Web Technologies Need an Owner

"Let's face facts: the Web will never be the dominant platform."

Hewitt's post hinges on that statement, presented without supporting evidence. But actually the Web is already dominant among the platforms Hewitt mentions (Web, Windows, iOS, and Android).

Relevant stats:

Web - 1.7 billion users as of July, given that 880 million people go to the single busiest website publicly measured by Google, and this site has a "reach" of 51 percent. (You can distill this same total from any of the smaller sites listed via simple division.) http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/

iOS - 38 million people as of April http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/04/19/a-look-at-ipad-users-...

Android - 24 million people as of April http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/04/19/a-look-at-ipad-users-...

Windows - 400 million Windows 7 license sold as of this month, the most popular version of Windows going. http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive... Even if piracy doubles total Windows 7 installs, you're still not halfway to total web users (which means trying to count creaky old XP as the same platform won't get you there, either).

Hewitt is a smart guy, ex Facebook, built their iOS client, so clearly he has a thought a lot about platforms. But he undermines his arguments about the future when he is incorrect about the present.

I am a fan of Joe Hewitt but this is crazy talk, especially coming from one of the heroes of the Mozilla revolution. It's as if he doesn't remember those dark days long ago when he was working on Firefox in what seemed like a lost cause, Microsoft was the defacto standard setter and single-handedly drove innovation in the web, it was awful. We must never go back to those days. I know Joe imagines some benevolent dictator or consortium, but it's just too risky. There's too much power in controlling the web and power corrupts. Look at what's happened to ICANN with the power they've been given. No, we must keep the power spread out, preferably we'd have more browser makers not fewer. The slow pace might be frustrating to the innovators on the cutting edge like Joe, but it's the only way.

> Browser vendors are innovating in some areas, but they are stalled by the standards process in so many areas that is impossible to create a platform with a coherent, unified vision the way Apple has with Cocoa or the way Python has with Guido.

Nobody actually wants that web; we'd have somebody's "coherent, unified vision" circa 1995, with a handful of updates every year or two. I like my web as a fierce competition between browser vendors to desperately catch up to their peers in terms of speed and features.

While there are a couple of minor bits I agree with, overall I think Joe's off on this one.

The web has five organizations pushing really hard on it at this point (Mozilla [my employer], Google, Apple, Microsoft and Opera). The web almost had HP. We'll see what happens with WebOS.

The one part of his article that I somewhat agree with is that under the guidance of several entities (and lots and lots of people) the web may not have quite the same coherence as, say, Cocoa. I'm not sure that will be a problem.

"The Web has no one who can ensure that the platform acquires cutting edge capabilities in a timely manner (camera access, anyone?)."

Five years ago, even two years ago, would anyone even be questioning adding camera access to the web? I think there's been a huge shift in terms of how people view web technology.

gmail was the original "holy crap" app that started us building information apps with better user experiences. It proceeded from there to add things like canvas and svg and, more recently, webgl and audio, making apps well beyond "information apps" possible.

The "Boot to Gecko" (B2G) project which Mozilla kicked off a couple of months back is going to push quite firmly on adding all of the APIs needed for a modern mobile device. And, I might add, in conjunction with others in the standards bodies who are interested in such things.

And what about the Metro announcement from last week? Sure, Microsoft's ideal scenario is to build on the web and lock people into APIs that are tied to their platform... but, seriously, wouldn't people just write shims? Wouldn't Microsoft ultimately have to follow the standard because they are not quite the monopoly they were before?

The end of his post is telling:

"The closest thing we have to that today is Chromium, but they have no foothold in mobile and are likely years away from having one. And so I end on a sad note"

So, the crux of it would seem to be that Joe sees the world going mobile. I certainly agree. I got my start on a TRS-80 model III, and the stuff happening in mobile is the most exciting stuff I've seen in my entire career.

I've been working with the web for 16 years. There has never been a time in the past when so much effort was being put into pushing the web-as-a-platform forward. It's huge and I, for one, think the best is yet to come.

>>"Browser vendors are innovating in some areas, but they are stalled by the standards process in so many areas that is impossible to create a platform with a coherent, unified vision the way Apple has with Cocoa or the way Python has with Guido."

Personally I don't think he has anything meaningful to say on this particular topic. Hard to tell because he can't even keep his examples consistent. "... the way Apple has with [a product] or the way Python has with [a person]."

