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by 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.
2 comments
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.

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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...
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