But, a little revisionist about why browser innovation slowed. It wasn't Microsoft yielding to standards demands that slowed their pace; it was Microsoft's de facto victory in (for a time) neutralizing the business possibilities of competitive browser development.
It took a while for alternate models that could sustain further browser evolution -- the Google placement payments to Mozilla, Apple's sponsorship as a complement to their other platforms -- to grow to take the place of the original Netscape dreams.
Hewitt's prescription seems right, though: a bit of healthy disdain for waiting for standards bodies before deploying new things, and some added respect for even those proprietary offerings -- like Flash -- that kept expanding capabilities and user expectations when browsers didn't.
We're supposed to believe that the W3C (founded in 1994), and the Web Standards Project (founded in 1998), had to work for years and just coincidentally managed to browbeat MS into stopping development on IE at the same time MS beat Netscape? That they were even capable of "bullying" a company like MS into stopping development on one of their products?
My own exposure to web standards was Zeldman's first "Designing With Web Standards" book, published in 2003. My experience has been that the standardistas have spent most of their time trying to push MS to further develop IE to support standards (which it still lags at), not trying to hinder innovation.
And no, I'm not speaking on behalf of my employer; it's just my personal opinion.
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> As someone who has tried to do both cutting edge native and web iPhone apps, iPhone Safari is a joke compared to iPhone Cocoa
What he is basically saying is developing natively instead of for the web can give a better result, and he would prefer to drop cross-browser compatibility and just have users launch whatever browser he developed the app for.
The question is why develop for the web at all if your apps only run in a certain browser? He seems to make the assumption that while his app can’t run in all browsers, the browser it does run in is available “on all platforms”.
I think he needs to rethink what the purpose is with HTML, semantic markup, and having a standard.
This is a mental block. You're thinking about it from a developer's perspective. He's talking about how to make the web better for users.
He is seeing “the web” as an easy way to deploy applications. The app store is exactly what he needs, easy way to deploy stuff to users and no cross-browser requirements.
He makes the argument that while the app store is great in that regard, it sucks because he is locked to one mobile phone (OS) — at the same time, he is making the argument that the Cocoa platform is so much better because individual browser vendors did not (and were not allowed to) innovate, he downplays the compatibility problems by saying that users can just launch another browser (and indirectly, buy a new computer / OS if the browser is not available on their platform).
In the domain of Operating Systems this makes more sense, because the OS or kernel is generally written in the low level language that is being asked about (i.e. C). Any higher-level language is generally implemented in terms of the low level language, making it available as a fall back for low level tasks (i.e. tasks on the OS/kernel level).
I'm just not sure how this concept of lower-level languages applies to the web.
If they really want a history lesson, then return to the pre-browser days -- yeah, you had to #ifdef and port your code over and over and over, always chasing the latest APIs (the time of origin of that horrible phrase, in fact).
Standardization fixed that.
Apparently you weren't doing web development back in the Netscape 4.7 days. :)
IE 5.5 and 6 were actually big steps forward for web standards back in 2000-2001. They were actually decent browsers then. Not perfect, but no one was. The problem isn't IE6 - it's that Microsoft stopped with IE6 for such a long time.
Tabs were the last thing that struck me as innovative. I was hoping Google's sidebar idea would take off but it doesn't seem terribly popular. I wish the social internet (not so much facebook, but discussion forums like this or persistent comment communities) were decoupled from content, such that commentary was not siloed on the same page as the content.
The question is whether a browser innovation war would provide benefits that would compensate for the inconvenience of installing and using several browsers. I think it would. Actually, I think it would be much better than the first time around, because we've finally reached the point where most web sites can work across all browsers. (Perhaps it would be best if the impulse toward complete compatibility and uniformity across browsers came and went like the tide.) A web site that only worked with one browser engine would be at a severe disadvantage compared to a similar web site that worked in all browsers. Browser innovations would have to enable really radical improvements before they were adopted. That's assuming that web developers are smarter this time around, which I think they are. If there's a surge in incompatible innovation, you won't see banks or insurance companies jumping on the bandwagon. Nor will you see any plain-jane sites that mysteriously require one browser or another. If a site requires you to launch a certain browser, it will be immediately obvious why, or you'll never go back to that site again.
But he is correct about Microsoft and web standards committees.
Hence, IE6 remained stagnant until MS started feeling some heat from Firefox.
