform (to get things done). It’s certainly not where you find innovation today.
For how much longer do you think Apple can keep up momentum based on being more expensive alone? It’s not how things work. It may be easier to sell things on iOS, but it’s certainly getting more and more difficult to find an excuse to buy. iOS isn’t a platform, it’s just a cheap warehouse with an expensive entrance fee. Oh, and you have to buy stuff, just to get by.
I’m pretty sure that’s not a viable way to run a warehouse, never mind a computing platform.
So much ignorance about tech history and about how platforms function in the real world and the real economy.
I guess I just don’t think that having greater commercial activity associated with a platform is a sign of weakness and that having less value in an ecosystem is a sign of strength.
Your use of the “effective” word here is a bit weird, as it seems that to you, the only thing that matters on a software platform is how much money can be extracted from users. Basically, what you’re saying here is that as far as computing works, users do not matter, they are just a bunch of mindless sheeps from which money can be pumped out as needed.
I do hope for Apple that it’s not how they are thinking. Because if having a lot of revenue per capita is all that determined the success of a software platform, then it would be OSX, not Windows, which would be the main desktop operating system today. Which is obviously not the case.
Let me explain my point.
You have strongly stressed the point that what you’re caring about is revenue per capita, and not global revenue. Mac users bring a lot of money to the Mac ecosystem simply by buying such expensive machines, and to do so, they must have a lot of money to spend in computers. So that money will likely go into more expensive Mac-related peripherals and software than those of the overall more resource-constrained Windows crowd.
Beyond that purchase step, Macs have long had a very poor freeware ecosystem, since they have neither the sheer user base of Windows nor the developer-centric ecosystem of other Unices. This means that on OSX, if you want to do something which the system is not good at, you pretty much have to pay for it, or satisfy yourself with low-functional demo versions. Perhaps the Mac App Store can help with that, but we won’t know until a few more decades.
So, in theory at least, the Mac platform had everything that you like and consider efficient. Expensive hardware, expensive software, rich users, and no freeware escape route. Yet the Windows platform has, in the end, come to dominate.
So, what could play a role in this turn of event, which should be surprising for you. Probably not Microsoft’s heavy-handed politics, since Apple have just as long of a juridic and PR arm. Probably not money either, since Apple make tons of it. So could it just be users?
-Due to the PC world’s more relaxed attitude towards OEMs, there is a broader hardware diversity, which means that the platform targets much more potential users. As a user, there is something for you in the PC world whether you have a high or low budget, and whether you are a bored accountant or a crazy gamer.
-With users come developers, since the will to develop software comes with the daily experience of an OS’ limitations, and since one cannot develop good software without having a machine to test it on.
-With developers comes software, both small freewares and cheap sharewares which have been written just for the sheer satisfaction of scratching an itch, and commercial stuff which is here to feed the kids.
-With software come more users, since if a platform can do more than the others AND is more comfortable to get into and deal with, then users will choose it.
It’s just a positive feedback loop, which sadly makes life much harder for new platforms and thus tends to lead to stagnation in the long run. Even in the commercial world, people tend to prefer the larger ecosystem when the difference becomes big enough. Because when you have lots of users on a platform, even if they spend less on the average, they tend to spend more as a whole in the long run. Which is what matters on a quarterly financial sheet.
Which is why when software exists for both OSX and Windows, the OSX version tends to be less polished, and also why Apple have to regularly buy new companies and force themselves to shut down their Windows products in order to stay relevant in the multimedia field, rather than having Mac users and developers spontaneously help them by building better products on their own.
Edited 2013-04-05 06:59 UTC
Uhh – no – that is not what I said. I am discussing platform performance as a platform, not from the perspective of the end user preferences.
A platform is precisely that – something upon which other things stand. It’s the other things that stand on the platform that add value to that platform. So much value can be added to a platform by that which stands upon it that, as was the case with Windows, the inherent shortcomings of the underlying OS for users can be out weighed by the value and benefits added by the third party additions that stand upon the platform. A platform could rest upon a beautifully designed OS but with nothing standing upon it it would function as a poor platform.
The key to how much stuff stands upon a platform is how much third parties add stuff to the platform (software, hardware, services, etc) which in turn is largely dictated by what commercial opportunities that platform offers. The commercial opportunity that a platform offers is mostly calculated financially, how many users and how much they spend on average as against the costs of operating on a given platform. iOS is easy to operate on (iTunes distribution, SDK kits and apps, limited number of form factors etc) and it’s high per capita spend means that it offers a greater commercial target even though in sheer numbers Android devices (mostly low end) out sell iOS devices.
I fear you have completely missed the point I was making. I didn’t realise how much of the basic stuff I had to explain to you. Put simply it’s per capita spend times the number of users that dictates the overall commercial size of a platform. As an example if every iOS user spends generates on average three times the amount of economic activity that an on average Android users generate then even if Android outsells iOS by three times the two platforms are, from the point of view of commercial third parties the same size. (In reality, based on the evidence I have seen, iOS user generate on average more than three times the economic activity of Android users.)
