Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too

To be charitable, though, I guess what most people mean by "NaCl is not open like Javascript" is that it's low-level--compiled binaries instead of readily-accessible script. And that's true; it exposes less to the user--and although it would be perfectly possible for every NaCl module to be debuggable through the browser with embedded symbols, just like Javascript is, it hasn't happened yet.

But you know, NaCl isn't for that, as far as I can tell. It's not a thing to write the business-domain logic of your web app in. It's far too clunky to develop with, if that were the intent.

Instead, what NaCl seems perfectly suited as, to me, is an architecture for writing pluggable scripting-language virtual machines. In other words, to give freedom of choice to use a backend other than V8 to write your web app against. Java-in-the-browser, Ruby-in-the-browser, Erlang-in-the-browser; any of those would be possible, and just as transparent+useful as Javascript-in-the-browser (in fact, V8 itself could be lifted out to being just another NaCl module.) And since the site would deliver the "runtime" for the scripts itself[1], any compatible browser could pull it down and execute it, instead of waiting for IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc. to all adopt the new language before anyone can start using it (a Sisyphean wait.)

There's already one perfect example of how this all would work: Adobe Flash. Flash is, in Chrome at least, an NaCl (PPAPI) module. Now, Flash isn't a shining example of openness--but using a custom interpreter is not where it goes wrong.[2] You can easily imagine Flash without that problem: a world where you can have <script type="text/actionscript"> and the Flash runtime will reach in and execute that code, just like the Javascript runtime reaches in and executes your JS.

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[1] This doesn't necessarily have to be true, though. The browser can come with default language runtime modules, and then the webapp can suggest a site-specific runtime module, but the browser doesn't have to take that suggestion. Which is exactly the way a thing that is considered "open" on the web works: fonts! Think of an NaCl module as being no more or less than a custom @font-face rule for the execution of a script.

[2] Flash goes wrong by embedding its programs into proprietary binary asset packages [SWFs]; goes wrong again by drawing everything onto a single canvas, not allowing for anything like DOM manipulation; and then goes wrong a third time by having only one de-facto implementation with no open standard.

Something similar could be said about Dart, but there the language itself is not so interesting (merely not insane). The VM is potentially the language-independent bytecode and stdlib in a browser we've all been waiting for.

While Google have been behavin evil-ly lately, in particular related to Google+, NaCl and Dart are not examples of this.

No, they didn't. Google started Dart because they had a bunch of Java programmers who were having good success building JavaScript web apps such as Gmail with Google Web Toolkit. They thought to formalize it with Dart instead of using a hacked up Java dev environment. I have a client who needed a web app fast, so I took a chance on Dart and did it in half the time. The client doesn't even know I'm doing it in Dart. I'm shipping the minified js file which works on all modern browsers because the Dart team set out to bring jQuery up to a higher level. There's a bright side to all the dislike and misinformation about Dart though, because it gives me a competitive edge.

I don't remember them saying that. I remember them saying that JS has insurmountable performance problems, but that's very different from saying that JS is as fast as it can get.

As for asm.js, it's another approach to the same problem. An insurmountable problem for a VM usually means that there's a limit to how well the VM can reason about arbitrary code. The clever thing about asm.js is that it gets around that by just restricting the language rather than inventing a new one. The clever thing about Dart is that you would rather write in it than kill yourself.

And yes, of course asm.js is meant to be written by compiling via emscripten, but that means trading far more dynamicness for speed than you would with Dart.

Even if Google cancelled Chrome tomorrow, the entire open web community would owe them a debt of gratitude for administering the coup de grace to IE's reputation as the only significant desktop browser and pushing Mozilla to heavily invest in performance and the user experience – they cared about them before but as we can see now, setting your goal as “better than IE” was still too low.

There were a bunch of nice things which happened around that time – Firefox, Safari, iPhone, etc. – but the thing which really opened the desktop market moving was Chrome shipping a radically fast, user-friendly browser which you could install even on typical corporate IT-mismanaged desktops and which you never needed to think about updating. Web standards advocates had spent years preaching using standards first and fallbacks for compatibility and related ideas but the rise of Chrome seems to be what got the mainstream web developer to really internalize that idea and start coding with the assumption that the browser would improve before they revisited a site.

I get that HN has this startup culture where creative people come up with "cool things" to sell, and are product oriented rather than profit oriented (though a lot of them seem to love the idea of selling the business off to a big business like Google, walking away with the pocket change, and watching it flounder into obscurity under corporate oversight...) but big business isn't run by people who have product vision, they have profit vision, and these companies are the amalgam of hundreds of managers and overseers that don't have collective vision and can thus only drive it towards what they can all agree on - making higher returns. It happens to the best of them.

There appears to be a really prevalent attitude here on HN that you can either really love or really hate a company. If you like it, you use all their stuff. When the switch in your mind flips and you know you must instantly start hating them, it means you must stop using every instance of their software, whether it's related or not to whatever your issues were.

It seems kind of silly.

+1 this nails it. I do share content links a few times a month on twitter and g+ but basically I want to read interesting stuff.

I have also started to realize that I rely too much on HN and Prismatic - nice sources of interesting material, but still limited. This appropriate shit storm over google moving to a walled g+ garden has increased my use (again) of RSS.

IETF standards have a history of longevity, and I suspect this format will be around a very long time.

I also now prefer paid services. Evernote and Dropbox, for examples, are clearly motivated to support me because I am a customer not a product.

And the best part about Reader (and now The Old Reader, for me)? The comments come from people I mostly know or are vouched for by people I do, so there's a distinct lack of inane Reddit-y comments.

    HN and Facebook are enough for me.

If you expect readers to check your site daily, that doesn't scale very well. I follow 200+ blogs; I would never be able to remember/bookmark all of them to visit regularly.