Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

> The inability of industry and academia (and the w3c) to create standards is what created the opportunity that enabled Apple to succeed.

Steve Jobs crippled the web browser, wouldn't allow non-Safari browsers, and didn't open the hardware APIs the way modern web APIs and WASM seek to do.

Don't misrepresent history. It was always about control.

> Turn signals are a great example of why this idea is dead on arrival. They have been around for close to a century and the government mandated them 50 years ago.

Air bags, tire standards, headlight specifications. You're picking on the wrong part of my argument.

> If you want the US computing industry to move at that speed, the government will make that happen for you.

This sounds like a boogeyman. I hypothesize computing evolution happens slower because of how locked down everything is. Smartphones are stagnant already - no government help required.

View on HN

Misrepresent history?

How exactly did ‘Steve Jobs cripple the web browser’?

I’m guessing you don’t know that Apple took the open source WebKit from KDE, and continued to develop it into a world class engine in the open.

So open that Google was able to build Chrome with it. It’s still developed completely in the open now and is free to use in your platform, as most of Apple’s competitors actually do.

That is about as far from ‘crippling the web’ as any company in history has ever been.

As for saying that evolution in computing is slower because of how locked down things are, that seems like a view that is hard to understand.

If you can’t see how fast things have moved in software over the past 5 years and then over the past 10, I think you just aren’t looking hard enough.

Smartphone hardware design may have plateaued, but that’s just superficial.

And in any case, a government standard isn’t going to make anything any less locked down.

It will be just as locked down as it is now, more expensive to develop for, and the possibility of an open alternative emerging will be harder than ever, if not impossible.

> How exactly did ‘Steve Jobs cripple the web browser’?

Some examples:

- Automatically erasing all script-writeable storage after 7 days, crippling local PWAs and preventing them from competing with native apps

- dragging their feet on Service Worker support for ages, another PWA issue

- delaying WebGPU standardization

- blocking the standardization of numerous web hardware APIs:

  - Web Bluetooth
  - Web MIDI API
  - Magnetometer API
  - Web NFC API
  - Device Memory API
  - Network Information API
  - Battery Status API
  - Ambient Light Sensor
  - HDCP Policy Check extension for EME
  - Proximity Sensor
  - WebHID
  - Serial API
  - Web USB
  - Geolocation Sensor (background geolocation)
  - User Idle Detection

Why should any of those be web browser APIs? I don't want those anywhere near my browser. They all sound horrible.

Edit: Sorry, I wrote this too fast and didn't finish my thought. To clarity, I meant they sound horrible from a privacy perspective, and I don't think some random website should even have to option to access those APIs. The web has enough tracking and malicious sites as it is.

Imagine if apps as they exist today were actually running on a web platform. Apps indistinguishable to the ones you use today.

They're downloaded over www.

They call device APIs

But they're written in Rust or WASM or something.

Visit Netflix.com and suddenly you have the native Netflix app instantaneously on your device. And it works just the same as the one you use today.

That's what I want to see.

The web isn't just HTML and JavaScript. It's not just documents or web apps. It can be native too.

It's a protected runtime.

And it'll be fast.

I honestly think that is a massive privacy issue. Letting the web browser have any access those API is practically begging for abuse. There are enough privacy and tracking issues already with what they have access to without those being added on. The negative far outweighs any positive you have mentioned.

Should there be better faster options for applications to run? Absolutely. Should they run in the web browser? I don't think so.

How is clicking a link to a web page and tapping "accept" any different than clicking a link that loads an app store entry and tapping install?

Heck use the same permission dialogues.

And the same sandboxing.

Who manages those permissions? The browser? The OS? Is it different dialogs than the OS? If not, you are now giving a browser the ability to delegate those permissions. Is it the same level of granularity?

If I visit one page, say facebook and it gets permission. And then visit another page which embeds Facebook, does it still have all those permissions there? If I visit a page, and it hits 60 different URLs under the hood am I getting 60 accept buttons or blanket accepting all of them?

As I see it, there is a ton of difference in scope there.

The exact same argument exists for apps that embed facebook's SDK in them.

It isn't like we can't treat a WASM compiled program delivered through https the same as any other compiled program delivered through an app store. It is just that launching involves visiting a url instead of tapping an icon.

Sure, but this ignores the fact that App Store apps are reviewed, and Websites are not.

That’s critical to why one is trusted more than the other.

As to the Facebook SDK, yes that’s a problem, but it just proves the point - Apple is in fact continuing to tighten restrictions on what Facebook can do to invade your privacy via their app.

