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Am I missing something to think it is insane a kitchen appliance manufacturer fund such core dev work instead of Apple ?

havkd 5y ago
You clearly don’t know how expensive a Thermomix is…
tester89 5y ago
This reminds me how we got film which was better able to represent people of color because (as one reason, I don’t hink it was entirely this) of wood and chocolate manufactures wanting film which better showed the colors of their products.
danShumway 5y ago
On the surface, it is kind of wild, but I want to suggest that it's in some ways beneficial for work like this to be supported directly by the companies that benefit from them (including core dev work and engine improvements). There are downsides to only having Google/Apple/Mozilla participating in this process, and it's that (regardless of whether you think they have good or bad intentions) they are extremely insular. There are dangers to this as well of course. We don't want things getting derailed or worsened just because it makes life more convenient for some company somewhere. But in general I suspect it's good for more stakeholders to be getting their hands dirty engaging with both the standards processes and the minutia of actual browser development. They had a problem, they gave money to developers to fix it, and it got fixed with approval from upstream. In terms of Open Source, a pretty clear success story to me. We should encourage this.
- nzimmermann86 5y ago
  Agreed - Igalia encourages companies to work upstream, it's part of the idea that we stand for. A patch like the layer based SVG engine is imposssible to maintain by a single company - e.g. Vorwerk, downstream, for an extended period of time. You want to be able to follow upstream (e.g. for security updates), and that's hard when you change a piece of the core engine with your own stuff. To suceed, you _need_ to work upstream :-)
marcellus23 5y ago
Uh, why? Isn't that the whole point of open-source? Apple webkit engineers have been supportive from what it sounds like, it's not like they're against this patch.
- azinman2 5y ago
  Because it’s for a company that makes a high end blending appliance. The sponsor is what makes this odd. I don’t see Cuisinart or KitchenAid sponsoring much other open source code.
  - ghostly_s 5y ago
    Well, Apple's devices presumably don't have any trouble rendering SVG on CPU. As explained in the intro, the embedded CPUs on the blenders do. The unusual part here is that they decided to fix it instead of just falling back to a less featureful UI framework, which I'd say demonstrates an unusual commitment to quality user experience (or if you want to be cynical, flashy user experience).
    - Piribedil 5y ago
      Thanks for your comment : that makes more sense now. I had the assumption that efficient SVG rendering in Safari was critical and a UX bottleneck to work on from an Apple perspective, but maybe Apple hardware makes it moot.
      - nzimmermann86 5y ago
        It's not the hardware per se. CoreGraphics on macOS/iOS utilizes the GPU for painting, which is much faster than software rendering. Cairo, used for the Linux GTK/WPE ports, is software based, and thus much slower, when painting large scenes. Therefore for embedded devices using WebKit/Linux GTK/WPE ports we see a huge improvment with the layer based engine. Also macOS/iOS benefits though -- animations are even faster, and you don't easily run into problems, when animating parts of a complex document. It's shown in the video linked in the article at the end: > 20% frame rendering time improvement on an already quite efficient rendering pipeline (Safari / macOS using CoreGraphics on M1 machine).
skywal_l 5y ago
Yep, never thought my passion for computers and cooking would collide on hacker news this way!
Semaphor 5y ago
It’s interesting to see Vorwerk described as a kitchen appliance company. I had heard of the Thermomix, but didn’t know it was made by them (or even German). I’ve mainly known them for their vacuums.
- Octoth0rpe 5y ago
  > I’ve mainly known them for their vacuums. So they mostly suck is what I hear you saying
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
rezmason 5y ago
"So what computer graphics work are you the most proud of?" "I contributed some highly impactful performance improvements for a blender." "For Blender?" "No, for a blender."
dncornholio 5y ago
We are speaking about the most rich company in the world. You'd think they'd have the resources to fix their shit. Vorwerk probably got fed up with it too and decided to fix it themselfs. This is not a good look for Apple IMO. I completely dropped iOS support for an app I made because it used SVG's and clogged up every iPhone. It's a serious issue.
- otterley 5y ago
  You assume, incorrectly, that having money and other resources means you can snap your fingers and immediately hire the right person with the right skills to solve any arbitrary problem you might have. The world just doesn't work that way. There's a shortage of talent out there, and they often don't want to work for the richest players.
  - daenney 5y ago
    Not just “you might have” but “other companies using OSS software whose development you financially support might have”. If faster SVG graphics were an impediment to Apple’s business it would likely have been prioritised and fixed by them.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  One person's "fix their shit" is another person's "feature bloat." I assume Apple didn't implement this change in-house because they don't need higher-performance SVG rendering.
