Had no idea the Skype and Music app UI's were built with WinJS. Playing around with the demo's really does pass the eye test. This is really good stuff.
Microsoft isn't a fair comparison. They have other, multi-billion dollar cash cows to rely on.
I don't think they're unfounded. Nearly every developer I know uses chrome, and chrome dev tools. This wasn't always the case. Market share can be a lagging indicator, i think it's a little short sighted to suggest they're okay. They're not!
Forking isn't a sin. Diversity often a result of forking. Take a look at this graphic[1]. There's a good chance the browser you're currently using is a result of a fork.
Mozilla has to really examine what they stand for. The open web doesn't depend on implementation internals. Just specs, tests, and sensible governing body, and a set of willing participants that don't have unreasonable misaligned interests. They can still promote an open. Perhaps even do a better job of it with the extra resources.
Locked out of iOS. Under heavly competition on Android. Put the metro port on the back burner. Increasingly fighting to stay on feature parity with Chrome on the desktop. FirefoxOS still to make an impact.
I love Firefox. I'm just worried for it. With the world going mobile, I wonder if there's space for Firefox. It would be such a shame not to see it around 5 years from now.
I wonder if it makes sense for a small organization to spend so much time and money on a custom rendering engine. Is it such a horrible idea to fork and contribute to blink? Just thinking out loud. Mostly out of despair.
Something about Angular rubs me the wrong way. I think it has to do with dirty checking. Either that or the scope magic that happens. React, comparatively, is quite straight forward. I hope it stays that way, a minimal API and no magic.
The more I look into react the more I wonder if some intermediary representation of the DOM ought to be standardized so that a native "diff/batch" algorithm can be provided as regular functions. I think react would help this cause if it can break up into several projects (react-events, react-virtual-dom, react-dom-diff/batch, etc). Perhaps other projects can adopt parts of react into their own frameworks. Just a thought.
React is absolutely incredible! They only thing i'd ask for is better support for mobile applications. Namely, touch gestures (tap, swipe, pinch, etc). Since react uses synthetic events, perhaps pointer-events can be baked right in so that it's backwards compatible, replacing touch* events.
