9 ms·

I ran the HTML5 app on my iTouch 4G running iOS 6 (roughly equivalent to iPhone 3GS) and compared it to the native FB app. The HTML5 app had noticeable lag in t

I ran the HTML5 app on my iTouch 4G running iOS 6 (roughly equivalent to iPhone 3GS) and compared it to the native FB app. The HTML5 app had noticeable lag in the swipe transitions. It also crashed once when loading a photo (only once though). Not to mention that they implement almost everything differently and leave out 90% of FB's features. That being said, it was really smooth on my iTouch 5G. The demo HTML5 app also runs in Safari. The problem is that Safari's Nitro JS engine is much faster than the older JS engine used in a UIWebView (I think the restriction is supposedly due to security). For the moment, native is still the way to go, IMO. But I've always believed that at a certain point iPhones/Androids and their browsers will be powerful and efficient enough to negate any performance drawbacks to HTML 5. I think that point might arrive by the iPhone 6 or so, when developers might feel comfortable dropping support for the iPhone 3GS and equivalent. In fact, many devs are already dropping support for the iPhone 3GS.

posabsolute 14y ago
I am currently developing a vanilla (no mobile frameworks like sencha) mobile web app I can attest that on IOS you can pretty much get native performance if you do some trade off and optimize your app rendering. On android that's another game and you can forget about all those cozy animations and only devices with android 4.0+ will perform well, or at all (in my case anyway). Also I'm really not sure why people currently associate html5 apps with bad battery life, personally I did not see any noticeable differences in usage from a native one, hell native use a lot more the gpu so it should be worse.
- TeeWEE 14y ago
  I have the same experiences. We wrote http://hyves.nl/hybrid http://hyves.nl/hybrid which works wonderfully on iOS. But didnt really deliver the HTML promise on Android. Maybe because of the browser which was not as good as the safari a year ago. And maybe also because of slower phones. However the same code did run on iOS blackberry and Android. However the experience was sub-native on most devices. And we really needed to do a lot of tweaking and work to get the native look and feel on iOS. So if you want to be the best, no matter the costs, go native. Otherwise Sencha is not a bad choice to make. It really depends on your requirements.
- cheeaun 14y ago
  Is that app on github or something? Would love to try it.
rimantas 14y ago
Even when browsers are powerfull enough the mess what is trying to shoehorn technologies created for hyperlinked text into apps development will still be a mess. It may appeal for those who know only the said technologies, but frankly, they would be better of by just learning the native instead of spending time traying to fight quirks. As for the appeal "run everythere"—that's just some more quirks. Good luck with that. I am very experienced web developer and probably know html, css, js and all that jazz better than I do know Objective-C and Cocoa Touch, but building mobile apps with web technologies is the last thing I want to do.
- mtrimpe 14y ago
  It's all about who is able to get their VM in the most places; Java already lost that battle and Flash is on the way out. It seems like JavaScript is the new ActionScript.
  - macspoofing 14y ago
    >It seems like JavaScript is the new ActionScript Not even close.
    - andybak 14y ago
      Why not?
      - macspoofing 14y ago
        It's a very strange comparison to me. JS is intrinsically tied to the DOM, HTML and Web technologies, the underlying VM has widely used open-source implementations (V8, WebKit, Gecko), and JavaScript is not controlled by any single company.
        mtrimpe 14y ago
        My comparison was of a more practical nature and practically speaking the most distributed VM is the browser. The browser itself used to be too slow for many use cases which led to Flash filling in the gap, but thankfully that's rapidly changing with improved JIT VMs and HTML5 standardization efforts (WebRTC e.a.) all leading to the eventual demise of Flash. Hence; JavaScript is the new ActionScript. P.S. They're both just ECMAScript flavors so in that sense I would say they're very close ;)
spiantino 14y ago
Safari uses a tracing JIT compiler, meaning that it's taking pieces of javascript and, in real time, turning them into machine code and executing the machine code. It then will save these "traces" and reuse them for recurring pieces of code. This requires special permission to add execute permission to memory that the app had allocated and used for data, which is pretty dangerous. So Safari gets it and 3rd party apps do not.
- amasad 14y ago
  I doubt that JavaScript is the bottleneck here.
rakkhi 14y ago
Wrote this in 2010 still seems valid:http://www.rakkhis.com/2010/10/rich-vs-thin-client-20-native-app-or.html?m=0 http://www.rakkhis.com/2010/10/rich-vs-thin-client-20-native...
wamatt 14y ago
Many seem to be missing the point here. While native in the mobile context, has the potential to be faster, it's a necessary, but not sufficient condition for superior responsiveness and usability. Even with the native app, the same poor design decisions are being repeated once again. For example, not caching data locally between screens - an especially egregious oversight in the context of mobile networking. I think the broader issue however, is just how out of touch Mark Zuckerberg was with regards to mobile and perhaps even emerging web technology in general. He eventually admitted to screwing up (great!), but then got it so wrong again, by declaring HTML5 as the culprit. The problem was almost certainly more attributable to people and management issues, rather than a technological misstep, irrespective of whether that resulted in a more palatable conclusion for Mr Zuckerberg's ego. As for the Sencha demo, after installing it on my iPhone 4s it works really well, and installing it as app on the home screen makes it virtually indistinguishable from native. I think it's fair to say this is a rather significant achievement by Sencha, indeed considering it's a part time effort. Which makes one wonder what a full time team, with the right leadership and resources, could have achieved at Facebook.
mbesto 14y ago
What incentive does Apple have to make the web browser on their iOS devices better?

