OK, this is the post that contains everything that everyone on the inside of the browser market knows, but doesn’t say out loud. It’s time for someone to expose the emperor. It’s a shame that the main victim here turns out to be Apple, given that the king of these tactics is Google, but hey, Apple managed to come out with something that was so brash and misleading it deserves a good tear-down. (Google at I/O managed to take native client and the Chrome Store and make it all sound like it was part of html5 – it was beautiful. But that’s for another post on another day.)
First, let’s start with the awesome dichotomy. You start with this:
My god, what a beautiful thing. They are the web. I love that. I could have written it myself. I should have written it myself.
That classic Apple dark headline and light grey subtext that everyone loves. And the text: standards, CSS, JavaScript, web designers, puppies and rainbows. Who could possibly disagree with that? From a marketing perspective, it’s beautiful – non-specific, feels good, it means that Apple loves the web, and loves you.
But how do they prove it?
That’s right. If you’re not on Safari, then Fuck You.
Aside from the incendiary language I’ve used to help you understand how it feels the real underlying message here is that if you don’t have access to Safari then you must not have access to HTML5. Wait, only Safari supports HTML5??
Nope, lots of browsers do. A huge percentage of the world does have access to standards like HTML5. Today. In fact, given the page says html5, you might ask, who has the best html5 support across the browsers right now? Not Safari. Not Chrome. The browser that also happens to have a lot of market share – Firefox:
(The best overall site that gives you useful information for this stuff is actually one that a lot of people don’t use, but should: caniuse.com lovingly maintained in his own time by Alexis Deveria)
Of course, the big problem is that html5 has come to mean a lot of things, mostly thanks to Google. They’ve basically been riding that and flogging it and making it their own. (That and performance – simple, great marketing messaging. I appreciate it, even if the dishonesty of it makes my blood boil.)
And I’m sure that this entire apple site is a result of exactly the same problem we’ve been struggling with at Mozilla as of late. This is best described by a recent experience that we had from a candidate that came in to interview. He asked:
Hey, are you guys ever going to support html5?
Like, what? Are you fucking kidding me? Truth that marketing works. The perception-to-reality gap is giant.
I’m sure this was Apple is having exactly the same problem. Basically they are saying internally “omg, no one thinks we support html5, we need to prove them otherwise! We’ll put up tests! Demos! The world will then know and we can go back to being perceived as actually leading the WebKit project which is also made of puppies and rainbows!”
So you end up with sites like this. Sites that entirely miss the point of the web, interoperability, standards and html5. The demos that they put up are just filled with stuff that Apple made up, aren’t part of HTML5 and are only now getting to the standards process. Part of CSS3? Kind of, sort of, but under heavy development and still in a feedback process.
Let me be clear. I’m being snarky here essentially to get your attention. Because this is actually important. And if there’s one paragraph you should read here it’s this one:
The most important aspect of HTML5 isn’t the new stuff like video and canvas (which Safari and Firefox have both been shipping for years) it’s actually the honest-to-god promise of interoperability. Even stodgy old Microsoft, who has been doing their best to hold back the web for nearly a decade, understands this and you’ll see it throughout their marketing for IE9. (Their marketing phrase is “same markup” – watch for it and you’ll see it everywhere in their messaging.) The idea that the same markup, even with mistakes, will be rendered exactly the same. HTML5 represents the chance for browsers to work together and find common ground.
Before people misunderstand me, this is different than the question of how we innovate in browsers. Standards are part of that process, but standards follow more often than lead. HTML5 contains lots of new stuff that isn’t in IE, so it looks innovative, but most of HTML5 is like breathing to Mozilla. We’ve been doing that stuff for years. We’re more interested in what’s next at this point.
But it’s unfortunate, and I guess inevitable, that browsers would compete on how much html5 they are bathed in. But it’s important to ask: when you see someone making a claim, what does it really mean? Is that a made up test by a vendor? A demo of something that goes well beyond the standards that exist? (Tons of room for that, but it should be labeled as such!) Is it a test that is designed to show off other browser’s bugs in a meaningful and constructive way? Does the person running the tests know what they are doing and respond to constructive comments?
Apple’s messaging is clearly meant to say “hey, we love the web” but the actual demos they have and the fact that actively block other browsers from those demos don’t match their messaging. It’s not intellectually honest at all.
Since you made it this far I’ll make a promise. I can’t go back and fix the past, but I can help propose a new future. I personally end up driving a lot of the messaging that comes out of Mozilla (although maybe I won’t be after this post!) I promise that:
- I’ll be as honest as I can be about what we’re doing, what it means to other browsers and even to the new darling brand of the web: html5.
- I’ll work to make sure that demos that Mozilla does work in as many browsers as possible, even with graceful fallback.
- Demos or messages that are meant to show off stuff that’s not part of any standards process at all will be labeled as such.
HTML5 is in a dangerous place since everyone wants to own it, but everyone is in a different place in terms of support or even what it means. I can’t promise what other organizations will do, but I can at least say what I will do in the future. At Mozilla, intellectual honesty matters and it matters to me personally. So I don’t think you’ll see us do things like this in the future. To us, the web and its users matter more than any particular standard or browser. And you’ll see that reflected in messaging that comes from me and shows up as marketing.
