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.")
The Web has a huge advantage over the competition ("native, closed,
proprietary ecosystems"):
The web only needs to be good enough.
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.
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.
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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> teoa
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> uIp
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