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Comment by ootachi | Hacker News Reader

Recently Google has shown little interest in working with others; witness Dart (which essentially nobody but Google wants) and NaCl (which no other browser manufacturer wants).

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There's also SPDY and WebM, which certainly both have shown to be desirable outside of Google.

Sorry but I don't see that as them not showing interest in working with others at all. There is a NaCL plugin for firefox written by Google, in both case the specs a open and the code in WebKit is open source. They can't force others into using their stuff. They've been proactive in taking in Firefox's new tech like WebGL and they killed their own effort (O3D) in the process(I depended on O3D for one of my work projects but they did make the transition pretty painless by rewritting O3D's api on top of WebGL). There are many more examples.

First of all, NaCl is now Pepper-only, so it is no longer compatible with Firefox. Firefox uses the NPAPI, not the Pepper API. Pepper is itself an instance of Google not showing interest in working with the other browser manufacturers. The other browser manufacturers considered it unnecessary to add two incompatible plugin APIs when the NPAPI already exists and could just be extended.

Second, the position of every other browser manufacturer is that NaCl is undesirable because (a) it's not compatible with JavaScript, so it requires another language runtime and (b) that it locks the Web into x86 and ARM. As bzbarsky of Mozilla posted here [1], if Google had made and pushed NaCl a decade ago, the iPhone would be unable to browse the web. Google ignored the other browser manufacturers' concerns and are now pushing NaCl to gain a competitive advantage.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3391747

I appreciate your reply. As far as the Pepper API my understanding is that it was an extension to NPAPI to improve it, not an attempt at creating an incompatible API. I can't find any source on why Mozilla decided to not use it. From the Pepper wikipedia page it looks like some of the goal of Pepper would be very useful to every browser.

You write software, right?

Sometimes the user doesn't know they want something until they see it in front of them.

So should Google be working with other browser manufacturers or not? It seems like there's a double standard here.

The option for other vendors to implement those features has not been removed from the table. Unlike something like ActiveX, these companies have a choice to implement, even if they dont want to.

Firefox could have implemented ActiveX, of course. The spec wasn't a secret.

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