Are mobile web apps really slow?

The point of that article was to specifically call out lazy surface-level discussions of HTML5/js apps by throwing out some benchmarks, and trying to have a practical fact-based discussion. I found the article very convincing actually, and what I wanted to see was both browser-app proponents and detractors testing out the limits of what the browser is capable of, so we can determine what is and is not viable to program in the browser stack.

This piece is simply not an answer to that article in any way. It does not attempt to answer the question posed in the title, nor does it address any of the points of it's parent article. I think we need to step up the level of discussion here if we want browser tech to be more viable for general use.

They have plenty of advice on improving general performance and how to use the WebKitInspector to measure performance problems.

Some key take aways:

Avoid using libraries (like jQuery) unless you really need them - It will reduce memory consumption significantly.

Be careful how often you're invalidating style/layout info and forcing recompilation.

Avoid using onscroll events to do layout. Especially when you're likely to inadvertently invalidate styles/layout at the same time e.g. accessing element offsets and positions

Another example: try using any web based spreadsheet software after using Excel for a while. I guarantee that you'll be immediately frustrated with the web apps sluggishness.

Web apps are getting better, but anything that uses both the HID and graphics stacks is still way faster if native.

Part of me wants to resist that frame. The whole point of browsers running (sandbox safe) arbitrary code is getting the benefits of arbitrary code, right? Who wants to distort their problem solving to conform to the ad hoc details of the current state of browser vendor libraries? Isn't that what we're trying to get away from?

But then a part of me thinks... we do that with GPUs too, right? If you benchmarked a modern game that didn't use the GPU (and didn't distort what work was done to accommodate the particularities of the how the GPU expects computation to happen), its performance would be relatively speaking even more dreadful. Just like a web app that doesn't lean heavily on the browsers' libraries.

Obviously there is a difference in that browser constraints are mostly social (and thus kind of arbitrary), and GPU constraints (and those of the C64, for that matter) seem to be responses to certain physical realities.

I guess in the short run, he has the right attitude if you want to make code that actually performs well today, but wrong if you think that putting political pressure on standards bodies and browser vendors by offering up critiques like the original article is likely to improve things.