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
--
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
_______________________________________________
dev-platform mailing list
dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
_______________________________________________
dev-platform mailing list
dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
