> Market competition underlies the enterprise of standards. It creates the only functional test of designs and functions as a pressure release valve that enables standards-based ecosystems route around single-vendor damage. Without competition, standards bodies have no purpose, and neither they, nor the ecosystems they support, can retain relevance.
This is a strange rant about Apple specifically, because Apple, Google (the author's former employer), and Microsoft (the author's current employer) collectively monopolize both web browser market share and consumer OS market share on desktop and mobile. There is no competition, there are no web standards anymore except what the monopolistic browser vendors decide, and indeed the WHATWG successfully executed a coup d'état against the W3C standards body. Worldwide, Android has higher market share than iOS, Windows higher than macOS. I'm not trying to defend Apple, but I do think the author neglects to mention the essential role of his employers in this monopoly, destruction of competition, and assault on standards.
The author calls WebKit a "sham" of an open source project, not mentioning that Google used to participate in WebKit but then abandoned it, forking into a Google-controlled browser engine. Google's dominance of the web is so complete that even Microsoft was forced to abandon its own browser engine and adopt Google's. And we've seen the results of that: websites that only work in Chromium—thereby forcing browser vendors to adopt Chromium, furthering Google's monopolization—and worse, the debilitation of web browser extensions via the deprecation of Manifest V2. And if Apple doesn't happen to implement whatever Google decides, the author complains about it; why doesn't the author complain about how Google is driving all of the so-called "standards"? Why is the author not complaining about the lack of diversity in web browser engines? And even Firefox is ultimately beholden to Google, ironically arguing in court to preserve Google's monopoly so that Firefox can continue to receive Google money, Mozilla's main source of financing, even while Google continues to monopolize and force browser engines other than its own into obscurity. Firefox is a shell of its former self.
Again, this is not a defense of Apple. But Google and Microsoft are equally bad. Apple is at worst a duopolist, so how about talking about the other side of the duopoly?
The author seems to think that Apple is specifically targeting the web, trying to undermine it, but as a Mac user and developer for almost 2 decades, I don't think this is specific to the web or Safari. Whether it's malice or incompetence, Apple has been undermining the Mac too. Their software quality overall is now atrocious. And their UI is becoming atrocious too with "Liquid Glass", on all of Apple's platforms. If you focus only on Safari and WebKit, you're missing the forest for the trees.
> There is no competition, there are no web standards anymore except what the monopolistic browser vendors decide, and indeed the WHATWG successfully executed a coup d'état against the W3C standards body.
The remarkable thing is how the WHATWG gang successfully got lots of observers to cheer this on as a good thing. (Relatedly, are there any archived copies of the old, disappeared "Last Week in HTML5" blog floating around out there?)
Overall the Web is a classic (probably by now the classic) example of Too Big To Fork https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6810259 : as the size and interconnectedness of a piece of software or a protocol go up, the power of incumbents and those with deep pockets over it increases, effectively nullifying more and more any legal open-source or open-standard status it has. The glass-half-full implication is that this is a to a large extent a technical problem: it can be ameliorated by making the Web more modular and/or easier to independently reimplement. The glass-half-empty implications are that this is a difficult technical problem—it's not straightforwardly obvious how this can be done even starting with a clean slate, let alone how to get there from here—and that without technical improvements, any attempts to solve this with regulation, antitrust action, consumer activism or whatever is going to be unsatisfactory in one way or another.
To be fair... the W3C at the time was only starting to recover from their fascination with all things XML and Semantic Web. To the extent a standards body has an innovation budget, theirs had been in serious deficit for a while.
In the meantime, innovation was desperately needed to catch web standards up to the "2.0" evolution of the web into a vaguely usable app platform.
That shift was largely developer-driven, not standards or browser vendor driven: The magic enabled by XMLHttpRequest was more or less a happy accident.
> Their software quality overall is now atrocious.
People have been saying this for a while, and maybe there is a degradation of performance and UI consistency, but I'm a little confused when people describe it this way. What are you referring to?
> Both Apple and Google can be guilty of anti-competitive and anti-freedom behavior.
I said as much. I mentioned twice that I wasn't trying to defend Apple.
The article is nominally about web standards, but the WHATWG—whose steering committee includes Google and Microsoft—hijacked web standards. The article is painting a picture where Apple is largely acting alone, but that's not even remotely true.
> Android is caving to the pressure to follow suit more and more every day.
Pressure? What pressure? Are you claiming that Apple is somehow pressuring Google into locking down Android?
You were trying to re-focus the discussion away from Apple's behavior by pointing to Google.
Yes, both stepped over the line trying to anti-competitively make their browser dominant. Everyone had an ostensible choice to not use Chrome but if you spend enough money to be pre-installed, bundled, advertised, etc everywhere, you can take over. Good old fashioned monopoly tactics, right?
Apple took the novel, and IMO far more disturbing and reprehensible, approach by simply not giving anyone any choice. Since then, we've seen a huge expansion of DRM, integrity checks, eFuse, etc to strip everyone of their freedom. Companies got a taste of that sweet total control with iOS and wanted more.
> Apple took the novel, and IMO far more disturbing and reprehensible, approach by simply not giving anyone any choice.
Users who disagree with the concept of walled gardens have the choice of buying into an open platform.
As long as the platform creator is honest and doesn't try to yank away the supposed freedom to run any software you like that they fraudulently promised when they announced and marketed the platform.
