Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by azakai 4865 days ago
> If you don't like monocultures, you shouldn't have hated plug-ins.

Plugins are each a monoculture. Flash, Silverlight, etc. - these are not multiple implementations of the same standard (like WebKit and Gecko are). Plugins are each a single implementation of non-standard.

> And Firefox OS should allow users to install browsers other than Firefox.

Firefox OS is really just the Firefox browser and minimal stuff around it to make it run. I'm not sure I see the point of allowing installation of another OS from it (replacing firefox there means replacing basically everything).

> I'm very sad that not only Flash 11 but also Silverlight and Unity Web Player are all doomed by the enthusiasm of the "open" standards.

None of those are doomed, except for Silverlight which Microsoft decided to discontinue. And the thing that is dooming Flash is not open standards, but iOS which did not allow it to run, which eventually made Flash irrelevant on mobile.

> And Mozilla, you must implement the Web Audio API ASAP.

Of course, work on this is well underway. You can follow here,

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=779297
1 comments
chadaustin 4865 days ago
You've given some specific plugins which are monocultures but plugins in general democratize the web by allowing things like Unity3D to flourish. Without plugins, web developers are limited to a blessed set of capabilities offered by the browsers, with no ability to extend the set of capabilities. Let's consider video codecs: without plugins or some way to run near-native code, innovation on the codec front must happen in the browser itself.

So I think there's truth to NinjaWarrior's argument that plugins protect from monoculture.

link
azakai 4865 days ago
That's a different form of diversity, but yes, plugins do give more options. And they are helped by running in browsers.

But they are security risks and cause lots of problems for browsers, as well as the monoculture issue (I can't run Flash on linux anymore because they decided to deprecate the flash linux NPAPI plugin).

So I don't think browsers should promote them. But native apps are still fine for them - Unity is flourishing especially on mobile, far more than on desktop browsers; Unity ships native apps on mobile.

link
comex 4865 days ago
Arguably, if asm.js (and perhaps WebCL) takes off, you'll be able to implement custom codecs at near-native speed without any need for a download or the risk of plugins...
link