Re: Sites using webkitAudioContext only

On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 9:54 AM, Olivier Thereaux <
Olivier.Thereaux@bbc.co.uk> wrote:

> While Mozilla may be worried that app/sites developers will tell users to
> "just use Chrome" rather than fix a handful of lines of their code, I
> believe developers may be equally worried about bad publicity and lost
> users if they are pointed at for sticking to prefixed code and deprecated
> interfaces, or simply because their old code doesn't work everywhere when
> everyone else's (especially later adopters') does. I am hopeful that there
> is a decent compromise somewhere.
>

That will only materialize if their apps stopped working in Chrome.
Otherwise, why would they worry about bad publicity?  They're already
advertizing their content as Chrome only.


> If I can try and summarise some of the mitigating ideas which have been
> introduced in this thread so far:
>
> * Collect and maintain a list of all the significant pieces of
> documentation of the API
> * Update HTML5rocks and other documentation which we control directly
> * Get our community to help us ask implementers and writers to update
> their examples
> * Communicate positively about upcoming implementations, make it exciting
> for developers to update their code
> * Document known demos and apps using the web audio API as a way to
> contact them when needed. Also as a way to promote/thanks early adopters?
> * Publicise (more) aggressively the existence of the Monkey Patch(es)
>

You forgot a very important one!

* Convince Google to drop webkitAudioContext from Chrome as soon as
possible, and evangelize monkey patching libraries to keep sites working.

It really seems to me that we're going to great lengths just to avoid
dropping webkitAudioContext from Chrome, and the benefits of doing that are
not entirely clear.  Surely all of the arguments in favor of monkeypatch
libraries to fix all of the problems can be used to convince Chrome to just
drop webkitAudioContext?

I don't claim to have data but I've seen a fair number of tech demos for
the Web Audio API (you can look at lists gathered on
http://chromium.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/audio/samples.html or
http://webaudiodemos.appspot.com/.  Almost all of them are targeting Chrome
specifically and it's clear that most of them have not even been tested on
Safari.  I firmly believe that the only effective way to make sure that
those tech demos change is to make them stop working in the single browser
that they test against.  That would be helpful since these _are_ the
samples that people look at when they want to see how to write code using
Web Audio.

Cheers,
Ehsan