On 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.”)
Yes, we can. Look at some of the performance characteristics of FFOS on low-end
hardware. We beat Android and other native systems on a regular basis on key
performance metrics like startup performance by leveraging architectural
advantages of the Web stack (lazy loading, etc). Or compare opening the App
Store app on Mac OS X with going to a marketplace website like amazon.com. We
load a rich content experience faster over the net than my SSD high end Mac
loads from disk because the Web has evolved to a place where it has better
capabilities for these tasks than native.
>
> The Web has a huge advantage over the competition ("native, closed,
> proprietary ecosystems"):
>
> The web only needs to be good enough.
Aiming low is always wrong. Always. It is true that the Web has massive reach,
but thats not an excuse to be stagnant and reach for the “lowest common
denominator” as you are proposing it. The massive reach of the Web helps us to
get innovation to people faster. It doesn’t remove the need to innovate.
>
> 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.
We aren’t winning just yet. We barely got the foundation laid for Web gaming
(even though I agree that we likely have tipped the scale now). In any case, we
got here through technical excellence and innovation. asm.js is not merely good
enough as you are claiming. It is the fastest, mostly widely available way to
deliver portable game code to devices, with performance rivaling native
performance. Thats very different from “lets just trail the market and do as
little as we need to."
>
> 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.
I think you get the history of the Web all wrong. The Web has always been and
will always be like the Wild West. Innovation happens all over the place, and
we iterate towards a stable, standardized point after innovation happened. This
is the biggest strength of the Web. Its not governed by a committee approving
and managing the pace of innovation (or worse, by a single company controlling
the ecosystem like Google or Apple). Nobody owns the Web and nobody can stop
innovation. Of the 4 or so major browser vendors, if 2 move in some direction
the other 2 have to follow suit or suffer the consequences of not being
competitive on some characteristics. At the same time, nobody can go alone and
fork the Web because nobody has enough market share to force a standard on
their own. This is why Google’s proprietary extensions like NaCl and Dart are
failing to get traction.
Innovation is the life blood of the Web and we need heretics like Vlad to push
its boundaries. I remember when Vlad first started pushing for WebGL. A lot of
people felt its crazy talk to expose GL to the Web and today we can’t imagine a
Web without it. Knowing Vlad and his track record, we will think the same about
WebVR in a few years. Lets clear the roadblocks for him to take us there.
Andreas
>
> 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
> > --
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