On the surface, it is kind of wild, but I want to suggest that it's in some ways beneficial for work like this to be supported directly by the companies that benefit from them (including core dev work and engine improvements).
There are downsides to only having Google/Apple/Mozilla participating in this process, and it's that (regardless of whether you think they have good or bad intentions) they are extremely insular.
There are dangers to this as well of course. We don't want things getting derailed or worsened just because it makes life more convenient for some company somewhere. But in general I suspect it's good for more stakeholders to be getting their hands dirty engaging with both the standards processes and the minutia of actual browser development. They had a problem, they gave money to developers to fix it, and it got fixed with approval from upstream. In terms of Open Source, a pretty clear success story to me. We should encourage this.
Agreed - Igalia encourages companies to work upstream, it's part of the idea that we stand for.
A patch like the layer based SVG engine is imposssible to maintain by a single company - e.g. Vorwerk, downstream, for an extended period of time. You want to be able to follow upstream (e.g. for security updates), and that's hard when you change a piece of the core engine with your own stuff.
You are, the very first line of the article explains why they care. They make extensive use of the SVG api and it would benefit them to have this feature.
It's no different to Valve hiring CodeWeavers to implement new things in the Linux kernel to advance their efforts with Proton. Steam isn't in the kernel development space, but it behooves them to improve the kernel with features that are useful to more than just themselves, since features that are _only_ useful to them are likely to be rejected.
The first line (of the fourth paragraph, but still) does indicate that they make use of the SVG API, but what's baffling is not that they use it, but that apparently there's enough return on investment for them to be sponsoring this.
Is there no alternative for what they're using it for? How much extra money does this use bring in? Who managed to convince management to do this and how did they do it?
(I also imagine it's not so much a critical note as it is a "wow, I'd really like to understand the economics of this". It is for me.)
I can believe that, but it would still be hard to fathom that marketing to standards geeks like us brings in enough additional revenue to finance this, or that they'll be having access to talent that brings in so much more revenue than who they'd have been able to hire otherwise that it pays for this. But: that might very well be because I just don't understand the economics of this (which is why I'm hoping for someone to explain it with a back-of-the-napkin calculation :) ).
Having been involved in the discussions, maybe I can give a bit of an inside view here: When we got the suggestion to involve Igalia into building the TM6, it was on the one hand because of their proven expertise in webkit dev but on the otherhand also because they walk-the-talk on the OSS mindset - which is something our team values very much. We saw this as a chance
a) to have a higher chance of including changes into the upstream that would benefit our products and
b) to give back to opensource projects which our products benefit from for many years.
And yes of course we did consider that this might attract more like-minded fellows who are eager to build great products with great colleagues than our „corporate job advertisement“ ^^
Sounds great! So is it just that you're a relatively small company that can decide to give back just because the people it's made up of think it's the right thing to do?
Uh, why? Isn't that the whole point of open-source? Apple webkit engineers have been supportive from what it sounds like, it's not like they're against this patch.
Because it’s for a company that makes a high end blending appliance. The sponsor is what makes this odd. I don’t see Cuisinart or KitchenAid sponsoring much other open source code.
Well, Apple's devices presumably don't have any trouble rendering SVG on CPU. As explained in the intro, the embedded CPUs on the blenders do. The unusual part here is that they decided to fix it instead of just falling back to a less featureful UI framework, which I'd say demonstrates an unusual commitment to quality user experience (or if you want to be cynical, flashy user experience).
Thanks for your comment : that makes more sense now.
I had the assumption that efficient SVG rendering in Safari was critical and a UX bottleneck to work on from an Apple perspective, but maybe Apple hardware makes it moot.
It's not the hardware per se. CoreGraphics on macOS/iOS utilizes the GPU for painting, which is much faster than software rendering. Cairo, used for the Linux GTK/WPE ports, is software based, and thus much slower, when painting large scenes.
Therefore for embedded devices using WebKit/Linux GTK/WPE ports we see a huge improvment with the layer based engine. Also macOS/iOS benefits though -- animations are even faster, and you don't easily run into problems, when animating parts of a complex document. It's shown in the video linked in the article at the end: > 20% frame rendering time improvement on an already quite efficient rendering pipeline (Safari / macOS using CoreGraphics on M1 machine).
The number of people who want to do useful work that isn't sexy is vanishingly small, so I'm completely unsurprised that great, useful work comes from random places.
That's actually how progress gets made - by people doing thankless work in obscurity. Then opportunists usually take that effort, make it fit an existing industry and charge whatever the market will bear.
It'd all be fine if the middlemen didn't then proceed to claim greatness, insight and ingenuity, but they do (because then older middlemen give them money to replicate their success).
This social structure is quite bad because it makes people think the middlemen are capable of creating value through their 'insight', without people who did unsexy, hard, thankless work prior.
I can't think of many things flashier/sexier than high performance vector graphics. We live in a world with 8K displays. Pushing the envelope of attractive (2D) graphics is done in vector land.
Yes! You’re missing the most important aspect of open source projects. Anyone can contribute a feature they care about (within limits). Apple (apparently) doesn’t care that much about SVG performance, Vorwerk does, so they paid for it.
This is why companies like Google and Microsoft are big contributors to Linux: They add features they care about.
As for why companies care about upstreaming: It’s not even because they’re so kind (though FOSS contributions are good marketing) - it just tends to be easier than maintaining a private fork.
> Yes! You’re missing the most important aspect of open source projects. Anyone can contribute a feature they care about (within limits).
The biggest limit is resources. SVG is too big to be implemented by a lone wolf working for love alone, and too diverse in application for a tech company to embrace for the length of time and breadth of focus required.
This is a welcome development that validates the W3C model in a positive, constructive way.
It’s interesting to see Vorwerk described as a kitchen appliance company. I had heard of the Thermomix, but didn’t know it was made by them (or even German). I’ve mainly known them for their vacuums.
It does baffle me that Apple, who will benefit from this, couldn't spare the development funds themselves, considering they are worth more than God himself.
Apple has allegedly spent billions on the development of a car, yet could not spend what was probably $100K of consultancy to fix this issue.
> Am I missing something to think it is insane a kitchen appliance manufacturer fund such core dev work
It’s a great development and the key to open standards success. Not, of course, that a kitchen appliance manufacturer stepped up, but that any outsider was interested and willing to contribute to a general computing tech stack.
For a thousand flowers to bloom, the bird must leave the nest.
This reminds me how we got film which was better able to represent people of color because (as one reason, I don’t hink it was entirely this) of wood and chocolate manufactures wanting film which better showed the colors of their products.
We are speaking about the most rich company in the world. You'd think they'd have the resources to fix their shit. Vorwerk probably got fed up with it too and decided to fix it themselfs.
This is not a good look for Apple IMO. I completely dropped iOS support for an app I made because it used SVG's and clogged up every iPhone. It's a serious issue.
You assume, incorrectly, that having money and other resources means you can snap your fingers and immediately hire the right person with the right skills to solve any arbitrary problem you might have.
The world just doesn't work that way. There's a shortage of talent out there, and they often don't want to work for the richest players.
There are downsides to only having Google/Apple/Mozilla participating in this process, and it's that (regardless of whether you think they have good or bad intentions) they are extremely insular.
There are dangers to this as well of course. We don't want things getting derailed or worsened just because it makes life more convenient for some company somewhere. But in general I suspect it's good for more stakeholders to be getting their hands dirty engaging with both the standards processes and the minutia of actual browser development. They had a problem, they gave money to developers to fix it, and it got fixed with approval from upstream. In terms of Open Source, a pretty clear success story to me. We should encourage this.