Apple Is Holding Web Back with Underpowered iOS Browsers: Google Engineer
wccftech.com
wccftech.com
There are so few impositions they've created. On the other hand, they are creating wonderful fantastic improvements. Good generic sensor capabilities. Service Workers, so we can do offline web.
People bitch endlessly & i think they are just so full of shit. I don't mind luddites, but at least be informed luddites. The web needs to grow, needs to get better. It's the best tech humanity as a whole has, that isn't captured, and complaints that investing in making the web better "put barriers to entry" as you say in place are uninformed & irresponsible.
The big thing most of the complainers don't seem to have any respect for is that very very very few of the improvements to the web are required. Almost all specifications are orthogonal. Some browsers will support the feature, some wont. That is ok! The web is designed for that! It works! Just because Google implements awesome sweet new super capabilities that rock doesn't mean the bar has to be that high. That's not what the web is about.
The "BS" features are, actually, incredible. Watching Mozilla & Apple team up to bitch & complain that ambient light sensor is some huge threat? What a bunch of losers!! Such bellyaching! Sorry but it's cool that my personal website can offer the option to show a night/dusk/dawn/day view, it's just stylistically cool. Willing yourself to see only the harm, to only regard features as bad is a tragedy. Denying the web capabilities, calling them BS is so overplayed, so narrow minded. A small & sad for us. It's just a tragic thing to see, & so pervasive, from such a grouchy salty segment of the world. I want to call it astoturfing but I it's probably all too often genuine & truthful griping, just a narrow view that some old fashioned view of the web as being a small, narrow, for only what we already know thing is The One True Way and that anyone doing more is an Abomination. There's extreme conservatism in software engineering, extreme fear. It's a sad thing to have to endure, such narrow view. The web doesn't deserve this view.
Meanwhile, here's this operating system which refuses to allow anyone to access the web in any way what so ever except from Officially Approved internally developed (& tragically behind) browsing technology.
To try to lay blame at Google's feet, to try to turn this narrative like this from how malicious & how holding things back Apple has been, to casting emotionally ladden harping-upon-fear anti-progress scaremongering is DISINFORMATION. This is a malicious enemy against progress that seems pervasively present, highly organized, but which also has marshalled endless disenfranchized salty narrow minded geeks to fight hte battle for this misinformation. It's endlessly frustrating seeing Google continually slandered. There are some semi-dubious works they do. FLoC looks bad. But look at the alternatives that the ad industry is doing, where they are building cross site super cookies & spreading information in unblockable fashion. Look at how easy it would be to block or adjust FLoC as a user, to rewrite the header, to deny the data. Most of the specs go through the trustable, respectable w3c reviews with little serious objection, because they make sense, because they are straightforward advances. The arguments against Google's web development efforts are hot air, are built on general fear & misunderstanding, in 99.99% of cases. I'm so done with it. It's hurting us. The uninformed, slanderous, irrepsonsible, unqualified Google slandering? As bad as Apple's iron fisted cruel monopoloy & their long long long long long war against the web.
Well, some of us would prefer less capabilities, no service workers, and the web sticking to documents and simple interactions, which work well offline or not - and good, native or cross-platform+native GUI libs for actual apps.
Instead we get more "shoehorn every kind of app into a web page" innovations.
It's "reinventing the wheel, worse and in several layers removed from the road" sold as some kind of betterment of technology.
That's how you get GB's lost and the fans spinning, for doing what we could do on a Pentium in 1999 with no CPU utilization.
treating the web as a competitor which must be restrained in order to allow your horse to win is unfair.
sure we should do ok with native too. but making everyone use native because you a priori decide no online systems may possibly be allowed to ever be feature competitive? that's shady.
this is exactly the anticompetitive struggle apple & now weirdly mozilla are waging against the web. this perspective is the authoritarian "you may not compete" holding us back bias. you can have your platform but don't make this a zero sum game, don't insist you have exclusive claim to featurefulness.
your positive desires for your interests are valid. don't join with apple in holding back competition for your own interests. don't tell online systems/the web they have to stay small & non threatening to your preferred alternative. that's what's been going on. it's not pretty.
google puts no locks on your devices. the actual vaudevillian shit show horror monsters you failed to properly identify are the carriers & device manufacturers, which are in cahoots to maim & limit devices.
that's not Google's fault. buy a phone or chromebook from Google & it will give you the owner a fair shake as such if you want.
notably chromecast & Android nearby share are excempt from this respectability, are viciously proprietary. but I can't think of a simgle other major consumer device designer doing anywhere remotely near as much good. it's the jerks taking that design & locking it down that are fucking scum. fix your anger, aim true. google is consistently white knighting the everliving shit out of the situation, best as they can.