No it isn't; if you can't get Microsoft and Apple on board, it won't shift. It'll take more than Mozilla and Google cooperating to replace JS.
That's ridiculous. Mozilla is willing to stick their neck out there implementing a mobile phone operating system, but trying to deploy a sane runtime environment to replace JavaScript is just too risky?
Meanwhile, native mobile and desktop keep growing, and growing, and the web as an application platform loses out, because none of the native platform vendors are quibbling about whether they can convince themselves to ever do something different than what they were doing before.
No, the situation makes it a reality; Mozilla doesn't control Apple or Microsoft.
If they're willing to accept that risk, by comparison, how large of a risk is trying to push through a better standardized browser execution environment, with Google's cooperation?
God forbid they succeed, and we finally have a competitive application platform.
You mean, like Google, who continually pushes to do exactly what I've described here, only to be stymied by:
- Apple, who has no reason to support the web as competitive to their native platform.
- Microsoft, same.
- Mozilla, who refuses to consider that there might be a world beyond HTML/CSS/JS because they believe those specific technologies are intrinsic qualities of the web, and thus central to their mission of supporting the web.
Looks like the only people I disagree with are the Mozilla camp. Microsoft and Apple have different priorities, and Google is continually frustrated by exactly what I've described here.
Reality. Imagine that.
Imagine that.
Mobile is growing hand-over-fist and web apps developers are still arguing about whether they're fast enough to compete, and whether we could possibly maybe actually move past HTML/CSS/JS sometime in this decade.
It's ridiculous, and you claim it's "reality". Fine, your reality sucks, and there's no inherent reason why it has to win ... and it might not.
Mobile has gone from a side-show farmed out to consulting organizations to a mainstream in-house development effort, and the organizations themselves have shifted management and priorities accordingly.
It used to be that almost everyone had a web engineering organization in-house, even non-technology companies. That is changing. Companies like the NYTimes have gone from being grossly unable to manage mobile efforts and farming their work out to subpar contractors, to straight-up building a top-quality team of mobile developers.
Here's the tricky thing about that, too. Those developers, by the nature of where they work in the technology stack, are already quite versatile, and can choose technology solutions outside of the web stack. The problem that most organizations faced originally was that their web departments were a mono-culture and couldn't adapt.
So now you have companies that can and are building technology outside the web, and that means that the network effects that existed before are being torn down. The web tried to leap onto the application bandwagon, and the web failed. Now other technologies are taking over that space.
Who are these development organizations who truly enjoy maintaining five different apps for all the major desktop and mobile platforms and who are aren't going to make the jump as soon as HTML5 delivers everything they need?
Obviously there will always be applications (antivirus, encryption, etc.) for which a browser is poorly suited. But this percentage will never be bigger than it is today.
When will that be, exactly? The promise has been a long time coming, and in the meantime, the constitution of the industry is shifting away from a web myopia.
Next Thursday, 7:39 PM PDT time. Go outside and look at the sky.
> The promise has been a long time coming,
Indeed.
> and in the meantime, the constitution of the industry is shifting away from a web myopia.
I'm sure there are individual companies that fit that description, but I don't see it from where I sit. Here's an example of one of the classic big native platform apps doing stuff on the web. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/
> the reality is that proprietary application platforms are taking over the application market
That doesn't even make sense as proprietary application platforms have always owned the application market.
You're asserting that there hasn't been a significant management and hiring shift in engineering departments over the past 5 years, moving away from what became a web monoculture in the post-90s environment, from roughly 2000-2005?
> That doesn't even make sense as proprietary application platforms have always owned the application market.
So you admit the web is ill-suited to serve as an application platform, and is failing to acquire traction in that space despite considerable but ill-focused efforts to the contrary?
> You're asserting that there hasn't been a significant management and hiring shift in engineering departments over the past 5 years, moving away from what became a web monoculture in the post-90s environment, from roughly 2000-2005?
I asserted no such thing, learn to read.
> So you admit the web is ill-suited to serve as an application platform, and is failing to acquire traction in that space despite considerable but ill-focused efforts to the contrary?
I admit? What kind of stupid opening is that? Show me where I said anything about the web serving as a great application platform over native apps.
You know what, never mind; you're an argumentative ill tempered child who doesn't know how to have a discussion properly. Have a nice day.
One of us has stuck to discussing the topic, the other, discussing the person. Good day.
There are far far worse systems for evolving widely used platforms.
That's fine, but perhaps it would behoove Mozilla to not participate in dooming the web as a competitive application platform simply due to a misguided belief that the web is defined by HTML/CSS/JS?
The problem with HTML5 is it was designed by committee for displaying documents not dynamic apps. While JS has come a long way to closing the gap with native performance, it's the other HLML5 tech that's holding the web back. CSS is ill-suited to be hardware acceleration and DOM is a performance sucking hack that kills the UX on mobile platforms.