The aggressive dismissal of the concerns are unwarranted and a bit ignorant. The concern is not, per se, vendor extensions -- such a mechanism exists for a reason -- but rather that many users of those extensions have lazily taken to only bothering with webkit extensions. Most of the time for no reason other than an IE-only like "suck it" attitude (many demos front-paged here on HN only work in single browser, despite often needing just trivial changes to work elsewhere).
Dismiss the W3C and the purpose for standards at your peril. Webkit and its offshoots have the ability to innovate on the edge because that body and its impact kept the web open.
EDIT: It's worth noting, with sober consideration, that exactly the same argument was made to support Internet Explorer during the ugliest days of the web. This could have been cribbed verbatim from something a Microsoft advocate would have said in the late 90s.
"Webkit and its offshoots have the ability to innovate on the edge because that body and its impact kept the web open."
I don't agree. I'd say the web saving itself from IE's grip had a lot more to do with Microsoft sitting on its ass and doing virtually nothing to push things forward once they got 90% share. If Firefox didn't have its impressive extension mechanism or webkit in the form of Chrome wasn't so damned fast or the whole mobile browser didn't become a thing, people would still largely be using IE, and none of those circumstances has a single thing to do with the W3C, really.
IMO, the fact that this is even being discussed but now in the context of Webkit instead of IE shows that the W3C isn't really that relevant when it comes to pushing the web along.
You miss the fact that Gecko and Webkit are open source projects. There will never be the case where something like ActiveX can exist with these projects.
The fact that they're open source doesn't matter. We (humanity) have largely compatible open-source implementations of ActiveX in Wine and ReactOS, and if W3C or ISO or someone had deigned to standardise ActiveX this code would've found its way into Gecko and KHTML.
Plus, NaCl is closer than "something like" to ActiveX. What do you consider to be the salient difference between the two technologies?
The salient point is that Native Client is open source and the standard can be adopted by Firefox, Opera, and Safari if developers find that it meets their needs. Native Client is built on OpenGL (cross platform compatible) where ActiveX was developed against the Windows APIs.
Wine has been a long time in the making and certainly wasn't ready to be integrated into Mozilla for ActiveX compatibility on Mac OS, Linux, or even alternative browsers on Windows in 1996, so it's kind of a silly point to make.
Why are you ranting about things you clearly know nothing about?
> The NPAPI port for other browsers was abandoned
You're bitching up and down this thread about standards, and now you're defending the ancient, non-standard Netscape plugin architecture? Do you have any clue what you're talking about, or are you just here to be anti-Google?
Ok, I still don't understand. I really got into web development around ten years ago, and have been a Firefox since back when Firefox was simply called Mozilla. So I have no experience, developer side or userland, with ActiveX. What were the consequences of ActiveX and how could open source have prevented it?
Well, ActiveX was a proprietary technology developed by Microsoft that only run on Windows, and especially only run on IE. So sites using it were only working with IE.
Webkit and Mozilla being open source means that no single company can control the projects or add a proprietary single-platform exception to them.
Now, a company could FORK Webkit/geecko and add something like ActiveX to it, but the fork wouldn't be part of webkit/geecko project anymore, and we'd still have webkit/geecko proper. For example, Google added NaCL which is something like ActiveX to Chrome, but not to Webkit itself.
Okay, so you now you have edited the source code and compiled a binary, is your recommendation that the binary be downloadable and installable by the user from the website?
Open source is one thing, but if you're not able to convince Google and Apple to ship your changes, you've hit a wall. FF implementing support for the WebKit extensions is what will break the web back into the IE-dominant era.
For the example given were activeX open source then its windows-specificity would be rendered moot as some fork would displace it.
Or, if were webkit not open source then it would probably not end up being a joint apple-google production. Joe-bob's ideas for CSS that he compiles into Firefox himself may not be relevant, but eventually if FF sucks enough some fork of it will displace it as it did for Mozilla (cf. V8 displacing JavascriptCore) per some version of Kuhnian paradigm-shift.
> It's worth noting, with sober consideration, that exactly the same argument was made to support Internet Explorer during the ugliest days of the web. This could have been cribbed verbatim from something a Microsoft advocate would have said in the late 90s.
I hate Microsoft, but the argument you mention was made because it was mostly right. IE "won" because it provided a better platform and better user experience, not for any other reason.
The focus on IE in antitrust battles has been a disgraceful waste of resources. There are far better things to attack Microsoft for than providing a better browser than the piece of shit later versions of Netscape turned into.
And why did Netscape turn into a "piece of shit"? Because Microsoft used their considerable monopoly power (bullying OEMs out of preinstalls, bundling IE with Windows,...) to make it impossible for Netscape to build a business around making a better browser.
The stagnation and backslide started circa 1995-1996. IE was barely a blip at that time. By 1998, Netscape was basically useless and their share was just starting to drop below 50%.
If you look at timelines instead of listening to hysterical lawyers, the truth becomes clear. If you listen to the people who were actually at Netscape during this time, it becomes even clearer. They were utterly lost in the woods before Big Bad Microsoft ate them alive.
Dismiss the W3C and the purpose for standards at your peril. Webkit and its offshoots have the ability to innovate on the edge because that body and its impact kept the web open.
EDIT: It's worth noting, with sober consideration, that exactly the same argument was made to support Internet Explorer during the ugliest days of the web. This could have been cribbed verbatim from something a Microsoft advocate would have said in the late 90s.