This is only possible because it’s an App and not a website.

I was thinking more about my post after I made it, and I came to the same realization.

Part of this is on iOS, apps are compiled to native code and the restrictions enforced through static analysis before code even reaches the end user.

A good analogy would be Android and how they ban 3rd party advertisements in push notifications. That obviously isn't an API enforcement, indeed that enforcement is only possible with a centralized app store where developer credentials can be revoked.

In comparison, web browsers have become a push notification nightmare, with naive end users being endlessly spammed with garbage on their desktop being delivered through web push notifications.

So, I'll readily concede that a web based open distribution model cannot offer the same API surface area as a distribution model that has a combination of manual reviews and static code analysis being used to enforce customer friendly policies.

That said, a lot of apps still can fit into the web model, including large numbers of games (See: The decades of insanely HQ Flash games that existed until recently, sandboxed(ish) code delivered through a web browser), video playback (in which downloaded apps failed in the 90s, then the field took off thanks to web browsers), music playback (I use Spotify in my browser every day), and many others.

Sure, I don’t think anyone, least of all Apple, is disputing that the web can be a great platform for apps.

The point is that there is a genuine need for both kinds of platform and for people to be able to tell the difference.

Can’t believe people downvoted you for making a clear point

So if you don't like something - it shouldn't exist, and no one else should have it?

That is not what I said. I asked what the justification for them existing is. None of them sounded valuable, and seemed like just additional ways for ads and malicious sites to track you. So what are the up sides? I actually want to understand.

None of them sounded valuable to you - I have no problem imagining how those APIs could be useful (e.g. some simple apps may be replaced by a web application). One can easily apply your argument against access ramps ("My establishment already has stairs, a ramp doesn't sound valuable")

Can you see how they also create privacy problems?

If ramps hypothetically did create privacy problems, would you still wish them out of existence, despite their utility to other people?

Do these exist on Android?

If not, why not?

If they do, why hasn’t it enabled Android to leapfrog iOS?

These are web APIs, not Android/iOS specific, and IIRC Google and possibly other browser vendors have expressed interest in these APIs.

Web standards require voluntary cooperation and isn't something that can be resolved by allowing "better" standards variants to win in a marketplace over others (otherwise they wouldn't really be standards).

Apple has pre-emptively blocked the standardization of these APIs because they effectively have veto power, and they have veto power because web standards aren't really a free market. Browser vendors choose not to ship standards that major browsers don't all agree on, which means that Apple's singular objection scuttles the process by design.

Of course this is one of the risks you have with standards, one bad actor can screw everything up. It's why standards often suck and it's a happy miracle that the web is as good as it is. When Apple themselves can screw up a standard that they directly compete with (web vs native iOS) from the inside, well, that's just too convenient for them.

This isn’t accurate. There are plenty of instances of browser vendors implementing API’s ahead of other vendors.

It simply isn’t true that vendors always wait for agreement. Apple’s participation is important, but not mandatory.

They implement APIs ahead of other vendors because someone has to do it first and try out an implementation, most standards start out as experimental implementations. But when other major browsers reject it as a standard, the API is usually deprecated.

I'm sure there exist instances of vendors not waiting for agreement, those are rare exceptions because it essentially breaks the standard. Web fragmentation was a big problem for a long time and the major browsers have largely willingly agreed to avoid that. Apple's participation is de facto mandatory, they control a major browser and other major browser vendors won't ship something that Apple has openly declared they will never support.

> How exactly did ‘Steve Jobs cripple the web browser’?

> I’m guessing you don’t know that Apple took the open source WebKit from KDE, and continued to develop it into a world class engine in the open.

While I agree with your points that Apple in general contributed a lot when it comes to how humans perceive technology (for better or worse), I cannot let this argument stand untouched.

- WebKit is NOT developed in the open.

- It has a private bug tracker nobody outside Apple can see. Try to report a bug, even as a bug reporter you can't see shit what's happening with it. And this wasn't the case before ~2009, from personal experience.

- Over 80% of contributions were actually from Mozilla or Google.

- WebKit source code is still released 6 months after it was developed, leaving nobody outside Apple's internal team with the capability to even discuss features or APIs.

- Apple's "Open Source" philosophy is the minimum legal requirement, aka dumping a fucking zip file with random shit to a server and forget about it afterwards. Lots of people from Chromium have been in contact with Apple's legal team until they "really complied" and actually dumped the full source code (again, as a shitty zip file). Apple didn't do this on their own, and they never have.

