Awash in revisionist histories about Apple's web efforts, a look at the evidence
11 points by uncenter
11 points by uncenter
Please note: I had to work “with” Alex when I used to work on WebKit and JSC and that experience was basically bad faith attempts to “understand” concerns or “cooperate”, and make personal/ad hominem attacks against me and my coworkers, so that is something to be aware of when reading this. At the same time the following reflects my personal experience of interacting with him over a period of years.
Alex Russel has always seemingly had a personal hatred of Apple, webkit, and personally vitriol directed at individual engineers working on webkit over the years - I know this having been on the receiving end - his view has consistently been that privacy and security concerns are always false no matter the feature or concern, and simply dismisses any argument as not relevant.
I have literally never seen him accept any counter argument to a feature that he or is employer wants. While I worked on webkit I never had a single discussion with him in which there was any indication of a good faith interest in collaboration or willingness to listen to anyone who disagrees with what he wanted.
There are many legitimate concerns to have about safari, but also note the revisionist history: the iPhone was meant to be built around browser based apps, a huge marketing point on the first phone was that the browser was a real browser. But everyone wanted native apps instead, and so that’s what happened.
It also ignores a wide array of the features used on the web that originated in webkit under Apple (again to support performant apps in the browser).
Again, there are all sorts of reasons to complain, but Alex has demonstrated consistently over the years that he is simply overwhelmingly biased against Apple, and while I had the misery of having to work with him had no problem with bad faith or personal attacks on anyone who for Apple. Also noting that he never did any actual development himself, just attacked anyone who didn’t wholly support whatever feature he wanted on any given week.
Alex has demonstrated consistently over the years that he is simply overwhelmingly biased against Apple
Oh, glad it's not just me. Was starting to wonder if I was just being overly harsh in my interpretation of the various posts that have been feted on L and HN.
The whole "Thoughts on Flash" HTML5 power move was a master play. We owe the modern web in very large part to Apple.
Note: it is worth noting the author's conflict of interest here. They work at Microsoft on the Edge browser, and previously worked for 13 years at Google on Chrome/Blink.
I find it pretty cool that as a Microsoft employee, he shares graphs that seem to show Apple contributing as much to web standards as Microsoft, and then says this is a huge indictment of Apple.
This article really just reads as apologia for the position that web standards are whatever the Chrome team says they are. Does WebKit lag in features behind Blink? Sure. But are those features actually good things to have? Who knows?!? A feature is a feature, a LOC is a LOC. Good things are the same as bad things said the wise man. More is more.
Right? The reasoning is completely circular. Safari is bad because it trails the feature count of the leader, Chrome, who is the leader because it has more features.
It’s a strongly argued straw man.
The only thing I took from skimming this rant was that Apple doesn't want websites to be interacting directly with a user's hardware (USB, Bluetooth, MIDI) and that it's more conservative about shoveling more crap into their browser. Ok then.