The WebKit maintainers wouldn’t let us attack Apple directly, by changing WebKit in ways that would make it perform badly on OS X and iOS.
Because they share a rendering engine, developer effort to ensure Chrome compatibility currently benefits Apple platforms for free. To prevent this, we must make Chrome and WebKit behave differently.
Opera has announced that its range of Web browsers is now being used by 300 million people each month to navigate the Internet across mobile phones, PCs, tablets and more. The Norwegian firm is marking the milestone with the announcement that it will transition its browsers over to the open-sourced WebKit, in a move that will eventually end the development of its own rendering engine.
A very sensible decision. I’d advise Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team to do the same for a couple of reasons:
1. Webkit is king
Due to the rise of mobile (and your own company’s inability to lead in this domain), Webkit has become the de-facto browser-engine developers are targeting first* before any others. Right now, supporting IE is a pain in the ass (initiatives like modern.ie are little more than a stop-gap solution, since not everyone is willing or able to sacrifice huge chunks of their hard-drive to run all the Windows VM’s just to test their work in IE). As a result, people aren’t going out of their way to support IE any more than they have to (see the whole prefix drama last year).
Let me give an example of what this means: Google’s Chrome experiments website is populated with loads of cool Javascript demos, almost all of which are made by independent web-developers in their spare time, for free. Meanwhile, Microsoft has to pay companies to make showcase web-apps optimized for Internet Explorer.
Ballmer’s infamous “developers, developers, developers“-schtick clearly hasn’t reached the IE team. They don’t own the web-developer’s hearts and minds, and nothing they can do can win them back (not that they ever owned them to begin with). Switching to Webkit would allow users of IE to reap the benefits of other browsers’ popularity.
And who knows: Maybe with a more level playing field, maybe browsers can start competing on UX and features, rather than on how accurately (or not) they render sites. MS might actually win some people back.
2. Time to play catch-up
Right now, IE is still stuck in an almost archaic 12-18 month release cycle. Both Chrome and Firefox are constantly updated year-round. In the time it takes for IE to go up one version number, Chrome goes up 10. Switching to Webkit would allow Microsoft to make up for a lot of lost time in one fell swoop.
3. People aren’t nostalgic about IE
Switching to Webkit would be a more productive use of time and money than making ads like this. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a glorious ode to the 90′s people of my generation will certainly remember. But while it’s one of the best Microsoft ads I’ve ever seen**, strategically I think it sends the wrong message.
Nostalgia isn’t the right sentiment for promoting a browser that’s already crippled by a dated image. For people to be nostalgic about something, they have to remember liking it in the first place. Same reason you wouldn’t make a nostalgic ad about DOS to promote Windows 8. Maybe I’m an exception, but I remember Netscape Navigator’s spinning globe a lot more fondly than Internet Explorer’s blue “E”.
So to wrap up: good on you Opera. I’m looking forward to what you can contribute to an already great rendering engine.
* Some people are weary of this Webkit-dominance, drawing parallels to IE’s dominance in the late 90′s-early 00′s and all the horrors and stagnation that came with it. But Webkit is different because it’s open-source and has multiple stakeholders, including web-native companies like Google. I don’t think any of them are willing to let the web rot like Microsoft was back then.
** That’s not saying much. At least this one doesn’t have scary hard-core schoolgirls.
Filmmaker Vincent Laforet took time out to go watch Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit 3 times in a row:
Tonight I went to see his latest film in all three flavors of its release: 3D HFR, Standard 3D, and in 2D.
On one end of the spectrum I had one of the most disappointing cinematic experiences in recent memory, and on the other extreme I fell into the film and enjoyed it very much – all watching the EXACT same film mind you…
I went to see The Hobbit last night (in 2D) and loved it. After reading this I’m glad that I did, but I’m also perversely curious to see if the 3D HFR is as awful as a lot of people are saying. Seeing as the movie was a lot more dynamically shot in places than the original LoTR movies, I can certainly see how it could be torture for some people.
The last movie I saw in 3D, Tintin (also from Peter Jackson) put me off of 3D for good because of the action scenes. 3D cinema is almost fascist art: the director literally forces you to focus on the part of the picture where he wants you to focus, and any deviation of your gaze is met with instantaneous punishment in the form of broken immersion at best and a splitting headache at worst.
The “you are the product” line is most often repeated when a company that provides a free service does something that people don’t like. See Instagram’s recent terms change or any Facebook design update. The subtext is, this company does not serve you, you don’t pay for it, so shut up already.
But that’s crazy talk. If a company shows that they’re not treating you or your work with respect, vote with your feet. Uninstall. Delete account. Walk! And make sure they know why you split. It’s the only way we have to make companies feel the repercussions of dumb, user-hostile decisions.
People have every right to complain when a company does something they don’t like. Sometimes, those companies might even listen. But unless you actually follow through on your outrage and delete your account or stop using their product, your outrage amounts to very little indeed.
People complain about Facebook and Twitter all the time (hell, I do too), but they have no motivation to care one iota about your privacy unless you actually suck it up and leave when they violate it.
iPhone photography site Life In LoFi takes a sober look at Instagram’s controversial new Terms of Service that has the world up in arms:
The internet is still an untamed place. If you want to share and for people to see your work, you now have to be ready to give up some control. If you want to maintain control of your works, you should consider rethinking your social media strategy.
To me this all comes back down to the same old problem: if you don’t pay for something, you are the product being sold. You can’t expect make use of a free service like Instagram indefinitely and not expect there to be some sort of downside to it. Which is why I won’t publish anything serious on any of the big, free, social networks and instead choose to host it myself, on a website I made myself and whose bills I pay myself. Anything I post or publish anywhere else, I just assume it to be public, regardless of what anyone might tell me. It’s the only sensible position to take, considering these services can just change their ToS whenever they want.
If you can’t live with that and don’t want to host anything yourself, you can always pay for a professional Flickr account. Plus I’ve heard good things about their new iOS app too.
Der Spiegel has a good exposé on the life of American drone pilots, & how they’re trying to live with the knowledge that they’re killing people from halfway across the world via remote-control.
Drone warfare seems to me like one of the great social injustices of the world. I believe war should never be without a human cost for all sides involved, because otherwise there’s a fundamental lack of motivation to look for alternative solutions. Few things motivate the public (and thus politicians) against war like footage of body-bags coming home. With drones, there’s none of that.
There ought to be another Geneva convention against drone warfare.
So, you decided to build a real application. Not a toy. Not a hobby project. Something that’s supposed to last, supposed to scale, supposed to work and remain reliable.
It’s always tempting to try out new frameworks, technologies and toys when starting a new project just because. But over the years I’ve found that, for every minute of work you save when some framework does something magical for you, you’ll later spend 10 minutes going through the framework source code to figure out how to do something that works even slightly contrary to its design.
Whenever you work with someone else’s technology or framework, you ought to be prepared to own it entirely, i.e. to read & know most of its source code & documentation. Otherwise, don’t be surprised to find yourself working at 4AM on a Friday-night.
