

The State Of Web Development Ripped Apart In 25 Tweets By One Man - maximebf
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/30/joe-hewitt-web-development/

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sorbits
_> So launch a different browser. Not a big deal._

 _> […]_

 _> As someone who has tried to do both cutting edge native and web iPhone
apps, iPhone Safari is a joke compared to iPhone Cocoa_

What he is basically saying is developing natively instead of for the web can
give a better result, and he would prefer to drop cross-browser compatibility
and just have users launch whatever browser he developed the app for.

The question is why develop for the web at all if your apps only run in a
certain browser? He seems to make the assumption that while his app can’t run
in all browsers, the browser it does run in is available “on all platforms”.

I think he needs to rethink what the purpose is with HTML, semantic markup,
and having a standard.

~~~
Qz
_> The question is why develop for the web at all if your apps only run in a
certain browser?_

This is a mental block. You're thinking about it from a developer's
perspective. He's talking about how to make the web better for users.

~~~
sorbits
I don’t follow — are you saying I don’t understand his critique because I only
look at this from a developer’s point of view?

He is seeing “the web” as an easy way to deploy applications. The app store is
exactly what he needs, easy way to deploy stuff to users and no cross-browser
requirements.

He makes the argument that while the app store is great in that regard, it
sucks because he is locked to one mobile phone (OS) — at the same time, he is
making the argument that the Cocoa platform is so much better because
individual browser vendors did not (and were not allowed to) innovate, he
downplays the compatibility problems by saying that users can just launch
another browser (and indirectly, buy a new computer / OS if the browser is not
available on their platform).

~~~
joe_fishfish
His point is that it's pretty trivial for a user to change their browser,
these days. Changing their phone is more difficult and expensive. Hence, it
would be better for users if developers developed their apps for a specific
software platform (e.g. Firefox) as opposed to a specific hardware platform
(e.g. iPhone).

~~~
Terretta
It is _not_ trivial for "a user" to change their browser.

Watch this video:

[http://uxmag.com/short-news/these-are-your-users-read-and-
be...](http://uxmag.com/short-news/these-are-your-users-read-and-be-horrified)

~~~
joe_fishfish
Trivial was probably the wrong choice of word. Regardless of most users' lack
of knowledge on the subject, it is a much easier (and cheaper) task to change
your browser than to upgrade your phone in mid-contract.

I think the real driving force behind web UI improvements, that isn't being
picked up on the article, is the open, shared standard. If there was a cool
new piece of functionality in, say, Opera, that allowed users to instantly buy
whatever it was they were vaguely thinking of or something genuinely
revolutionary, it wouldn't make much of a difference to the web unless it was
backed by an open standard. This is largely due to the reason shown by your
video - most users wouldn't know how to go about installing a new browser to
take advantage of the functionality.

However if the standard behind the new super-fun-happy-wow web technology is
shared, then it can spread across a majority of the web-using population
comparatively quickly, because other browser makers will include an
implementation of it within their browsers. If a browser is open-sourced under
a BSD-type licence, this technology spread can happen even faster.

------
danparsonson
I know for a fact that my grandparents would find it a big deal to have to
launch different browsers for different sites, and I'd venture to suggest that
the majority of web users feel the same.

~~~
dkarl
I know for a fact that "normal" users were well aware that some web sites
didn't work with some browsers, usually had two browsers installed, and tried
the other browser when a web site looked broken in their favorite browser. It
isn't a difficult concept, no different in users' minds than having two
different kinds of stain remover in their laundry room. They didn't like it,
but they had no problem understanding it. My mother, who at 67 is old enough
to be a grandmother, still tries IE when something doesn't work in Firefox.

The question is whether a browser innovation war would provide benefits that
would compensate for the inconvenience of installing and using several
browsers. I think it would. Actually, I think it would be much better than the
first time around, because we've finally reached the point where most web
sites can work across all browsers. (Perhaps it would be best if the impulse
toward complete compatibility and uniformity across browsers came and went
like the tide.) A web site that only worked with one browser engine would be
at a severe disadvantage compared to a similar web site that worked in all
browsers. Browser innovations would have to enable really radical improvements
before they were adopted. That's assuming that web developers are smarter this
time around, which I think they are. If there's a surge in incompatible
innovation, you won't see banks or insurance companies jumping on the
bandwagon. Nor will you see any plain-jane sites that mysteriously require one
browser or another. If a site requires you to launch a certain browser, it
will be immediately obvious why, or you'll never go back to that site again.

------
chc
WebKit is already doing this. They constantly implement new features that are
later imported into HTML5 or CSS specs. For example, canvas, shadows, CSS
transforms and CSS transitions were all things that WebKit introduced in its
nightly builds and the standards groups later adopted specs for them. Just
Google any of these technologies and you'll see the posts introducing them on
the Surfin' Safari blog years before the initial version of the respective
standards.

