[Reason077]

> "we're lucky they weren't in a dominant position when TCP/IP or HTML were invented"

TCP/IP and HTML became dominant because they were open standards. Should they have been proprietary, they would have floundered and something else would have emerged instead.

[rjzzleep]

I guess people have forgotten, that Webkit came out of KHTML from the KDE team and that Apple was a nightmare when it came to contributing code back. They just released a huge dump of the whole thing.

[klodolph]

I remember this... it was just a fork. Projects get forked. It's unfortunate from some perspectives, but from other perspectives you can understand why forks happen.

When you have a long-running fork, especially one that is so active, merging it naturally becomes a nightmare. This is expected and ordinary.

The Linux kernel gets forked by Android vendors and others all the time. A lot of the changes never make it upstream, for various reasons. At least the story ends a bit better for KHTML / WebKit.

[rjzzleep]

Every single Apple patch to GitHub projects is done by the same single indistinguishable user account. This isn't just "some long-running fork". It is Apple culture to actively prohibit contributions to open source projects unless 5 managers sign off on it.

[cma]

They really don't like people "poaching" their employees/wildlife. Remember they illegally collided to stop other large tech firms with Apple board members from cross recruiting.

[KerrAvon]

No, it’s usually just overzealous lawyers. Remember that Apple is still a pre-dot-com company and — like Microsoft — retains vestiges of those attitudes.

[GekkePrutser]

I think that's collusion not collision :) But probably a case of "Damn You AutoCorrect" :)

[KerrAvon]

I don’t get this criticism; this is a case where open source _worked_. People complained about it. Apple cleaned up their act on it a bit, but still maintained WebKit as a fork. And Google forked WebKit when they decided they didn’t want to play in Apple’s sandbox anymore. This is how it’s actually supposed to work. It gets messy sometimes because humans are involved.

[chalst]

This isn't quite the same thing. Apple are really terrible at cultivating open source - more obvious than KHTML is the fiasco that resulted from Apple's half-hearted efforts to kindle a community around Darwin - but my impression is that they have been decent enough with the kind of openness that standards processes need.

[GekkePrutser]

Were there ever really interested in Darwin being a thing? I've been following Mac closely since OSX and I've never seen it getting any limelight.

[chalst]

At Apple's executive level, it doesn't look like anyone ever really cared. But people were hired, like Jordan Hubbard, who were supposed to liaise with the community and it's clear that both a nontrivial number of Apple developers were optimistic about the prospects for a healthy Darwin community and that many Apple users found Apple's choices in the early years of Darwin being open sourced and then partly closed to be very disappointing.

[jojohohanon]

I was disappointed in how the Dylan project ended up.

[pjmlp]

They don't even remember how vertical integrated they were before OS X came to be, how would they remember that?

[fattire]

> TCP/IP and HTML became dominant because they were open standards. Should they have been proprietary, they would have floundered and something else would have emerged instead.

Anyone remember AppleTalk?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleTalk

[smoldesu]

ActiveX would like to have a word with you.

[GekkePrutser]

ActiveX was never 'dominant' really. It was always a duopoly with Java (and in many use cases also with flash!) and a pretty niche one at that (corporate software and crappy webcams)

[Tijdreiziger]

South Korea begs to differ: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/business/korea-internet-e...

[KerrAvon]

DECnet, Token Ring, Novell, X.25, et cetra, would like to have a word with you.

[fezfight]

Yes, that attempt to EEE the web was thwarted thankfully.

[smoldesu]

Right. If the government hadn't stepped in to encourage Microsoft to play nice, we might live in a world where "the web" simply means Internet Explorer.

I'm beyond the point of negotiating with the people on this website. Apple is due in for exactly the same treatment, it's only a matter of time before the US eats their favorite crow.

[GekkePrutser]

> If the government hadn't stepped in to encourage Microsoft to play nice, we might live in a world where "the web" simply means Internet Explorer.

I kinda doubt that. As soon as Microsoft had a virtual monopoly on the browser market, they let IE go stale for years. Hardly any feature development, hardly any bug squashing. Terrible security. By the time the browser choice thing in the EU and the antitrust thing in the US happened, the rot had already set in and everyone was fed up and yearning for a browser that didn't suck. Google drove their Chrome truck right into that gap.

If IE had actually been a decent browser, no amount of "choose your browser" screens would have been enough to sway people from it. Just like they cling to Chrome now because Google is too smart to make that mistake.

PS FWIW I don't like and hardly use chrome but technically as a browser it's great, I just don't like Google's attitude to privacy.

[aaaaaaaaaaab]

Instead we live in a world where the web means Chrome. How wonderful!

[fezfight]

They usurped the minds a generation with free email and YouTube.

[KerrAvon]

Look, as someone who was rooting for MS to lose big time back then, I would have been happy for that to be true. But MS lost through hubris, not the antitrust settlement.

[fezfight]

If it wasnt clear in my reply, I agree with you.

But as an aside, don't let this site get to you too much. There's a lot of arguing for sport that goes on here.

[pjmlp]

Phyrric victory, modern Web simply means ChromeOS rebranded.

[pjmlp]

WebAssembly....

[jchw]

WebAssembly is an open standard and I don't really see how it's any bigger a problem than asm.js or obfuscated JS already was.

[fezfight]

Agreed! Would be nice to reverse the tide on that stuff though. C'est la vie.