>>"Even if WebKit was the only game in town, it would still be crucial for it to have competent, sympathetic, benevolent leaders."

This statement, as well as others in the article and his apparent association with Apple-related things makes me wonder if he has this point of view because of the whole Steve Jobs thing they have/had going on. The fact that he doesn't even mention the W3C or the WHATWG shows his point of view is skewed.

I don't understand the argument. Joe is saying that the web stack (that is, HTTP/HTML/JS/CSS) deserves to be saved. And that the only way to save it is to have somebody own it.

But what makes the web stack special if someone owns it? Why is it worth saving? Let's face it, if you actually bought The Web(tm) from a vendor, you'd ask for your money back.

I disagree that the web tech should be owned by a company. It seems to me the "committee" has done a much better job the Microsoft alone, so far.

But if there was to be such company, it should clearly be Google. Both Apple and Microsoft don't really have their interests aligned with the web. They make money from hardware or from selling OS licenses. By default, that means that their #1 priority is to do that - and in many cases at the expense of the web. If they would own it, and they would ever have a conflict of interest between the web and their main platform, they would choose their main platform.

But Google have their interests much more aligned with the web. They care about making the web faster, more advanced, and so on, because they indirectly make money from that.

But of course, even Google owning the tech would bring it's own set of problems, and this will happen with any company owning it. Any company who would own it would "corrupt" it in some way, if only to be better for their own products or less good for the others.

That's why the Internet is decentralized in many ways, and it's the beauty of the Internet. We've had many closed platforms before, but none like the Internet. And the Internet is the greatest one by far, and I doubt it's by coincidence.

If you look at other "cross-platform" technologies, like Flash for example, they ultimately fail, because a single owner can't make sure it works on absolutely every platform and browsers, with no problems. It requires too much work.

And again, that's one of the beauties of the web technologies, that every browser has to do their own implementation of the spec as good as possible, and compete with each other for that.

One more thing. Yes, iOS and Android did help bring back to popularity the native applications, but this is not an "ultimate" win. It's just a cycle. We've had native apps when the PC's emerged, then we had web-apps becoming popular. Then the smartphones emerged with slow processors (compared to PC's) and native apps started being popular again. But HTML5 is already starting to become popular on mobiles, and with at least 3-4 platforms, you can be sure the web will "win", at least this cycle, until a new low-performance tech comes along and native apps are back.

Ultimately, I think there is some truth to what Joe is saying. We have already seen the web stagnate under the reign of IE6 - almost a decade of no real innovation.

As web developers, we are limited by what the browsers are capable of. That's not to say we don't desire more... hence why a good proportion of devs and designers are using the very latest technology even though it hasn't been fully ratified by it's standards bodies.

People _want_ to innovate on the web. With every single one of the other platforms, the web comes for free - they have a browser and a working HTTP stack.

I think the challenge is protecting users. The fact that web is such a widely-used platform means even small changes to the supporting technologies can have vast security repercussions.

It's not ownership that's the problem - it's fear. What we need is a browser vendor that's prepared to stick it's neck out, to be daring with the technologies.

Also fear of accountability... as soon as you become the leader in the browser wars you become accountable for a huge proportion of the world's web experience. This was why IE stagnated.

So as a browser vendor, who do you cater for? The billions who just use your software, or the few-million who want to innovate on it?

This is why taking ownership is not an option. I would argue that browser vendors would actually prefer to have an equal proportion of users. If Android and iOS had that sort of reach, they would face the same problem. The difference being that some platforms actually make more money out of a wider reach.

This changes the dynamic somewhat - of course the owners of those technologies want to innovate, it's a huge income stream. But if someone took charge of the web, who would get all of the money? Who would pay?

So there's little incentive for ownership and in fact the last few decades have proven that there doesn't need to be ownership of the web to make it work. All we need is someone to stick their neck out - just like Apple did with the iPhone.

This is sort of a cleaned-up version of his string of tweets from a year back:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/30/joe-hewitt-web-development/

One thing these discussions seem to be slipping into is "the web" vs. "native" while skipping the fact that "native" is not a thing, it's a collection of (competing!) things... and they all also run web apps.

Until one native platform captures more usage than the browser, which is impossible unless platforms start to drop the browser, the web will by definition be dominant if dominance is measured by addressable market.

