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> The free and opened web presents a challenge to Apple's app business. The free and opened [sic] web is BS. The "web" was always free and open, if you had wo

by gkya 9y ago

> The free and opened web presents a challenge to Apple's app business. The free and opened [sic] web is BS. The "web" was always free and open, if you had worthy and user-respecting stuff to publish. Autoplaying video and other similar features are just plain evil. And if web apps are second class citizens on iOS, that's really a nice thing to hear, IMnsHO, because they are second class citizens on the WWW itself. They are either castrated versions of the native applications they are pretending to be, or overtly bloated thin clients (i.e. glorified <form>s) anyways. There has been one web app that I've used and liked: the old Gmail app. The requirements of the platform are quite clear, and the service in return is quite desirable (apps being reviewed before publishing, user-centric permissions scheme, etc.) and even though I don't own an iOS device ATM, it sounds quite desirable to me, at least over Android where there is a hundred million billion versions of the OS out there and nobody bothers sending update my way so that I can has some granular control over what I allow the apps do. If you don't like it, don't take it. And it's nothing like IE because nobody has to use iPhones whereas Microsoft had put its OS and its browser on almost every computer out there, and I bet older IE browsers still have more market share than the sum of devices online with Safari installed. They are just a little island of the technosphere that want to get what they paid for, and enjoy the web like it was meant to be, possibly; and I'm just like them with my Qutebrowser where I have to disable JS and maintain a whitelist because the free and open web. Gosh.

judah 9y ago
The free and open web is BS? Well, I disagree. That any person with the will and the skill can publish something for all the world to see, without the need for gatekeepers? That's incredible freedom the world has never before seen. >> "Autoplaying video and other similar features are just plain evil." I'm not even asking for that. My app is a music player in the vein of Pandora. iOS Safari doesn't let me play the next song if I'm not in the fore. Apple has acknowledged this is an issue; maybe they will fix it in a future version. iOS Safari: As someone who has supported a web app (now PWA) for 7 years on iOS Safari, I say with knowledge and experience that yes, iOS Safari is the modern IE6. I say that because it is the slowest to adopt standard web features, and the reason for doing so is a business one. Both reflect 1990s IE and Microsoft.
- gkya 9y ago
  You are confounding things here. The actual free and open web is certainly one of the best things ever. But all the app ecosystem we have built on it, the insecure and wasteful universe of web apps, and all the cruft that is created to support them in the name of free and open web, none of them are necessary for tye web to be free and open. Is the open web this whole business of tracking and data ransom? No. It is the content that people publish, and it needs only a fraction of all this complexity. The rest is the closed web. Nobody bars anybody from publishing proper application software or make usable web applications that do not require clients to have software that takes hundreds of megabytes on disk and multiple gigabytes on ram. In thr nineties MS had almost 100 marketshare in consumer OS market. How much does Apple ecosystem has now. MS and Apple is incomparable in that you can prefer to not use an apple device, but for a long long time you could not prefer to not use the MS software, whatever consumer hardware you had.

by gkya 9y ago

judah 9y ago

The free and open web is BS? Well, I disagree. That any person with the will and the skill can publish something for all the world to see, without the need for gatekeepers? That's incredible freedom the world has never before seen. >> "Autoplaying video and other similar features are just plain evil." I'm not even asking for that. My app is a music player in the vein of Pandora. iOS Safari doesn't let me play the next song if I'm not in the fore. Apple has acknowledged this is an issue; maybe they will fix it in a future version. iOS Safari: As someone who has supported a web app (now PWA) for 7 years on iOS Safari, I say with knowledge and experience that yes, iOS Safari is the modern IE6. I say that because it is the slowest to adopt standard web features, and the reason for doing so is a business one. Both reflect 1990s IE and Microsoft.

gkya 9y ago
You are confounding things here. The actual free and open web is certainly one of the best things ever. But all the app ecosystem we have built on it, the insecure and wasteful universe of web apps, and all the cruft that is created to support them in the name of free and open web, none of them are necessary for tye web to be free and open. Is the open web this whole business of tracking and data ransom? No. It is the content that people publish, and it needs only a fraction of all this complexity. The rest is the closed web. Nobody bars anybody from publishing proper application software or make usable web applications that do not require clients to have software that takes hundreds of megabytes on disk and multiple gigabytes on ram. In thr nineties MS had almost 100 marketshare in consumer OS market. How much does Apple ecosystem has now. MS and Apple is incomparable in that you can prefer to not use an apple device, but for a long long time you could not prefer to not use the MS software, whatever consumer hardware you had.