Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by callahad 2654 days ago
Hi! Thank you for your work on the polyfill. There is a healthy inter-vendor discussion in the spec's GH issues, and I believe there is absolutely technical merit to this specific proposal. That's all great and above-board.

I'm mainly and strongly objecting to this degree of external promotion for a Stage 1 proposal, along with positioning it, fait accompli, as part of "the Web."
1 comments
writepub 2653 days ago
Mozilla has a storied history of roadblocking Google on principle. This outburst has all the hallmarks of an ideological objection, rather than technical, another in Mozilla's longstanding crusade against Google. If the proposal is a net benefit to developers and users, maybe energy is better spent in including this in Firefox, versus demonizing the semantics of a blog post from the competition.

For the curious, below is a non-exhaustive list of promising tech clearly beneficial to developers and users, killed by Mozilla, on principle rather than technical merit:

1. WebSql - A web port of SqLite - arguably the world's second most used (and loved) tech. Instead, we have IndexedDb, which is such a damn hassle that a million wrappers exist to deal with it's shortcomings and complexity, including the tech presented in this blog post.

2. Nacl/PNacl - A precursor to WebAssembly which already had threads, SIMD, permissions, security ... figured out. By design, most Nacl code will run faster than webassembly, as Nacl's sandbox only excluded certain processor instructions deemed a security threat to it's sand-boxing model

3. HTML5 Storage: A file-system like storage for the browser! Killed by Mozilla...

link
callahad 2653 days ago
Sure, we don't want any single entity--including ourselves--to monopolize the foundations of the Web. To allow that would diminish the Web's power as a democratized public resource.

But let's not kid ourselves: Mozilla hasn't been able to unilaterally kill things for years. We finally caved on H.264 in 2014, acceding to a patent-encumbered Web: https://andreasgal.com/2014/10/14/openh264-now-in-firefox/ The following year, we reluctantly added DRM to Firefox: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/05/12/update-on-digital-r....

Google was the only vendor that supported NaCl or the Filesystem APIs, and WebSQL similarly failed to gain traction outside of WebKit and Presto. If we were wrong in our assessments of those proposals, we weren't alone. And that's what killed them.

link
writepub 2653 days ago
FWIW, I don't believe Google was pushing a patent encumbered web, or H.264. Their VP8/VP9,VP10 funding speaks for itself.

No one wants a monopoly in the browser space, and it seems like Mozilla has some other bone to pick with Google. As stated before, developers and web users come before Mozilla's philosophy, and many of the objections to Google's proposals don't seem to further that mission. Maybe some of it is in Mozilla's self preservation interests, I don't really know. But a lot of Google outrage seems feigned, and contrary to developer and user interest.

If you haven't noticed, most devs here haven't raised any technical objections, instead seem pleased with the offering, that's a hint in itself

link