alexashka 5y ago
The number of people who want to do useful work that isn't sexy is vanishingly small, so I'm completely unsurprised that great, useful work comes from random places. That's actually how progress gets made - by people doing thankless work in obscurity. Then opportunists usually take that effort, make it fit an existing industry and charge whatever the market will bear. It'd all be fine if the middlemen didn't then proceed to claim greatness, insight and ingenuity, but they do (because then older middlemen give them money to replicate their success). This social structure is quite bad because it makes people think the middlemen are capable of creating value through their 'insight', without people who did unsexy, hard, thankless work prior. Anyhoo :)
- willis936 5y ago
  I can't think of many things flashier/sexier than high performance vector graphics. We live in a world with 8K displays. Pushing the envelope of attractive (2D) graphics is done in vector land.
  - popcube 5y ago
    yes, this mean they have more chance let someone to do this for them freely
- rhizome 5y ago
  >people who want to do useful work that isn't sexy Ah, you crystallized something for me. Thanks!
chris37879 5y ago
You are, the very first line of the article explains why they care. They make extensive use of the SVG api and it would benefit them to have this feature. It's no different to Valve hiring CodeWeavers to implement new things in the Linux kernel to advance their efforts with Proton. Steam isn't in the kernel development space, but it behooves them to improve the kernel with features that are useful to more than just themselves, since features that are _only_ useful to them are likely to be rejected.
- Vinnl 5y ago
  The first line (of the fourth paragraph, but still) does indicate that they make use of the SVG API, but what's baffling is not that they use it, but that apparently there's enough return on investment for them to be sponsoring this. Is there no alternative for what they're using it for? How much extra money does this use bring in? Who managed to convince management to do this and how did they do it? (I also imagine it's not so much a critical note as it is a "wow, I'd really like to understand the economics of this". It is for me.)
  - zdkl 5y ago
    > there's enough return on investment for them Honestly, this sort of thing is more effective marketing to me than any communication strategy. In brand awareness and "employer-ability".
    - Vinnl 5y ago
      I can believe that, but it would still be hard to fathom that marketing to standards geeks like us brings in enough additional revenue to finance this, or that they'll be having access to talent that brings in so much more revenue than who they'd have been able to hire otherwise that it pays for this. But: that might very well be because I just don't understand the economics of this (which is why I'm hoping for someone to explain it with a back-of-the-napkin calculation :) ).
      - aheusingfeld 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
solarkraft 5y ago
Yes! You’re missing the most important aspect of open source projects. Anyone can contribute a feature they care about (within limits). Apple (apparently) doesn’t care that much about SVG performance, Vorwerk does, so they paid for it. This is why companies like Google and Microsoft are big contributors to Linux: They add features they care about. As for why companies care about upstreaming: It’s not even because they’re so kind (though FOSS contributions are good marketing) - it just tends to be easier than maintaining a private fork.
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  > Yes! You’re missing the most important aspect of open source projects. Anyone can contribute a feature they care about (within limits). The biggest limit is resources. SVG is too big to be implemented by a lone wolf working for love alone, and too diverse in application for a tech company to embrace for the length of time and breadth of focus required. This is a welcome development that validates the W3C model in a positive, constructive way. TBL would be pleased I imagine.
hnmullany 5y ago
Yes it is insane. Apple's SVG development team is practically non-existent.
- The_rationalist 5y ago
  you mean the webkit team is practically non-existent
kingcharles 5y ago
It does baffle me that Apple, who will benefit from this, couldn't spare the development funds themselves, considering they are worth more than God himself. Apple has allegedly spent billions on the development of a car, yet could not spend what was probably $100K of consultancy to fix this issue.
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  Millions actually, over years if you consider life cycle and dependencies. Still, FAANGS have trillions, so why not, you might wonder, splash a drop here or there? The reason in practice is that to get any significant dev adopted in a FAANG is a competitive process with career advancement at stake. Only so many projects can level up year after year, because there are limited eyes and ears at each successive level that approve funding.
wombatmobile 5y ago
> Am I missing something to think it is insane a kitchen appliance manufacturer fund such core dev work It’s a great development and the key to open standards success. Not, of course, that a kitchen appliance manufacturer stepped up, but that any outsider was interested and willing to contribute to a general computing tech stack. For a thousand flowers to bloom, the bird must leave the nest.

