 |
| “Mozilla -- and Brendan Eich specifically -- have held back the web as a platform for years.” (comment) | ||
| recommended by 1 user | 2013 | skatepark on: Why Mozilla Matters | browsers | original thread | | ||
| skatepark on Feb 15, 2013 | on: Why Mozilla Matters | view on HN | ||
| One user recommended this comment. What they said: |
|
grizzles Mar 22, 2015 | on: Ask HN: Are you satisfied with the state of the Web? What… | context
No. Steam and the (Apple, Google, etc) App Stores exist for a reason - Mozilla's colossal failure. I can't count the number of times I have been out somewhere with my top of the line android phone, loaded a responsive HTML5 webpage and then finally gave up after spending way too much time trying to get to the data that I was after. The mobile app experience is terrible. Static compiled code will always run way faster than dynamic languages. Mozilla's ideology doesn't allow compiled code, even though that's basically what asm.js is all about. The smartest and best thing Mozilla or some new browser vendor could do would be if they embraced android . The amount of quality engineering that has went into building that modern, ultra lean framework is epic. Imagine if someone made it so that anyone could do the equivalent of <html><object apk="my.apk" /></html>. That would be pretty great. Ofc for all sorts of cultural reasons it probably won't happen. Imagine Microsoft open sourced windows xp in the 90s, and no one bothered to do anything with it. That would be the equivalent of today's situation. PS Google can obviously do it - but maybe they are leaving it shut off because according to their current calculations the App Store revenue is better than having dominant browser market share. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush... A thread with some great commentary on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5226309 |
Mozilla -- and Brendan Eich specifically -- have held back the web as a platform for years.
Brendan Eich is myopically focused on the DOM and JavaScript monoculture -- rather than the underlying potential of the web: a standardized and completely open application platform.
I assume this is due to his own vested interests and personal investment as the author of JavaScript, but it has been incredibly damaging to the web as a whole. For Google to push anything forward (NaCL, PNaCL, dart), they need at least one other major browser vendor to join them. Apple and Microsoft have vertically integrated native application markets, and have no reason to further the development of the web. That leaves Mozilla.
If Mozilla genuinely cares about providing an open application platform (ala Firefox OS), they'll put Brendan Eich out to pasture and focus on moving past his stranglehold on JavaScript+HTML.