What’s the W3C then?

It's kind of amusing to read an article complaining about the walled garden of Facebook, and at the same time demanding central ownership for web technology.

It's not only a possibility that a centralized web will be bad, it's inevitable. A central owner has _no_ incentive for improvement. The only reason e.g. Cocoa keeps improving is because it needs to compete.

Why can't it be both native and web apps sharing the application space together? Each have their own strengths and one does not necessarily have to dominate over the other. There will always be use cases where a native app makes more sense and vice-verse. There is enough depth and breadth in the applications domain to allow both of them to thrive.

The Web doesn't have an owner, it has several. Competing against it other. That's why it is thriving.

It had no owner and it suffered when MS had 95% of the Web's market share, cause MS's platform is Windows, not the Web. Controlling it was MS's way of keeping Windows relevant.

Isn't this a little bit like asking for the days when IE6 was the ultimate in web technology back again? Look how that turned out.

Well, I agree that WebKit should probably be adopted in Internet Explorer, so Microsoft can once again innovate in the browser space while helping everyone. Maybe they should join Google and Apple in embracing open source software and committing their changes into a free project. Because then everyone wins, including Microsoft. No more IE6 nonsense.

We always have this question of centralized / decentralized. Whether it's social networks, or government, or the web. Flash was a centralized platform, and so what? Many people complain that iTunes and Flash etc. are not super accessible, and also that companies which exert influence tend to lock up their customers (except maybe Google and Yahoo :) The best example of this when it comes to the desktop was Microsoft. They wanted to get everyone into their ecosystem. Now Apple is the new Microsoft.

I personally think that "open source" should always be a competitor to proprietary stuff. Whatever the centralized effort would be, it should be open source. I personally think javascript-based technologies like the browser, jQuery, like PhoneGap and like Node.js are going to become more and more important. So what we really need is a standard ECMAScript that is implemented correctly everywhere, and we're pretty much there.

The web has already crushed a bunch of 'owned' platforms that had strong-willed, deep-pocketed stewards. A good run for iOS, and a few features where the web lags, doesn't change the immense power of the web commons platform. The things proven-out by adjacent proprietary platforms will be assimilated, in a few years' time — plenty of time for multivendor adoption and mass-market usership.

(It won't be standards bodies that lead the way — they never do. At best they can codify consensus after the fact, and lightly shame laggards. Instead a rotating selection of innovators, in different categories, will drive change.)

I think he is underestimating the quantum leap that web technologies have made in the past 2 years.

Between canvas, audio & audio data, video tag, css3, websockets, webworkers, webgl, touchscreen events, and new server tech like nodejs... there are now so many new API's to learn and work with that most web developers haven't even started to catch up yet. There's a lot of room here, the capabilities of the permutations of these technologies together will take years to fully realize. It will take years to write libraries to build the power-features necessary to really take this stuff to the next level.

The power to build a amazing new apps is now here. It took 10 years for this leap to happen. Just give it some time for web developers to catch up.

Isn't this similar to what happened with opengl (industry consortium, no clear driver) vs directx (ms owns; highly motivated; actually pretty decent a couple revs in)? Carmack seems to now find DirectX superior [1]. Note I'm not a graphics programmer so this is just my superficial understanding of the matter.

The quote from AMD's dev relations manager is damning: "AMD's GPU worldwide developer relations manager, Richard Huddy, agrees. He added that the actual innovation in graphics has been driven by Microsoft in the last ten or so years. 'OpenGL has largely been tracking that, rather than coming up with new methods,' he said. 'The geometry shader, for example, which came in with Vista and DirectX 10, is wholly Microsoft's invention in the first place.'" [1 also]

[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/news/john-Carmack-DirectX-OpenGL...

Truth hurts doesnt it!

I think Joe is spot on.The web is already miles behind native mobile platforms.Personally I can vouch for iOS.The kind of stuff you can do on iOS now just in terms of UI is just impossibly hard to do with HTML5 or any other web platform.

But then if you think about it.Its not surprising at all.Of course you will have a much more power on a native platform than a web platform which is built on top of a native platform.

In my opinion in the future you will have a browser and type in a url but a native app will open in the browser window.These native apps will be built for different platforms.The web app will be shown by default if a native app hasnt been developed for that platform.