Yeah it seems like people don't understand this. We've had an era of JavaScript dominating web standards. I also don't think people realize this is only the start of wasm...
And open platforms, if browser vendors decide to break your content. Hard to say at this point whether HTML5 games will end up lasting any longer than Flash games did. Openness is valuable but you also just have to look at whether the platform owner(s) are going to stick around (Google isn't going anywhere, at least) and whether they have a long-term commitment to the products and APIs they put out there. HTML5 is starting to look like a churn nightmare between arbitrary changes to audio policy and major features getting shut off due to threats like Spectre.
Adobe was a very bad platform steward regardless, but 5 years from now it may turn out that Win32 was a better choice in terms of developer investment/maintenance than HTML5 for many developers. iOS has had an incredible upkeep cost for indie game developers who released products on it early on, and we've seen many developers opt to pull games from the store instead of spend time+money updating them.
Hopefully WebAssembly helps fix things here by providing a much cleaner compile target (with well-defined APIs) that has good performance. Moving to HTML5 had a major performance hit for people previously using Flash or Unity's plugin but most of that hit is gone once you use wasm.
This was the only good option at the time. One alternative was for people to pass .exe files around. That was a great way to spread viruses. Another alternative was Java applets which was a great way to lock up a browser. JavaScript didn't do shit in the the Netscape and IE 4/5 days. So was everyone supposed to make Windows games or just give up? Would that have been better?
Let this be a warning to young developers tying into browser platforms.
For all the openness of web standards, let's remember that browsers are proprietary.
If a browser vendor decide to do something (whatever it is, good or bad), there is pretty much nothing users or developers can do, we saw it with IE6 for a long time, we now see it with Google Chrome too.
AFAIK browser plugins were considered part of those web standards (see [0] and [1])
I was thinking in term of player base size. But now that I think about it more, player base size makes no difference in the context of this conversation.
Essentially, all software has a end of life. I'll grant that Apple has done work to maintain their software across major processor and operating system changes, but at some point that support is dropped.
Yes. Well, since 2002 some old versions aren't, but v7 onwards is. macOS is based on XNU and NeXTSTEP, which are based on Mach and BSD, but macOS is not solely a Unix system and few use it as such. In fact, if you were to make a program using only the FLOSS unixy parts of macOS, porting it to other POSIX systems would likely be trivial. I hardly even count that as "macOS software" in the exclusivity sense.
macOS being unix-based doesn't make it less proprietary. z/OS is Unix certified and proprietary as balls.
People forget that actual Unix descendants are really mostly proprietary. Linux and BSD are what we often think of today, but those are really more "Unix-like's" and many of the "true" Unixes tend to be proprietary systems like AIX, HP-UX, IRIX (now deceased), z/OS etc.
The bare core of macOS (Darwin) is open source, but pretty much everything people identify with macOS is proprietary code built on top of Darwin. You used to be able to get standalone distributions of Darwin (maybe you still can?) that people built from Apple's source and they were almost completely unrecognizable.
Right, that's my point. What most people associate with "macOS" is actually the stuff layered on top of Darwin, which is mostly proprietary. It's not just the GUI, it's also a lot of the frameworks and libraries as well.
Doubt it. There are still dozens of frameworks that still link to OpenGL, and Apple’d need to drop or update them all in a year. Most likely it will remain on the system for at least a couple years.
(Not one mention in TFA of http://homestarrunner.com, for shame)