havkd 5y ago

You clearly don’t know how expensive a Thermomix is…

tester89 5y ago

This reminds me how we got film which was better able to represent people of color because (as one reason, I don’t hink it was entirely this) of wood and chocolate manufactures wanting film which better showed the colors of their products.

danShumway 5y ago

On the surface, it is kind of wild, but I want to suggest that it's in some ways beneficial for work like this to be supported directly by the companies that benefit from them (including core dev work and engine improvements). There are downsides to only having Google/Apple/Mozilla participating in this process, and it's that (regardless of whether you think they have good or bad intentions) they are extremely insular. There are dangers to this as well of course. We don't want things getting derailed or worsened just because it makes life more convenient for some company somewhere. But in general I suspect it's good for more stakeholders to be getting their hands dirty engaging with both the standards processes and the minutia of actual browser development. They had a problem, they gave money to developers to fix it, and it got fixed with approval from upstream. In terms of Open Source, a pretty clear success story to me. We should encourage this.

nzimmermann86 5y ago
Agreed - Igalia encourages companies to work upstream, it's part of the idea that we stand for. A patch like the layer based SVG engine is imposssible to maintain by a single company - e.g. Vorwerk, downstream, for an extended period of time. You want to be able to follow upstream (e.g. for security updates), and that's hard when you change a piece of the core engine with your own stuff. To suceed, you _need_ to work upstream :-)

marcellus23 5y ago

Uh, why? Isn't that the whole point of open-source? Apple webkit engineers have been supportive from what it sounds like, it's not like they're against this patch.

azinman2 5y ago
Because it’s for a company that makes a high end blending appliance. The sponsor is what makes this odd. I don’t see Cuisinart or KitchenAid sponsoring much other open source code.
- ghostly_s 5y ago
  Well, Apple's devices presumably don't have any trouble rendering SVG on CPU. As explained in the intro, the embedded CPUs on the blenders do. The unusual part here is that they decided to fix it instead of just falling back to a less featureful UI framework, which I'd say demonstrates an unusual commitment to quality user experience (or if you want to be cynical, flashy user experience).
  - Piribedil 5y ago
    Thanks for your comment : that makes more sense now. I had the assumption that efficient SVG rendering in Safari was critical and a UX bottleneck to work on from an Apple perspective, but maybe Apple hardware makes it moot.
    - nzimmermann86 5y ago
      It's not the hardware per se. CoreGraphics on macOS/iOS utilizes the GPU for painting, which is much faster than software rendering. Cairo, used for the Linux GTK/WPE ports, is software based, and thus much slower, when painting large scenes. Therefore for embedded devices using WebKit/Linux GTK/WPE ports we see a huge improvment with the layer based engine. Also macOS/iOS benefits though -- animations are even faster, and you don't easily run into problems, when animating parts of a complex document. It's shown in the video linked in the article at the end: > 20% frame rendering time improvement on an already quite efficient rendering pipeline (Safari / macOS using CoreGraphics on M1 machine).

skywal_l 5y ago

Yep, never thought my passion for computers and cooking would collide on hacker news this way!

Semaphor 5y ago

It’s interesting to see Vorwerk described as a kitchen appliance company. I had heard of the Thermomix, but didn’t know it was made by them (or even German). I’ve mainly known them for their vacuums.

Octoth0rpe 5y ago
> I’ve mainly known them for their vacuums. So they mostly suck is what I hear you saying
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

rezmason 5y ago

"So what computer graphics work are you the most proud of?" "I contributed some highly impactful performance improvements for a blender." "For Blender?" "No, for a blender."

dncornholio 5y ago

We are speaking about the most rich company in the world. You'd think they'd have the resources to fix their shit. Vorwerk probably got fed up with it too and decided to fix it themselfs. This is not a good look for Apple IMO. I completely dropped iOS support for an app I made because it used SVG's and clogged up every iPhone. It's a serious issue.

otterley 5y ago
You assume, incorrectly, that having money and other resources means you can snap your fingers and immediately hire the right person with the right skills to solve any arbitrary problem you might have. The world just doesn't work that way. There's a shortage of talent out there, and they often don't want to work for the richest players.
- daenney 5y ago
  Not just “you might have” but “other companies using OSS software whose development you financially support might have”. If faster SVG graphics were an impediment to Apple’s business it would likely have been prioritised and fixed by them.
shadowgovt 5y ago
One person's "fix their shit" is another person's "feature bloat." I assume Apple didn't implement this change in-house because they don't need higher-performance SVG rendering.