------
naz
I disagree that the app stores are successful because of superior APIs, they
are successful because you can charge for apps and make money.

But he is correct about Microsoft and web standards committees.

------
gojomo
A great rant by a practitioner who wants progress to go faster, ideologies and
committees be-damned.

But, a little revisionist about why browser innovation slowed. It wasn't
Microsoft yielding to standards demands that slowed their pace; it was
Microsoft's de facto victory in (for a time) neutralizing the business
possibilities of competitive browser development.

It took a while for alternate models that could sustain further browser
evolution -- the Google placement payments to Mozilla, Apple's sponsorship as
a complement to their other platforms -- to grow to take the place of the
original Netscape dreams.

Hewitt's prescription seems right, though: a bit of healthy disdain for
waiting for standards bodies before deploying new things, and some added
respect for even those proprietary offerings -- like Flash -- that kept
expanding capabilities and user expectations when browsers didn't.

~~~
tumult
My impression of IE is that Microsoft stopped developing it right at the point
when they realized "Oh shit! If this gets any better, it could replace
Office!"

~~~
zaatar
I don't know much about the past, but in _at least_ the past 3 years,
Microsoft has been incredibly committed to IE development and enabling it to
be more standards-compliant than ever. They've been consistently pouring
money, time, manpower, etc. into making IE the best browser that's out there.
This is one excellent example of the fruits of our labor:
<http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/>

And no, I'm not speaking on behalf of my employer; it's just my personal
opinion.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
They've had to put some resources on to IE as they didn't bother for the
previous 8 years and the stench of the rotten putrid corpse of IE6 was even
starting to get to them.

When a single someone can make a tiny javascript file that fixes nearly all
the rendering problems in your browser (Dean Edwards, IE6.js, IIRC) then it
starts to look really bad for your abilities as a multinational megacorp
that's supposed to employ some of the finest programming minds.

My impression is that it's still a pretty small team, if only they'd done it
consistently over the last 10 years.

------
DanielStraight
I think the real solution is not to provide more advanced features in the
browser, but to provide more primitives. Lots of programming languages over
the years have, at least for a while, compiled to C. C is an almost universal
primitive. The web doesn't have a universal primitive. HTML, CSS, and
JavaScript are high level languages. If you try to use a high level language
without ever accessing lower level functions, you will eventually run into
something you can't do. The web has hit that point. We need a way to fall back
to lower level languages when the abstractions become too leaky. The web needs
a C: a language which can do anything if you put in the time and energy to
make it work, which is blazing fast, and which is available everywhere.

~~~
metachor
Can you explain what some of those lower level functions are on the web that
need a lower level language? As far as I can tell, the lowest level of the web
is sending a static document to the requester via HTTP. Any lower than that
and you are talking about TCP/IP sockets, etc.

In the domain of Operating Systems this makes more sense, because the OS or
kernel is generally written in the low level language that is being asked
about (i.e. C). Any higher-level language is generally implemented in terms of
the low level language, making it available as a fall back for low level tasks
(i.e. tasks on the OS/kernel level).

I'm just not sure how this concept of lower-level languages applies to the
web.

~~~
DanielStraight
I'm talking low-level in terms of design and page manipulation, not
architecture. CSS is the lowest level available for formatting websites. For
formatting desktop apps, you can go straight to the graphics card and paint
individual pixels on the screen. There is simply no equivalent in the browser.
I suppose you can, strictly speaking, paint individual pixels in the browser
with absolute-positioned divs, but this is clearly impractical.

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tvon
Overall some very interesting points, but as I remember it, MS stopped
innovating in IE when the competition died off. Netscape was in the gutter and
went OSS, which ended up meaning a massive gap in releases while they rewrote
the thing, and Opera was still for-pay. The DOJ intervention was too late to
have any impact.

Hence, IE6 remained stagnant until MS started feeling some heat from Firefox.

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eplanit
These people liked IE, the worst browser ever?!? They reject standardization?

If they really want a history lesson, then return to the pre-browser days --
yeah, you had to #ifdef and port your code over and over and over, always
chasing the latest APIs (the time of origin of that horrible phrase, in fact).

Standardization fixed that.

~~~
jon_dahl
_These people liked IE, the worst browser ever?!? They reject
standardization?_

Apparently you weren't doing web development back in the Netscape 4.7 days. :)

IE 5.5 and 6 were actually big steps forward for web standards back in
2000-2001. They were actually decent browsers then. Not perfect, but no one
was. The problem isn't IE6 - it's that Microsoft stopped with IE6 for such a
long time.

------
joubert
As long as most sites don't require ie, because i don't have windows.

~~~
misuba
You will soon, if you want it: competent Windows machines for basic tasks will
soon be the price of a mid-range piece of software. There will be plenty of
reasons to _prefer_ other platforms, but there won't be any need to _choose_
per se.

