Are mobile web apps really slow?

#1

Post by fpgeek » Fri, Jul 12, 2013, 9:47 AM UTC

Are mobile web apps really slow?
danbricklin.com

Re: Are mobile web apps really slow?

#2

Post by anon1385 » Fri, Jul 12, 2013, 10:50 AM UTC

So, one argument in favor of web apps is that many of the common, tough-to-program operations are carefully coded by top programmers who are devoting their careers to fine-tuning that operation. Browsers are constantly being upgraded more and more of this important functionality built-in, including rich-text editing

Many tough-to-program things like rich text editing have also been implemented for you in native frameworks. For example see the source of TextEdit[1], it does not implement a rich text editing control from scratch, it uses NSTextView and the other NSText* classes.

Only slowly has Objective-C been seeing strings and hash-tables becoming more than libraries accessed like other objects. This means that handling of modern cases (e.g., characters taking up more than one byte) happens naturally, efficiently, and hopefully more bug-free

NSString has supported NSUTF8StringEncoding since OS X 10.0 (and I imagine since before that). Dictionaries and arrays did recently get some syntactic sugar, but strings have always had the @"" syntax, so I'm not sure what the author is referring to here.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/TextEdit...

Re: Are mobile web apps really slow?

#3

Post by millstone » Fri, Jul 12, 2013, 10:55 AM UTC

This means that handling of modern cases (e.g., characters taking up more than one byte) happens naturally, efficiently, and hopefully more bug-free.

This isn't true at all, right? JavaScript is missing fundamental Unicode support, like normalization or testing for canonical equivalence.

Re: Are mobile web apps really slow?

#4

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 12, 2013, 10:59 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Are mobile web apps really slow?

#5

Post by coldtea » Fri, Jul 12, 2013, 11:18 AM UTC

>Browsers are constantly being upgraded more and more of this important functionality built-in, including rich-text editing

I don't see any "rich-text editing" widgets built-in in browsers.

And even if that was the case (that they are available in some) it has been 18+ years we've have had to put with BS solutions like the common "rich-text editors" found in most Content Management Systems: slow, buggy, crappy output AND brittle.

Re: Are mobile web apps really slow?

#6

Post by hamidpalo » Fri, Jul 12, 2013, 11:19 AM UTC

Speed is only one of the tradeoffs. You also lose access to the native interactions, controls, transitions etc.., which makes a lot of the mobile web apps be very alien to the users since they don't really quite fit with the rest of the apps.

I am curious, can anyone point to an well-done mobile web app? The best way to shut up all of us yelling "js is worthless for mobile development" is to point to such apps and explain how they were made.

Re: Are mobile web apps really slow?

#7

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Jul 12, 2013, 11:20 AM UTC

anon1385 wrote: post #2

So, one argument in favor of web apps is that many of the common, tough-to-program operations are carefully coded by top programmers who are devoting their careers to fine-tuning that operation. Browsers are constantly being upgraded more and more of this important functionality built-in, including rich-text editing Many tough-to-program things like rich text editing have also been implemented for you in native frame…

In these type of discussions they tend to selectively ignore all what the desktop has brought to the development and what is possible in native code frameworks.

Re: Are mobile web apps really slow?

#8

Post by coldtea » Fri, Jul 12, 2013, 11:20 AM UTC

>For most of what we are talking about, JavaScript does not execute in a vacuum. It runs in a browser. That browser environment brings a lot to the table. The applications you are coding are often ones that lend themselves to what a browser is good for: Presenting information.

We already covered this too. Apps that are just about "presenting information" (your typical CRUD stuff, or glorified CRUD, from Gmail to twitter clients), are plenty fast.

Mobile web apps are really slow for those OTHER uses. Anything with multimedia for one.

Re: Are mobile web apps really slow?

#9

Post by camus » Fri, Jul 12, 2013, 11:31 AM UTC

The problem again is not really javascript, it is DOM manipulation. You can have the fastest javascript engine ever,if the bottelneck is the DOM , there is little you can do about it. And everybody doesnt own a quad-core mobile.

I like Titanium approach where the ui is native and the code is javascript,so you are basically using javascript with a specific API,not the DOM. I'd like to see more frameworks like this , or even , i'd like mobile os vendors to faciliate the use of their native framework with javascript, instead of having to use HTML5 in a webview for development. I believe that's what WP is doing. As much as i h*te MS , it is a good move.

Re: Are mobile web apps really slow?

#10

Post by camus » Fri, Jul 12, 2013, 11:33 AM UTC

hamidpalo wrote: post #6

Speed is only one of the tradeoffs. You also lose access to the native interactions, controls, transitions etc.., which makes a lot of the mobile web apps be very alien to the users since they don't really quite fit with the rest of the apps. I am curious, can anyone point to an well-done mobile web app? The best way to shut up all of us yelling "js is worthless for mobile development" is to point to such apps and ex…

Especially with Ios redesign , this is going to hurt , quite a lot, for some devs who tried to fake native feel. It's just difficult to reproduce in HTML5 CSS3.