As for the stuff you wrote about Mac and Windows it feels like a discussion of the past. Desktop technology is no longer the driver of the tech industry. The key factor from any Mac users point of view is that for several years now there has been not a single significant disincentive to using the Mac platform. What Apple under Jobs achieved in relation to the desktop was great from a Mac users perspective, they didn’t beat Microsoft or Windows they just made them irrelevant. There was a period when if you were a Mac user you felt fear and active dislike of Microsoft and Windows, and perceived them realistically as a threat to the Mac. Now whatever Microsoft does with Windows is wholly irrelevant to the Mac experience.
He outright said once “I write to defend Apple” …I don’t get how one can be so consumed for 2-3 decades by a company, of all things.
People like Tony Swash swayed me against Apple, in a way – at some point I was kinda supportive of Apple and recommended its products …but I don’t want to be associated with some of its vocal supporters.
But… don’t you still use an iMac G4? ;p
PS. Thanks for pointing out that StatCounter introduced maps. “Mobile browser” is also a nice one: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-201304-201304-…
And I wonder if “screen resolution” ( http://gs.statcounter.com/#resolution-ww-monthly-201304-201304-map ) shows where people have misconfigured widescreen monitors :p
I still try to force myself to judge products separately from their creators and users on my side, but I’ll also be the first one to agree that it’s stupidly hard.
Not anymore, thankfully. My research team recently received a bunch of funding, so my supervisor bought himself a new MacBook Pro and donated the old one to me. I also used the opportunity to build myself a comfy desk with a large screen of adjustable height and some serious chair.
Oh, and of course I’ve ended up dual-booting Mint 13 Xfce on the thing too. It was a truly enlightening process, I just hope my mental sanity won’t suffer too much from what I’ve discovered about Apple’s hardware and firmwares along the way. Though as a PhD student and Linux user I’m probably a lost cause already!
Just love how the main screen resolution in SK is already 1080p by a large margin. Sounds like no matter how hard we try in other countries, the average Korean will always end up with the best Starcraft gaming rig
Edited 2013-04-07 13:28 UTC
One can say that’s what Tony Swash is very much arguing against, in a way, in this thread – judging platforms from the perspective of the economic potential of their users…
Edited 2013-04-07 14:01 UTC
There are a few things you need to do keep in mind when comparing hitslink and statcounter:
– I always get the impression Hitslink has more business-like websites as their customer, statcounter has less of that
– statcounter measures by pagevisits, hitslink by sessions. So if Chrome users are heavy Internet users by visiting many, many pages, they will show up higher
– Hitslink changes their statistics based on the ratio of users in a certain country. So if they measure on their US-customer websites that a lot of users from China use IE. They will proclaim a lot of users worldwide use IE.
Actually, both sites have sucky stats. StatCounter doesn’t weigh statistics from different countries, so a hit from someone in the US would count as, say, 50 hits in China.
StatCounter even admitted that they used flawed methodology, as did NetMarketShare a while ago.
Don’t trust either of them.
I don’t understand this geo weighting thing, actually: surely, these services would know where each hit that they receive on a website comes from, right?
Edited 2013-04-07 06:47 UTC
Competition means better products, Webkit was getting too dominant, totally owning mobile, and one ‘product’ dominating pretty much always leads to stagnation.
With this fork and and the upcoming Servo from Mozilla and Samsung we will finally have serious competition mobile, it’s a bit sad that Opera has given up their own engine though.
Furthermore, when no ‘player’ is dominant it means less risk of them abandoning standards as in a competitive field with many participants they would be the ‘odd one out’ rather than being able to push their incompabilities as ‘de facto standards’ through market share dominance.
Even better is that Blink, Servo, Webkit are all free and open source, which means that they can be adopted anywhere developers find need for them, and of course again be forked should someone come along with demands/goals that are not in line with that of the current projects.
Speaking of which, with Opera switching to Blink, are there any browsers out there using a proprietary engine other than Microsoft (triton)?
Yes, competition is great. As a web developer, this doesn’t make my work terribly harder — in fact, I embrace it because it gives me more permission to develop to standards and let the browsers do what they will. Of course, I still have to test on each platform and tackle minor show-stopper bugs, and that takes time. But the more rendering engines there are out there, the stronger the argument for standards-plus-progressive-enhancement becomes.
I have to take issue with this because again it is an idealogical viewpoint. Forgetting that every single browser has bugs (including Chrome with its new Engine).
Wherever possible I write standard compliant code. I try to write standard compliant CSS and X/HTML wherever possible. It isn’t always possible.
Unfortunately I don’t work for the W3C or WHATWG and the internet approval doesn’t pay my bills.
There is there this notion that all Web Developers should follow standards otherwise they are lazy/shit developers and they aren’t doing their job properly.
My employer pays me and I have to support the browsers with the highest percentage of page views. Standards support is entirely irrelevant to my employer and they pay my bills.
I find that there is real human factors involved in why code is the way it is and people seem to forget that.
I suggest Thom you read this post by Scott Hanselman.
