Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5 • Hacker News Board

Re: Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5

#71

Post by suprfresh » Mon, Dec 17, 2012, 5:45 PM UTC

marknutter wrote: post #42

tterrace wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true but wouldn't you (as of today) still be much more comfortable going that route with a non-trivial project? Less time spent on the cutting edge battling the idiosyncrasies of the platform and more time building your app.

It depends on the resources available. If I were a CEO and the company was flush with cash, I'd just brute force it by hiring native developers across all platforms or farm it out to specialized native dev shops. If was a CEO of a smaller company tight on cash with a bunch of web developers, however, I'd go the HTML5 or hybrid route because it'd be the best utilization of my company's time and resources. This isn't a…

Definitely agree. I'm not sure why many people think its just so cut and dry. The tradeoffs between html5 vs native are pretty much known at this point. Take those and rationalize along with the resources you have available, the cost, and time you can afford. Just ship something.

Re: Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5

#72

Post by paulkopacki » Mon, Dec 17, 2012, 5:48 PM UTC

andrewmunn wrote: post #45

I'd like to clarify one thing. The "native" Android app that was tested, isn't actually native. Native newsfeed shipped in Facebook for Android 2.0, but 1.9.2 was used in the comparison. Thus, the comparison was between two html5 implementations of newsfeed. That said, I'd love to see a side by side video with Facebook for Android 2.0.

give the comparison a try. fastbook (the sencha html5 facebook app) is here fb.html5isready.com.

Re: Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5

#73

Post by amasad » Mon, Dec 17, 2012, 5:50 PM UTC

spiantino wrote: post #67

brianchu wrote: post #11

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 a…

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…

I doubt that JavaScript is the bottleneck here.

Re: Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5

#74

Post by MrScruff » Mon, Dec 17, 2012, 5:59 PM UTC

marknutter wrote: post #41

technoslut wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google hasn't "miserably" failed, they use the same basic strategy that LinkedIn does; namely, a they make hybrid mobile apps where they mix both native and HTML5 components to get the best performance and flexibility. It's worked quite well for them. Maybe I'm mistaken but Google released an official Gmail app on iOS that was basically HTML. Everyone hated it. The same goes for the situation with GMaps. Virtually n…

I've never actually been able to get a confirmation one way or the other oh which of Google's native apps are "hybrid" apps and just how much of those apps is done in HTML5. The previous version of their gmail app seemed to employ a lot of HTML5 because you could see the main inbox list re-render occasionally. That app performed perfectly well for me. Unless we hear from Google officially about the new app we'll neve…

It's certainly not fully native. It has a number of issues that make it a poor experience in my opinion.

- Emulated scrolling feels wrong. This is my biggest issue.

- Slow launch and mailbox load time.

- Numerous short pauses while navigating.

It's a big improvement over the previous iteration, sure, but as a user I don't see why I should lower my standards just because Google (a company not short of engineering resources) chooses to advocate a particular technology.

Re: Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5

#75

Post by umsm » Mon, Dec 17, 2012, 6:04 PM UTC

I was tasked with creating the phone app for the company I work for. Here are the key points:

  - The project took 2 months for me to learn the sencha framework AND to build the app from scratch (it's live in the app store).

  - The app performs well on the iphone 4, but the best performance is on the iphone 4S and later.

  - The Android version is not as smooth. It's significantly slower. This means it's not truly cross-platform.

  - People with the iphone 4S / 5 don't know it's not a native app until I tell them.

Re: Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5

#76

Post by dexcs » Mon, Dec 17, 2012, 6:07 PM UTC

The problem with HTML5 are the different vendors with their different opinions. And that problem will make native apps faster and easier to maintain than html5 for the next few years....

Re: Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5

#77

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Dec 17, 2012, 6:10 PM UTC

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #66

micampe wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why so angry? Google's current iOS apps are great, the previous releases, the ones with heavy HTML use, were definitely not. I don't think they would be shocked by this, a guess supported by the fact that they have new, completely different ones. It's wrong for Sencha to force the bounce where it doesn't belong, but that's not what I was referring to and the physics are wrong on iOS too.

I'm not angry, you're just confused. >Google's current iOS apps are great, the previous releases, the ones with heavy HTML use, were definitely not I'd check again (they're still largely html5). >but that's not what I was referring to and the physics are wrong on iOS too. Right, but that's because they're completely hijacking the scroll behavior to be able to do the "fancy" inertial and bounce scrolling...

[deleted]

Re: Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5

#78

Post by technoslut » Mon, Dec 17, 2012, 6:19 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #53

technoslut wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google hasn't "miserably" failed, they use the same basic strategy that LinkedIn does; namely, a they make hybrid mobile apps where they mix both native and HTML5 components to get the best performance and flexibility. It's worked quite well for them. Maybe I'm mistaken but Google released an official Gmail app on iOS that was basically HTML. Everyone hated it. The same goes for the situation with GMaps. Virtually n…

Everyone hated it. There's a tech community confirmation bias at work here. I can't see what the ratings were like before the most recent version, but Gmail has a 3.5/5 rating on the App Store right now. I suspect that a lot of "ignorant" non-tech users found it to be fine.

The ratings were particularly low before it went native. I know because I have a Gmail account in Mail.app and didn't use it because of this.

It's one thing not to listen to MG Siegler complain. It's another to excuse everyone else who complains on the App Store. They may not know the reason but they know the effect.

Re: Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5

#79

Post by sil3ntmac » Mon, Dec 17, 2012, 6:26 PM UTC

To me the most impressive thing is that Sencha Touch can run at any reasonable performance level. Has anyone used the framework? iirc there's >1mb debug JS, randomly-generated element IDs, a mess in general. The thing would hang my chrome for a couple moments just to parse the js. Obviously this is solved with minification/dynamic script loading, but Sencha's kitchen-sink approach really doesn't seem to help much in the area of performance.

Re: Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5

#80

Post by jdminhbg » Mon, Dec 17, 2012, 6:29 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #53

technoslut wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google hasn't "miserably" failed, they use the same basic strategy that LinkedIn does; namely, a they make hybrid mobile apps where they mix both native and HTML5 components to get the best performance and flexibility. It's worked quite well for them. Maybe I'm mistaken but Google released an official Gmail app on iOS that was basically HTML. Everyone hated it. The same goes for the situation with GMaps. Virtually n…

Everyone hated it. There's a tech community confirmation bias at work here. I can't see what the ratings were like before the most recent version, but Gmail has a 3.5/5 rating on the App Store right now. I suspect that a lot of "ignorant" non-tech users found it to be fine.

I suspect that a lot of "ignorant" non-tech users didn't find it at all. You have to be fairly adventurous to even try a different mail client than the default Apple app.