[pbsdp]

It's reality because Mozilla makes it a reality. See how this is a circular argument?

Meanwhile, native mobile and desktop keep growing, and growing, and the web as an application platform loses out, because none of the native platform vendors are quibbling about whether they can convince themselves to ever do something different than what they were doing before.

[thelukester]

For my company, this is exactly what's happening. Like Facebook, we found HTML5 to be insufficient for our app, so our resources have shifted to iOS and Android development. Native gives much better and consistent performance and UX, and the idea of write once-run anywhere on the web is still a pipedream. Cross-browser compatibility is still terrible.

The problem with HTML5 is it was designed by committee for displaying documents not dynamic apps. While JS has come a long way to closing the gap with native performance, it's the other HLML5 tech that's holding the web back. CSS is ill-suited to be hardware acceleration and DOM is a performance sucking hack that kills the UX on mobile platforms.

[gnaritas]

> Mozilla makes it a reality

No, the situation makes it a reality; Mozilla doesn't control Apple or Microsoft.

[pbsdp]

That didn't stop them from trying to launch a mobile phone platform in competition with Apple, Microsoft, and Google.

If they're willing to accept that risk, by comparison, how large of a risk is trying to push through a better standardized browser execution environment, with Google's cooperation?

God forbid they succeed, and we finally have a competitive application platform.

[gnaritas]

I see; you're the type who thinks he's smarter than everyone in the industry and just has all the answers and ignores anything that doesn't fit your idea. Never mind that no one has been able to replace JS, just listen to you and all those problems will evaporate. Goodbye.

[pbsdp]

> I see; you're the type who thinks he's smarter than everyone in the industry ...

You mean, like Google, who continually pushes to do exactly what I've described here, only to be stymied by:

- Apple, who has no reason to support the web as competitive to their native platform.

- Microsoft, same.

- Mozilla, who refuses to consider that there might be a world beyond HTML/CSS/JS because they believe those specific technologies are intrinsic qualities of the web, and thus central to their mission of supporting the web.

Looks like the only people I disagree with are the Mozilla camp. Microsoft and Apple have different priorities, and Google is continually frustrated by exactly what I've described here.

[marshray]

Every major browser vendor has pushed for some stuff and resisted other stuff. Only extremely rarely does anything new make it to 'cross browser compatible' status.

There are far far worse systems for evolving widely used platforms.

[pbsdp]

> There are far far worse systems for evolving widely used platforms.

That's fine, but perhaps it would behoove Mozilla to not participate in dooming the web as a competitive application platform simply due to a misguided belief that the web is defined by HTML/CSS/JS?

[gnaritas]

> only to be stymied by:

Reality. Imagine that.

[pbsdp]

Yes, the reality is that proprietary application platforms are taking over the application market, and that the web is slowly losing one of its major market advantages: a huge brain trust of web-only engineers and web-only engineering organizations.

Imagine that.