Am I missing something to think it is insane a kitchen appliance manufacturer fund such core dev work instead of Apple ?
There are downsides to only having Google/Apple/Mozilla participating in this process, and it's that (regardless of whether you think they have good or bad intentions) they are extremely insular.
There are dangers to this as well of course. We don't want things getting derailed or worsened just because it makes life more convenient for some company somewhere. But in general I suspect it's good for more stakeholders to be getting their hands dirty engaging with both the standards processes and the minutia of actual browser development. They had a problem, they gave money to developers to fix it, and it got fixed with approval from upstream. In terms of Open Source, a pretty clear success story to me. We should encourage this.
A patch like the layer based SVG engine is imposssible to maintain by a single company - e.g. Vorwerk, downstream, for an extended period of time. You want to be able to follow upstream (e.g. for security updates), and that's hard when you change a piece of the core engine with your own stuff.
To suceed, you _need_ to work upstream :-)
It's no different to Valve hiring CodeWeavers to implement new things in the Linux kernel to advance their efforts with Proton. Steam isn't in the kernel development space, but it behooves them to improve the kernel with features that are useful to more than just themselves, since features that are _only_ useful to them are likely to be rejected.
Is there no alternative for what they're using it for? How much extra money does this use bring in? Who managed to convince management to do this and how did they do it?
(I also imagine it's not so much a critical note as it is a "wow, I'd really like to understand the economics of this". It is for me.)
Honestly, this sort of thing is more effective marketing to me than any communication strategy. In brand awareness and "employer-ability".
And yes of course we did consider that this might attract more like-minded fellows who are eager to build great products with great colleagues than our „corporate job advertisement“ ^^
I had the assumption that efficient SVG rendering in Safari was critical and a UX bottleneck to work on from an Apple perspective, but maybe Apple hardware makes it moot.
Therefore for embedded devices using WebKit/Linux GTK/WPE ports we see a huge improvment with the layer based engine. Also macOS/iOS benefits though -- animations are even faster, and you don't easily run into problems, when animating parts of a complex document. It's shown in the video linked in the article at the end: > 20% frame rendering time improvement on an already quite efficient rendering pipeline (Safari / macOS using CoreGraphics on M1 machine).
That's actually how progress gets made - by people doing thankless work in obscurity. Then opportunists usually take that effort, make it fit an existing industry and charge whatever the market will bear.
It'd all be fine if the middlemen didn't then proceed to claim greatness, insight and ingenuity, but they do (because then older middlemen give them money to replicate their success).
This social structure is quite bad because it makes people think the middlemen are capable of creating value through their 'insight', without people who did unsexy, hard, thankless work prior.
Anyhoo :)
Ah, you crystallized something for me. Thanks!
This is why companies like Google and Microsoft are big contributors to Linux: They add features they care about.
As for why companies care about upstreaming: It’s not even because they’re so kind (though FOSS contributions are good marketing) - it just tends to be easier than maintaining a private fork.
The biggest limit is resources. SVG is too big to be implemented by a lone wolf working for love alone, and too diverse in application for a tech company to embrace for the length of time and breadth of focus required.
This is a welcome development that validates the W3C model in a positive, constructive way.
TBL would be pleased I imagine.
So they mostly suck is what I hear you saying
Apple has allegedly spent billions on the development of a car, yet could not spend what was probably $100K of consultancy to fix this issue.
Still, FAANGS have trillions, so why not, you might wonder, splash a drop here or there?
The reason in practice is that to get any significant dev adopted in a FAANG is a competitive process with career advancement at stake.
Only so many projects can level up year after year, because there are limited eyes and ears at each successive level that approve funding.
"I contributed some highly impactful performance improvements for a blender."
"For Blender?"
"No, for a blender."
It’s a great development and the key to open standards success. Not, of course, that a kitchen appliance manufacturer stepped up, but that any outsider was interested and willing to contribute to a general computing tech stack.
For a thousand flowers to bloom, the bird must leave the nest.
This is not a good look for Apple IMO. I completely dropped iOS support for an app I made because it used SVG's and clogged up every iPhone. It's a serious issue.
The world just doesn't work that way. There's a shortage of talent out there, and they often don't want to work for the richest players.
If faster SVG graphics were an impediment to Apple’s business it would likely have been prioritised and fixed by them.
I assume Apple didn't implement this change in-house because they don't need higher-performance SVG rendering.