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen99.aspx
Edited 2013-04-04 18:10 UTC
Ive found that people who hold on to these ludicrous notions of a standard web, or think that WebKit is a hallmark of standard compliance have a) never done web development, and/or b) forgot that when IE6 launched it was the most standards compliant browser.
Standards are not the problem, it is what web developers actually do, through no fault of their own. The pain trickles down from the W3C being slow, to browsers doing their own prefixed things, to developers having to choose between standard compliance and actually rendering on the screen.
This is entirely how I feel.
Any decent developer will try their best to do it the right way as well as possible until you have to put in a hack/bodge whatever you want to call it.
There are many situations that lead to suboptimal code. There are 3 or 4 that is to do with the developer themselves.
* The developer doesn’t know better and re-invents the wheel unaware of a built in solution.
* The developer is asked to produce something outside of their core skillset.
* The developer doesn’t have a clue and really shouldn’t be in the industry.
* Managerial and time constraints cause the developer to rush the job.
I find that especially on here that there is a lack of pragmatism from some of the comments and the articles, which I find frustrating.
My employer pays me to provide functionality that works well for our user-base. I write code that supports their browsers. If that happens to conform to standards that is excellent. If not I document my hack and why I did it and hope I can remove it with a later browser revision.
Edited 2013-04-04 18:23 UTC
I broadly agree with this sentiment. I strive to stick to web standards, but do so not because they’re magical, rather because it helps to have an ideal structure in your mind to keep you grounded during those long nights of buggering around with IE conditionals and linear bloody gradients*.
When it comes to standards the browser vendors are hyperventilating while the W3C is barely breathing.
* To get a linear gradient in CSS (from memory so probably not strictly accurate);
> IE filter (possibly two different versions),
> Old accentric Webkit prefixed linear gradient,
> Old Firefox prefixed linear gradient,
> Opera prefixed linear gradient,
> New ‘standard’ linear gradient which uses different angles than all previous ones, only supported by IE10 & latest FF.
Good riddance to browser specific prefixes.
Edited 2013-04-04 18:43 UTC
I still use PNG images, and divs. It is far easier to make a sprite and just call it the day.
But the current situation is ridiculous. Yes if you are making a simple website with nice block colours and straight borders you are alright … add in opacity and gradient effects and everything starts turning nasty.
The biggest problem is that many of those are hipster kids that were still using dippers while we were developing the first wave of web applications.
I love how my comment got voted down even though pretty much every comment that was made was in support somewhat.
OSNEWS For ya, get 10 upvotes for making a trite statement, say anything that actually reflects the truth about the situation. Get downvoted.
There’s nothing in your post that is provably inaccurate, trolling or off-topic.
I’m in two mind as to whether the new OSNews, when it comes, should keep comment voting. I won’t go into pros and cons here, but I do think that it should be made really plain — i.e. in the pop-up — that when you vote someone down it cannot be because you disagree with them.
Putting aside ‘Troll’ and ‘Off-topic’, if a post is ‘Inaccurate’ then the poster should definitely be called out on the specific inaccuracy, not just down-voted.
TBB Mate while I like your serious response.
I just had a rant as a bit of a stress release. Up-votes aren’t everything.
I was a little frustrated still.
TBB?
No, it is more that your reflexion about “this is the shit I have to do today in order to pay the bills” is nice, even tear-inducing, but it is also very short-sighted, and we are all going to pay the price one day or another of what you gained right now.
Standards are the only way to go, because practical, extensive, on-the-grounds experience says so, not because of some philosophical crap concocted in an ivory tower.
…..and now it’s at the fighting over the CD collection stage.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5490242
Well, no… quite clearly, one or two Google/Chromium devs are arguing with an Apple/Webkit2 dev over the multiprocess extensions. The Apple guy was actually part of the process and has first hand knowledge of the rational behind Webkit2, the Chromium guys are less well informed on the situation. I’m pretty much going to believe the guy who was actually part of the decision as to why it was made, and both the Chrome/Googlers conceded anyway.
Me too
I’m not sure… Apple’s behavior in the Webkit project has been pretty damn shady at times.
Not in this case. The guy in question has publicly identified himself as being an Apple Webkit2 developer *and* gone on record that they *did* speak to Google regarding the specific Chrome functionality being folded back in to Webkit and Google declined their request.
To be honest, this is an old criticism, and most of the so called “shady” Webkit development was early on when the project was publicly announced.
https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2013-April/024388.html
WebKit vs Chromium is old story: Since inception of Google Chrome.
This is 21 month old document:
“Chromium WebKit does not directly provide a multiprocess framework, rather, it is optimized for use as a component of a multiprocess application, which does all the proxying and process management itself. The Chrome team at Google did a great job at trailblazing multiprocess browsing with Chrome. But it’s difficult to reuse their work, because the critical logic for process management, proxying between processes and sandboxing is all part of the Chrome application, rather than part of the API layer.”
http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2
…so this is no wonder, that Google FORK WebKit.
They did it long time ago, just did not call it right name until now: FORK.
Edited 2013-04-05 10:01 UTC