Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5
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Re: Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5
#2HTML5 can be fast just like Native applications, but you need to know how to make it faster. Hopefully we are going to get more awesome libraries and frameworks like Sencha Touch to make our life easier.
Re: Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5
#3A lot of the points that they make in the video are just flaws with Facebook's implementation of the app, rather than being a point for HTML5 or a point against native.
Truth is - HTML5 apps can be made to perform well but there are limits. Battery life suffers and you may find in future that the cool animation/whatever you wanted to add in is too laggy (especially on older devices).
Re: Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5
#4We saw the latest generation of mobile devices — running at least iOS 5 or Android 4.1 — push ever increasing performance and HTML5 implementation scores.
Do the new native FB apps only run on iOS5+ and Android 4.1+? HTML5 may be ready on those platforms, but Android still has a lot of 2.x phones floating around. How do the HTML 5 benchmarks for iOS 5 run on the original iPhone 4?
Re: Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5
#5A lot of the points that they make in the video are just flaws with Facebook's implementation of the app, rather than being a point for HTML5 or a point against native. Truth is - HTML5 apps can be made to perform well but there are limits. Battery life suffers and you may find in future that the cool animation/whatever you wanted to add in is too laggy (especially on older devices).
Battery life suffers
Really? If anything I would have thought that HTML5 was more battery efficient- there's only so much you can do with it, after all.
I spent a long time optimising a mobile webapp I was working on and while it was 95% there, that last 5% bugged me to no end. So I investigated native options. But I learnt to avoid mixing CSS3 box-shadows with transition animations and that sort of thing- you definitely suffer in FPS.
Re: Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5
#6Where are the benchmark reports on phone's from 1.5 to 4.1? 64% of android phone's are still pre-honeycomb(3.0). HTML5 on Android is good now but it sucks on those earlier phones. I am sure Facebook has to take care of everyone.
Re: Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5
#7HTML5 can be fast just like Native applications, but you need to know how to make it faster. Hopefully we are going to get more awesome libraries and frameworks like Sencha Touch to make our life easier.
This. It's a lot harder to screw up when using native SDKs vs. the plethora of HTML5 frameworks, some which are more mature than others but none really seem to have a "standardized" way to easily make a performant app in the same way that the native SDKs do.
Re: Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5
#8The future is bright for HTML5 apps, clearly. There will come a time when everyone's phone is fast enough to run apps like the FB clone Sencha made and the need for native apps will start to diminish. However, we're still in the transition period where there are a sufficient number of older phones on the market that don't run HTML5 apps well, so until they are filtered out your best option is still native.
I do hope this app silences the HTML5 critics out there who say you can't get a good UX with HTML5, though. The proof is in the pudding.
Re: Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5
#9A lot of the points that they make in the video are just flaws with Facebook's implementation of the app, rather than being a point for HTML5 or a point against native. Truth is - HTML5 apps can be made to perform well but there are limits. Battery life suffers and you may find in future that the cool animation/whatever you wanted to add in is too laggy (especially on older devices).
Older devices will slowly dissipate from the market because of the ubiquitous two-year contracts, though, and eventually everyone's phones will be capable of delivering native-like performance on HTML5 apps. It's only a matter of time.
Re: Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5
#10Why do we see plenty of articles saying that HTML5 can be as good or better than native code and no actual applications doing it?
Facebook and Google tried and miserably failed, LinkedIn and Twitter are probably the ones closest to actually doing it, but users still prefer the native version, why?
One I think is a big reason is clearly visible in the video: scrolling physics are different. It's annoying and feels wrong and I think people notice even if they probably don't know how to describe it.
Maybe with this Sencha contest we'll see some good ones.