> You were trying to re-focus the discussion away from Apple's behavior by pointing to Google.
No, I was trying to re-focus the discussion on all of the monopolists: Apple and Google on mobile, Apple and Microsoft on desktop. To talk only of Apple is to ignore the crucial roles of Google and Microsoft as monopolists.
I didn't say they invented the walled garden. I said Apple made it acceptable and successful for general purpose computing. "I can't use Firefox on my phone" doesn't quite have the same ring as "I can't use Firefox on my Switch".
Ask yourself who was the adversary for this DRM model? Game console lockdowns were built to target publishers. Mobile lockdowns are squarely targeted at users. Both are bad but the implications, magnitude, and overall consequences are very different, IMO.
> I said Apple made it acceptable and successful for general purpose computing.
So why did Windows Phone fail as a walled garden?
I'd say that it was because of Google's fraudulent promise that Android would be the platform that allowed users to run anything they liked. Google traded false promises of "openness" for market share.
(As well as Google using it's internet video monopoly as an anticompetitive weapon to prevent Windows Phone from having a YouTube client)
Why did Windows RT fail in the tablet market if walled gardens were so acceptable?
It turns out that users were perfectly capable of rejecting walled garden platforms even after the iPhone.
Your average person who wants to use Snapchat, if given a choice between a phone that runs Snapchat versus one that doesn’t, simply chooses the one that can. (Windows Phone never had Snapchat.)
Same with Photoshop. Neither Windows Phone or RT had any software support. It’s like buying a game console with no games — what’s the point?
No regular person even knows what a walled garden is. It’s not a decision factor.
By that logic, Windows RT/Windows Phone should have succeeded since they supported running versions of Microsoft Office and the other platforms did not.
This is a nonsequitor. You fear a loss of control (someone will force you to install Google and MS apps) so you choose iOS because it has less control.
That’s not true for me. And I get my family on Apple devices because it’s vastly easier to be their de facto IT department that way. When I go to visit my sister, I know my nephew hasn’t sideloaded a virus into her iPad, except that if he somehow did, it’d be so unlikely that we’d have fun talking about it.
I’m not arguing that you shouldn’t use more open portable devices. I contend that there are practical reasons why I greatly prefer them.
(But lock down my laptop to a degree that I can’t install and run software from wherever, and I’d fling it out the nearest window. The above applies to tablets and phones and that’s it.)
I'm on it for the software + hardware combo. Take either away and I'd just get whatever cheap crap instead, and probably use my computers, phones, and tablets a lot less (wouldn't bother with a tablet at all, most likely).
FWIW my intro to computers was DOS and later Windows, and Linux was my daily driver for a little over a decade before I finally gave Macs a fair shot. My first three or so smartphones were Android, before I ever tried an iPhone.
This is all true if you only look at 1-2 countries. However taking the rest of world into account and this quickly falls apart. In China for example you can use a custom rom and still use digital payments like Alipay no problem.
So you’re saying Apple legitimized some bad behavior, and now Google does it too, but we should only blame Apple, but Google does it too. You’re seriously blaming Apple for Google locking down Google pay on android?
> That's a long response that boils down to whatabout-ism.
When someone's saying "X is destroying Y!" and you point out that A and B have at least as much culpability for whatever is happening to Y as X does, that's not whataboutism. It's accurate assignment of blame.
This is a strange rant about Apple specifically, because Apple, Google (the author's former employer), and Microsoft (the author's current employer) collectively monopolize both web browser market share and consumer OS market share on desktop and mobile. There is no competition, there are no web standards anymore except what the monopolistic browser vendors decide, and indeed the WHATWG successfully executed a coup d'état against the W3C standards body. Worldwide, Android has higher market share than iOS, Windows higher than macOS. I'm not trying to defend Apple, but I do think the author neglects to mention the essential role of his employers in this monopoly, destruction of competition, and assault on standards.
The author calls WebKit a "sham" of an open source project, not mentioning that Google used to participate in WebKit but then abandoned it, forking into a Google-controlled browser engine. Google's dominance of the web is so complete that even Microsoft was forced to abandon its own browser engine and adopt Google's. And we've seen the results of that: websites that only work in Chromium—thereby forcing browser vendors to adopt Chromium, furthering Google's monopolization—and worse, the debilitation of web browser extensions via the deprecation of Manifest V2. And if Apple doesn't happen to implement whatever Google decides, the author complains about it; why doesn't the author complain about how Google is driving all of the so-called "standards"? Why is the author not complaining about the lack of diversity in web browser engines? And even Firefox is ultimately beholden to Google, ironically arguing in court to preserve Google's monopoly so that Firefox can continue to receive Google money, Mozilla's main source of financing, even while Google continues to monopolize and force browser engines other than its own into obscurity. Firefox is a shell of its former self.
Again, this is not a defense of Apple. But Google and Microsoft are equally bad. Apple is at worst a duopolist, so how about talking about the other side of the duopoly?
The author seems to think that Apple is specifically targeting the web, trying to undermine it, but as a Mac user and developer for almost 2 decades, I don't think this is specific to the web or Safari. Whether it's malice or incompetence, Apple has been undermining the Mac too. Their software quality overall is now atrocious. And their UI is becoming atrocious too with "Liquid Glass", on all of Apple's platforms. If you focus only on Safari and WebKit, you're missing the forest for the trees.