Eric Meyer: ‘No, Apple Did Not Crowdfund “:focus-visible” in Safari’

Eric Meyer:

Nobody at Apple asked the crowd to fund anything. Nobody at Apple asked Igalia to crowdfund anything. They didn’t even ask Igalia to implement :focus-visible, and then Igalia decided to crowdfund the work. In fact, all of those assumptions get things almost exactly backwards  —  which is understandable! It’s what we expect from our experience of how the web has developed since at least the late 1990s. But here, something new happened. […]

In other words: the community (more precisely, a portion of it) voted on which feature was most needed, Igalia implemented it, and Apple accepted it. Apple’s role in this process came at the end, not the beginning.

In other words, a major open source project working the way open source projects are supposed to work — but seldom do. Yet somehow it was controversial. Jason Snell:

So let me decode this: Some people in the web development community have different priorities than Apple does. And it makes them grumpy. Because they think that there’s only one correct priority list—theirs. And when one of their priorities is crowdfunded into existence, because Apple had a different priority list, their reaction is not delight at finally getting a much-desired feature, but outrage. The issue isn’t the thing getting done, not really. It’s Apple choosing to not put its vast corporate resources behind their personal priority list.

★ Monday, 31 January 2022