alexashka 5y ago

The number of people who want to do useful work that isn't sexy is vanishingly small, so I'm completely unsurprised that great, useful work comes from random places. That's actually how progress gets made - by people doing thankless work in obscurity. Then opportunists usually take that effort, make it fit an existing industry and charge whatever the market will bear. It'd all be fine if the middlemen didn't then proceed to claim greatness, insight and ingenuity, but they do (because then older middlemen give them money to replicate their success). This social structure is quite bad because it makes people think the middlemen are capable of creating value through their 'insight', without people who did unsexy, hard, thankless work prior. Anyhoo :)

willis936 5y ago
I can't think of many things flashier/sexier than high performance vector graphics. We live in a world with 8K displays. Pushing the envelope of attractive (2D) graphics is done in vector land.
- popcube 5y ago
  yes, this mean they have more chance let someone to do this for them freely
rhizome 5y ago
>people who want to do useful work that isn't sexy Ah, you crystallized something for me. Thanks!

chris37879 5y ago

You are, the very first line of the article explains why they care. They make extensive use of the SVG api and it would benefit them to have this feature. It's no different to Valve hiring CodeWeavers to implement new things in the Linux kernel to advance their efforts with Proton. Steam isn't in the kernel development space, but it behooves them to improve the kernel with features that are useful to more than just themselves, since features that are _only_ useful to them are likely to be rejected.

Vinnl 5y ago
The first line (of the fourth paragraph, but still) does indicate that they make use of the SVG API, but what's baffling is not that they use it, but that apparently there's enough return on investment for them to be sponsoring this. Is there no alternative for what they're using it for? How much extra money does this use bring in? Who managed to convince management to do this and how did they do it? (I also imagine it's not so much a critical note as it is a "wow, I'd really like to understand the economics of this". It is for me.)
- zdkl 5y ago
  > there's enough return on investment for them Honestly, this sort of thing is more effective marketing to me than any communication strategy. In brand awareness and "employer-ability".
  - Vinnl 5y ago
    I can believe that, but it would still be hard to fathom that marketing to standards geeks like us brings in enough additional revenue to finance this, or that they'll be having access to talent that brings in so much more revenue than who they'd have been able to hire otherwise that it pays for this. But: that might very well be because I just don't understand the economics of this (which is why I'm hoping for someone to explain it with a back-of-the-napkin calculation :) ).
    - aheusingfeld 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

solarkraft 5y ago

Yes! You’re missing the most important aspect of open source projects. Anyone can contribute a feature they care about (within limits). Apple (apparently) doesn’t care that much about SVG performance, Vorwerk does, so they paid for it. This is why companies like Google and Microsoft are big contributors to Linux: They add features they care about. As for why companies care about upstreaming: It’s not even because they’re so kind (though FOSS contributions are good marketing) - it just tends to be easier than maintaining a private fork.

wombatmobile 5y ago
> Yes! You’re missing the most important aspect of open source projects. Anyone can contribute a feature they care about (within limits). The biggest limit is resources. SVG is too big to be implemented by a lone wolf working for love alone, and too diverse in application for a tech company to embrace for the length of time and breadth of focus required. This is a welcome development that validates the W3C model in a positive, constructive way. TBL would be pleased I imagine.

hnmullany 5y ago

Yes it is insane. Apple's SVG development team is practically non-existent.

The_rationalist 5y ago
you mean the webkit team is practically non-existent

kingcharles 5y ago

It does baffle me that Apple, who will benefit from this, couldn't spare the development funds themselves, considering they are worth more than God himself. Apple has allegedly spent billions on the development of a car, yet could not spend what was probably $100K of consultancy to fix this issue.

wombatmobile 5y ago
Millions actually, over years if you consider life cycle and dependencies. Still, FAANGS have trillions, so why not, you might wonder, splash a drop here or there? The reason in practice is that to get any significant dev adopted in a FAANG is a competitive process with career advancement at stake. Only so many projects can level up year after year, because there are limited eyes and ears at each successive level that approve funding.

wombatmobile 5y ago

> Am I missing something to think it is insane a kitchen appliance manufacturer fund such core dev work It’s a great development and the key to open standards success. Not, of course, that a kitchen appliance manufacturer stepped up, but that any outsider was interested and willing to contribute to a general computing tech stack. For a thousand flowers to bloom, the bird must leave the nest.