- The Blink incident. Don't forget this. A shitload of contributors left WebKit because of the previous points, and now Chromium is getting dominant due to Blink. Do you think this is a coincidence?

All these policies how Apple "loves Open Source" speak against the fact. Also, don't forget bash, tcsh, zsh and pretty much all related to the brew ecosystem. These people, while they still love Apple's ecosystem, never benefited a single dollar and neither a single contribution from Apple.

If you don't believe me, pick a random zip file on Apple's "open source server" [1], contact the maintainer of said project and ask them about how they think Apple helps them. The answer is: not at all.

I won't dig into the other facts which made the Web crippled, where we've been before with IE6 and ActiveX. Humanity hasn't learned shit from that lesson. And /u/themacguffinman did that already in his own comment to elaborate this fact [2]

[1] https://opensource.apple.com/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25285306

This depends on your definition of “Developed in the open”.

Nobody is disputing that other people contributed to WebKit, however what is true is that WebKit was brought to the level of maturity require to create a competitive desktop browser before those contributions.

The fact that competitors are able to use WebKit, and that Blink exists is validation that WebKit is really open.

I do agree that Apple controls development of the mainline engine though, but that changes nothing about the meaning.

You're missing the point that standardization usually creates subpar products, which allowed Apple to break standards and create a more valuable product. Standards are inherently stifling in so many ways, you risk a lot with heavy-handed forced standardization. Air bags, tire standards, and headlights are small parts of a car with limited standardization, it's not comparable to inviting the government to involve themselves in application & hardware platform creation that they have no expertise or stake in developing.

Apple's behavior is definitely a problem, but government mandated standards are almost certainly not the answer.

This is the argument against the public option. The existence of a higher industry baseline does not the negate the existence of those who would surpass that standard. It merely means that consumer protections do not begin at zero. If we aspire for a society where everyone is entitled to a basic level of healthcare, or a basic level of income, why not also a basic level of software quality and security?

Because in most cases it's impossible to define what a basic level of software quality and security should be, and it's not likely that people agree on what that level is. Most of the economy is like this, you can't really pre-emptively define what is "good", the best way is to create a market and let consumers decide in aggregate.

Security is a little easier to specify, it's a more clearly defined space but you still have to be careful or you end up with outdated standards actually holding back industry security.

I have nothing against a public option, as long as it is an option. Government regulation of the tech industry doesn't sound to me like it's providing more options.

I never thought basic income was a good idea in the first place, I'm not sure what to say about this.

Basic healthcare is a more complicated case, but the healthcare industry doesn't look anything like the software industry. Regulating healthcare won't and shouldn't be like regulating software.

Apple’s software quality and security is, while far from perfect, at the top of the industry.

Clearly they would meet any such baseline.

Consumer protections of this kind would simply increase the cost of entry, and concentrate more power in the hands of those with capital, I.e. the incumbents and VCs.

Having my Phillips head screwdriver properly fit the Phillips head screw is great. The apple non standard screw is a horrible product for everyone except apple. The whole point is that they can force you to pay for substandard other stuff like their licensed hardware repairs.

They're breaking standards so that they can abuse IP laws to force you to pay more for an equivalent or worse product than the standard

Maybe they do, but evidently consumers accept it and are still willing to pay for it. I don't know whether non-standard screws are a trade-off that Apple needed to make a better product, but it's a trade-off consumers are willing to accept. That indicates that on the whole, Apple's non-standard behavior is still more valuable to consumers overall than their less successful standard competitors even if it is horrible to a minority.

Only a competitor that consumers like as much as Apple but also has standard screws can prove Apple wrong. Or, alternatively, maybe a day will come where consumers care about standard screws/repairability as much as you do. Until then, consumers will continue wanting Apple's non-standard stuff over the rest of the industry's standards, and what consumers want is pretty much the only thing that matters (with few exceptions, of course).

“Apple's non-standard behavior is still more valuable to consumers overall than their less successful standard competitors even if it is horrible to a minority.”

You must realize this doesn’t follow at all right? Almost no one is even aware if their laptop has proprietary screws or not when they’re purchasing one. It’s not listed as a feature on laptop comparison sites or in reviews. People choose Apple for many reasons but it’s not because they prefer non standard screws.

You’re confusing people choosing to buy a product with them endorsing a specific feature of that product that clearly goes against their own interest for no benefit.

Somehow you seem to be claiming that manufacturers and software developers can be forced to produce a better product than Apple by the government.

That seems implausible, but it also seems like they’d have just been outcompeted if that were true.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com