posabsolute 14y ago

I am currently developing a vanilla (no mobile frameworks like sencha) mobile web app I can attest that on IOS you can pretty much get native performance if you do some trade off and optimize your app rendering. On android that's another game and you can forget about all those cozy animations and only devices with android 4.0+ will perform well, or at all (in my case anyway). Also I'm really not sure why people currently associate html5 apps with bad battery life, personally I did not see any noticeable differences in usage from a native one, hell native use a lot more the gpu so it should be worse.

TeeWEE 14y ago
I have the same experiences. We wrote http://hyves.nl/hybrid http://hyves.nl/hybrid which works wonderfully on iOS. But didnt really deliver the HTML promise on Android. Maybe because of the browser which was not as good as the safari a year ago. And maybe also because of slower phones. However the same code did run on iOS blackberry and Android. However the experience was sub-native on most devices. And we really needed to do a lot of tweaking and work to get the native look and feel on iOS. So if you want to be the best, no matter the costs, go native. Otherwise Sencha is not a bad choice to make. It really depends on your requirements.
cheeaun 14y ago
Is that app on github or something? Would love to try it.

rimantas 14y ago

Even when browsers are powerfull enough the mess what is trying to shoehorn technologies created for hyperlinked text into apps development will still be a mess. It may appeal for those who know only the said technologies, but frankly, they would be better of by just learning the native instead of spending time traying to fight quirks. As for the appeal "run everythere"—that's just some more quirks. Good luck with that. I am very experienced web developer and probably know html, css, js and all that jazz better than I do know Objective-C and Cocoa Touch, but building mobile apps with web technologies is the last thing I want to do.

mtrimpe 14y ago
It's all about who is able to get their VM in the most places; Java already lost that battle and Flash is on the way out. It seems like JavaScript is the new ActionScript.
- macspoofing 14y ago
  >It seems like JavaScript is the new ActionScript Not even close.
  - andybak 14y ago
    Why not?
    - macspoofing 14y ago
      It's a very strange comparison to me. JS is intrinsically tied to the DOM, HTML and Web technologies, the underlying VM has widely used open-source implementations (V8, WebKit, Gecko), and JavaScript is not controlled by any single company.
      - mtrimpe 14y ago
        My comparison was of a more practical nature and practically speaking the most distributed VM is the browser. The browser itself used to be too slow for many use cases which led to Flash filling in the gap, but thankfully that's rapidly changing with improved JIT VMs and HTML5 standardization efforts (WebRTC e.a.) all leading to the eventual demise of Flash. Hence; JavaScript is the new ActionScript. P.S. They're both just ECMAScript flavors so in that sense I would say they're very close ;)

spiantino 14y ago

Safari uses a tracing JIT compiler, meaning that it's taking pieces of javascript and, in real time, turning them into machine code and executing the machine code. It then will save these "traces" and reuse them for recurring pieces of code. This requires special permission to add execute permission to memory that the app had allocated and used for data, which is pretty dangerous. So Safari gets it and 3rd party apps do not.

amasad 14y ago
I doubt that JavaScript is the bottleneck here.

rakkhi 14y ago

Wrote this in 2010 still seems valid:http://www.rakkhis.com/2010/10/rich-vs-thin-client-20-native-app-or.html?m=0 http://www.rakkhis.com/2010/10/rich-vs-thin-client-20-native...

wamatt 14y ago

Many seem to be missing the point here. While native in the mobile context, has the potential to be faster, it's a necessary, but not sufficient condition for superior responsiveness and usability. Even with the native app, the same poor design decisions are being repeated once again. For example, not caching data locally between screens - an especially egregious oversight in the context of mobile networking. I think the broader issue however, is just how out of touch Mark Zuckerberg was with regards to mobile and perhaps even emerging web technology in general. He eventually admitted to screwing up (great!), but then got it so wrong again, by declaring HTML5 as the culprit. The problem was almost certainly more attributable to people and management issues, rather than a technological misstep, irrespective of whether that resulted in a more palatable conclusion for Mr Zuckerberg's ego. As for the Sencha demo, after installing it on my iPhone 4s it works really well, and installing it as app on the home screen makes it virtually indistinguishable from native. I think it's fair to say this is a rather significant achievement by Sencha, indeed considering it's a part time effort. Which makes one wonder what a full time team, with the right leadership and resources, could have achieved at Facebook.

mbesto 14y ago

What incentive does Apple have to make the web browser on their iOS devices better?