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Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5

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

#121

Post by micampe »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #87
lacosaes0 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'd check again (they're still largely html5). I like how you two make claims with no data to back them up. You both don't know how "native" or how "html5" the app is.

Haha. Jesus this whole thread was a disaster I should've stayed away from. It's a bunch of people who don't know what they're talking about spewing years old tropes about HTML that aren't even true. Gmail, Google+ are both HTML wrappers on iOS. I'm not sure what to tell you, those are well known facts, easily confirmed with half an ounce of Googling.

You keep being needlessly harsh and bitter, that’s not exactly something that invites me to continue a conversation.

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

#122

Post by mistercow »

rimantas wrote: post #99
mistercow wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>trying to shoehorn technologies created for hyperlinked text Genetic fallacy. For 75% of its development, HTML has been taregeted at greater things than hyperlinked text. >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. I would say the opposite is true. Native doesn't protect you from quirk…

> For 75% of its development, HTML has been taregeted at > greater things than hyperlinked text. Where did you get this kind of nonsense and numbers? Before Web Applications 1.0 which evolved into HTML5 were was little considerations for web apps. > If you use HTML5, you're (eventually) dealing with standards that you > can rely on so that you know your app will still work years down the > road. Oh my, where do I sta…

>Where did you get this kind of nonsense and numbers?

HTML first showed up in 1990. It started its evolution away from "hyperlinked text" with the introduction of elements like forms in 1995. It has been around for 22 years, and for 17 of those it has been for far more than hyperlinked text.

> Oh, those scary stories of the days past. There is a name for them: FUD.

I'm glad to hear that you haven't yet been bitten by placing your eggs in a basket held by a single company. Please do some research before assuming that your experience can be relied upon.

Personally, I've been bitten repeatedly. Forgive me if your screams of "FUD!" elicit a chuckle.

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

#123

Post by blub »

macspoofing wrote: post #118
rimantas wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HTML/CSS/JS is exceptionally good at building user > interfaces. Except they are not. Even with all the nice tools we have now: backbone.js, CoffeeScript, CSS preprocessors it is still a mess. Just take a look at all those struggling to get sane view management, event binding, notifications, callbacks: it is years behind mature native frameworks which has very little cruft. I really doubt all this mess can be solve…

With HTML-native-apps you get free cross-platform support, and you get to work within a very-well supported, constantly improving and performant framework. Furthermore, if you're building a SASS-type app (e.g. where your content is primarily hosted online) then using a WebView-type component will let you instantly "upgrade" your clients and you never have to worry about old versions of your app in the wild. You bette…

Please don't listen to this person, webdev is hard and you don't get anything for free. Actually, it depends if you prefer learning from painful experience or simple advice...

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

#124

Post by mistercow »

pjmlp wrote: post #98
macspoofing wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What mess? HTML/CSS/JS is exceptionally good at building user interfaces. And you're on the right side of technology by attaching yourself to the HTML bandwagon. I would go as far as to say that if you're starting development on a new ("form-based") native app, your first choice should be HTML. You only go native if you have a very good reason to do so.

Because each single browser out there has a different understanding of what HTML/CSS/JS means. Making web sites that comply to customer requirements down to pixel level, across all required target browsers is a major pain.

>Making web sites that comply to customer requirements down to pixel level, across all required target browsers is a major pain.

How is that a fair comparison to native apps? A native app can run on one platform. Making native apps pixel-for-pixel identical on multiple platforms is way more of a pain than doing so with HTML5.

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

#125

Post by blub »

macspoofing wrote: post #101
pjmlp wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because each single browser out there has a different understanding of what HTML/CSS/JS means. Making web sites that comply to customer requirements down to pixel level, across all required target browsers is a major pain.

Even with multi-browser support, it isn't that bad . But we're not talking about websites here, are we? We're talking about using HTML/CSS/JS to build native apps for mobile devices - which are by and large webkit-based. This greatly simplifies everything.

Oh really? Let's take my webkit-based mobile browser then and look at an instagram picture. Hm, it's cut in half and I can't scroll. Mobile web apps are actually iOS webapps that most of the time work on Android. Stop pretending you actually care about standards and cross-platform, you're only interested in doing less work, learning fewer things and holding users firmly by the balls in the cloud.

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

#126

Post by blub »

javajosh wrote: post #108
ttt_ wrote: post #93

I'll be saying this as a user. I wish most developers would turn to HTML5 today, like right now, and avoid native apps at all cost unless there is really no alternative. Why? Because I remember the browser wars and how much it was a terrible idea and the terrible experience it made for users who simply could not experience the internet from a single starting point. This time it's not simply a matter of downloading an…

I was with you until you said "This platform cult is pretty meaningless to me." Actually the platform wars are quite meaningful insofar as they represent large-scale manipulation of consumers. Both Apple and Google are playing the following game: hey consumer, here's a shiny device, it's pretty cheap and then we lock you into a 2-year contract, meanwhile you acquire apps that can only be run an iPhone, and now even i…

The web app already has all my data on a server somewhere. And that web app is 99% of the time closed source. And the company can cut me off, change the TOS or sell my info to advertisers. Now THAT's a lockin.

While you identified the problem, the solution is a truly open mobile OS, not webapps.

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

#127

Post by camus »

nathanpc wrote: post #2

HTML5 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.

You mean commercial products with suscpicious licensing ?

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

#128

Post by TeeWEE »

posabsolute wrote: post #14
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…

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 curre…

I have the same experiences. We wrote 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.

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

#129

Post by javajosh »

blub wrote: post #126
javajosh wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was with you until you said "This platform cult is pretty meaningless to me." Actually the platform wars are quite meaningful insofar as they represent large-scale manipulation of consumers. Both Apple and Google are playing the following game: hey consumer, here's a shiny device, it's pretty cheap and then we lock you into a 2-year contract, meanwhile you acquire apps that can only be run an iPhone, and now even i…

The web app already has all my data on a server somewhere. And that web app is 99% of the time closed source. And the company can cut me off, change the TOS or sell my info to advertisers. Now THAT's a lockin. While you identified the problem, the solution is a truly open mobile OS, not webapps.

How does a truly open mobile OS (and applications, presumably) solve the problem of vendor-specific data lock-in? Data lock-in is a totally separate, and far more difficult, problem. Part of the reason is that our data a) probably wouldn't exist, and b) probably doesn't make sense out of the context of being mixed together with everyone else's data. There is a strong a priori centralizing force for some important kinds of data.

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

#130

Post by TeeWEE »

Good work. But they are cheating in one main spot:

- they use a proxy to cut down data transfer

Good choice, but comparing it with the orignal app is not valid anymore (its not really html5 that is making it faster)

Anyway its still a very fast mobile app, and html5 is sometimes the best choice to make.

Because it is very expensive to write a different app for all platforms currently. However, currently, it is also very time consuming to have a html5 app that is on-par with native, and works well in both android and iphone.

So its a tradeoff really, html5 is not better than native, or vice versa.

Like so many things in life, it depends :-)

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