State of Web Development

Apparently, not everyone agrees with my buddy Steve Jobs. That seems obvious to me because I have a large number of friends and colleagues that are very much in the Microsoft collective. However, I was quite surprised to find that a Netscape hero would be taking a firm public stand against Steve’s State of Web Development and defend IE so vehemently.

Joe Hewitt, a high-powered software engineer at Facebook, tweeted several insightful counterpoints to Steve’s blasting of Flash. Here are a few of those (some are combined) that I find illuminating and thought-provoking:

“Redirect your hatred of Flash to the W3C, whose embarrassingly slow pace forced devs to use a plugin because the standards were so weak.”

“10 years ago we bullied Microsoft into stopping innovation on IE so the W3C could take over. How’d that work out?”

He goes on to say that IE6 was amazing in 2000. Um, I was there, and we coded apps to work with IE6. I wouldn’t call it amazing. I would call it “a maze of crap”. Sure it had good features, but it lead to so many performance problems. It has so many bugs that we had to code around. It was a mess. The junkiness of IE6 still haunts us today. So, at this point Mr. Hewitt, you are losing credibility with me.

“Why are app stores threatening the web and luring developers like me away from it? “Evil” proprietary tech is blowing the web away. I want desperately to be a web developer again, but if I have to wait until 2020 for browsers to do what Cocoa can do in 2010, I won’t wait. I am ranting because I want to drop Cocoa and go back to the web, but I am upset about how much power I have to give up to do that. @joseph_wanja unfortunately I would recommend Cocoa [over web languages] at this point. Wish I didn’t have to say that.”

Hmmm, so Mr. Hewitt thinks that our web technologies aren’t innovative enough. Ok, I can agree to that. He seems to believe that phone apps are replacing mobile browsing altogether, and in many cases that is true. Personally, I don’t think that is a bad thing. Hewitt does. More of his tweets about it:

“@ppk That’s sort of what is happening with mobile web vs. native mobile apps, except app stores don’t extend the browser, they replace it.”

“@slauriat “best viewed in X” was not as bad as “buy another phone”, which is what we got for letting the web go to shit so apps could rise.”

“@ppk As someone who has tried to do both cutting edge native and web iPhone apps, iPhone Safari is a joke compared to iPhone Cocoa.”

He makes some good points, yet none of them are very compelling to me. Then I saw this tweet and nearly hit the roof:

“@ppk Yes, exactly. I’d rather developers had forced users to launch different browsers instead of making watered down x-browser sites.”

Oh come on! That’s just stupid. Hewitt would rather force me to launch Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and IE for different sites?!! Talk about being a geek elitist that has no regard for treating a customer with respect! I wouldn’t wish that type of web experience on my worst enemy.

If Hewitt thinks that the W3C, slow web standards, and browser manufacturers are to blame for creating a bad situation for web users, then he should seriously consider the implications of his muliple browser Internet. It would be disaster! Many people would use the web once or twice, hit the “launch a different browser” issue, and then never ever come back to the web.

People like my mom love the web. She has no clue what is really going on in the technology, but she thoroughly enjoys clicking gleefully through a carefree afternoon of travel opportunities, beauty tips, and political news. To make her launch different browsers and switch between them for each site she visits would be insanely painful for her. She would bail out in minutes.

So Joe, you may be a genious, but on this issue I deem you a first-class knucklehead. My father had a saying on the wall of his motorcycle shop, “Don’t argue with a fool – people may not be able to tell who is who.” It would be imprudent for me to continue writing more about Mr. Hewitt’s position on the state of web development. I think he is smoking something.