The following is all my opinion, of course:
Arguably many of the wins currently being seen in web games were only possible
because your biggest competitor (Google, w/NaCL) basically
ceded the market by failing to ship promptly and failing to support
their developers. I don't think the asm.js games situation acts as a
good example, given that.
Game developers were super enthused about flascc/alchemy before,
including Unity, and only abandoned it once it was clear Adobe was
going to ruin it through mismanagement. Game developers were super
enthused about NaCL, including Unity, and only abandoned it once it
was clear Google would never make it actually usable for delivering
products to customers. Only now do we see Unity and Unreal targeting
asm.js, after those two options are dead (though Mozilla certainly
worked hard to get them on board, and that is a huge success!)
This is not to undermine the value of asm.js or to dismiss the hard
work done on it, but you have to consider the context before treating it
as a model for future decisions. Had things gone different, asm.js
would have been thoroughly beaten to market and might not have been
able to build up as much momentum.
Maybe there's an argument to be made that Mozilla's proprietary
competitors will always stumble and fall, though. It does seem to
happen a lot.
On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 4:17 PM, Benoit Jacob <jacob.benoi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2014-04-15 18:28 GMT-04:00 Andreas Gal <andreas....@gmail.com>:
>
>>
>> You can’t beat the competition by fast following the competition. Our
>> competition are native, closed, proprietary ecosystems. To beat them, the
>> Web has to be on the bleeding edge of technology. I would love to see VR
>> support in the Web platform before its available as a builtin capability in
>> any major native platform.
>>
>
> Can't we? (referring to: "You can’t beat the competition by fast
> following the competition.")
>
> The Web has a huge advantage over the competition ("native, closed,
> proprietary ecosystems"):
>
> The web only needs to be good enough.
>
> Look at all the wins that we're currently scoring with Web games. (I
> mention games because that's relevant to this thread). My understanding of
> this year's GDC announcements is that we're winning. To achieve that, we
> didn't really give the web any technical superiority over other platforms;
> in fact, we didn't even need to achieve parity. We merely made it good
> enough. For example, the competition is innovating with a completely new
> platform to "run native code on the web", but with asm.js and emscripten
> we're showing that javascript is in fact good enough, so we end up winning
> anyway.
>
> What we need to ensure to keep winning is 1) that the Web remains good
> enough and 2) that it remains true, that the Web only needs to be good
> enough.
>
> In this respect, more innovation is not necessarily better, and in fact,
> the cost of innovating in the wrong direction could be particularly high
> for the Web compared to other platforms. We need to understand the above 2)
> point and make sure that we don't regress it. 2) probably has something to
> do with the fact that the Web is the one "write once, run anywhere"
> platform and, on top of that, also offers "run forever". Indeed, compared
> to other platforms, we care much more about portability and we are much
> more serious about committing to long-term platform stability. Now my point
> is that we can only do that by being picky with what we support. There's no
> magic here; we don't get the above 2) point for free.
>
> Benoit
>
>
>>
>> Andreas
>>
>> On Apr 15, 2014, at 2:57 PM, Robert O'Callahan <rob...@ocallahan.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 3:14 AM, Benoit Jacob <jacob.benoi...@gmail.com
>> >wrote:
>> >
>> >> If VR is not yet a thing on the Web, could you elaborate on why you
>> think
>> >> it should be?
>> >>
>> >> I'm asking because the Web has so far mostly been a common denominator,
>> >> conservative platform. For example, WebGL stays at a distance behind the
>> >> forefront of OpenGL innovation. I thought of that as being intentional.
>> >>
>> >
>> > That is not intentional. There are historical and pragmatic reasons why
>> the
>> > Web operates well in "fast follow" mode, but there's no reason why we
>> can't
>> > lead as well. If the Web is going to be a strong platform it can't always
>> > be the last to get shiny things. And if Firefox is going to be strong we
>> > need to lead on some shiny things.
>> >
>> > So we need to solve Vlad's problem.
>> >
>> > Rob
>> > --
>> > Jtehsauts tshaei dS,o n" Wohfy Mdaon yhoaus eanuttehrotraiitny eovni
>> > le atrhtohu gthot sf oirng iyvoeu rs ihnesa.r"t sS?o Whhei csha iids
>> teoa
>> > stiheer :p atroa lsyazye,d 'mYaonu,r "sGients uapr,e tfaokreg
>> iyvoeunr,
>> > 'm aotr atnod sgaoy ,h o'mGee.t" uTph eann dt hwea lmka'n? gBoutt
>> uIp
>> > waanndt wyeonut thoo mken.o w
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