Mozilla has 1.4 BILLION dollars that they are spending on some AI bullshit.

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@oblomov @cstross @jwz

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@oblomov @cstross @jwz The line is straight when you know the route it took, seemingly coincidental otherwise.

But as the HipCrime Vocab defines "coincidence": you weren't paying attention to the other half of what was going on.

And, err, though I'm in danger of exhausting my quote quota, the proof is in the proverbial pudding.

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@oblomov @cstross @jwz As you will note by some research, in April 2005, so before the publication of WebKit, there was already discontent in the KHTML community in how Apple was developing WebKit as a fork.

How can that be? They complied with the letter, but not the spirit of the GPL. https://web.archive.org/web/20050428230122/http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/view/1001

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@jens @cstross @jwz yeah, this is also something I tried pointing out on the subsequent rapid expansion of Chrome. Everybody was saying «relax, (the core) is free software». Which matters very little when the only thing that truly matters is who controls the platform. FLOSS is not immune to the dangers of monocultures (or of corporate control for that matter).

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@oblomov @cstross @jwz by the way, @lisamelton might have some views.

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@oblomov @cstross @jwz @lisamelton At any rate, Dave Hyatt was a former Mozilla dev who switched to Apple and started Safari, and so this entire thing.

He was also representing Apple at WHATWG from what I understand.

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@oblomov @cstross @jwz @lisamelton And then we know how much Google pays Apple yearly since, well... neither 2004, the WHATWG start, nor 2008, the Chrome start, but... did you guess when?

2005.

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-apple-iphone-search-engine-safari-deal-20-billion-2022-2024-5

It's all coincidence until it isn't.

Google's enclosure of the web has over two decades of history, back when their motto was still "Don't be Evil".

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@oblomov @cstross @jwz The WHATWG position paper is from 2004: https://www.w3.org/2004/04/webapps-cdf-ws/papers/opera.html

The working draft cited there edited by Google. Full authors at the bottom:
https://whatwg.org/specs/web-forms/current-work/

XHTML 2.0 specs have been sitting in decision limbo since 2002, when it was finished: https://www.w3.org/2007/03/XHTML2-WG-charter

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@oblomov @cstross @jwz The last bit of glue, which I can only give you second hand from personal acquaintances I shall not out here, is the frustration in XHTML WG about Google and Apple blocking adoption with ever more spurious reasons.

There's probably an archive of minutes somewhere.

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@oblomov @cstross @jwz The public archive of XHTML starts in 2007, but the private part requires membership.

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xhtml2/

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@oblomov @cstross @jwz I mean, there's also that Mozilla Corporation was launched in 2005, and crypto turd Marc Andreessen decided that was a good moment to heap praise on the new CEO https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1972656_1972712_1974235,00.html

Tumultous times, which weren't all dark. Firefox started making waves after this.

So here's another thing to contemplate.

[lisamelton@mastodon.social]

@jens That is incorrect. We forked KHTML and KJS in 2001 shortly after I arrived at Apple. We didn't make it known that we had forked it until Safari was released publicly as a beta in early 2003. After that we released periodic tarballs of our changes. Internally we had called them WebCore and JavaScriptCore and referred to both as WebKit. I'm the person who christened it as such. 2005 is when we put WebKit on a public repository and invited participation.

@oblomov @cstross @jwz