51–58 of 58 posts
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Do you have any proof that DOM manipulation is slow? This is a common refrain that I've never seen proof of (other then anecdotally). There are folks saying that the DOM is fast, and how the JS we use to manipulate it is slow. http://blog.korynunn.com/javascript/the-dom-isnt-slow-you-ar...
Ran this on Android 4.1.1 in chrome and it was 913ms. Desktop was ~40ms on average.
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Ran this on Android 4.1.1 in chrome and it was 913ms. Desktop was ~40ms on average.
Safari on an iPhone 5: 165ms. Surprised that the difference was so large.
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…
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5953345 for a discussion of a well-done performant mobile web app.
For me, it is not just that web apps feel slow. It is that they feel clunky . I can often see the UI elements being drawn one by one, the animations are rarely smooth, and the gestures (if I'm on mobile) never register as well as they do in native apps. The seams are showing. Even when native apps are slow, they can have a feeling of cohesiveness and polish that web apps lack.
This really feeds into npalli's point above. Comparing native vs. web by simply comparing JS execution performance is a red herring. The average native app doesn't really do that much app logic. I'd wager you can take almost any app in the App Store, rip its non-UI code out and replace it with JavaScript equivalents, and no one would be any the wiser. We're talking about software that needs to respond in human-time.…
This is a post responding to the following article that was posted on HN yesterday-ish: http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-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 bot…
For example, the anecdote about Wave that's supposed to demonstrate you can't do realtime collaboration on IE8. Well, I worked on Wave at Google (briefly) and it's no such proof. I also wrote EtherPad, which was realtime collaborative in IE6. You can't disqualify arguments of the type "I wrote an app one time" and then talk about the impossibility of writing apps.
The matter of whether phones will get yet faster is another great question, and one I'm not qualified to comment on, but I wouldn't bet against it.
I totally get the part about GC in a memory-constrained environment, photos, and the iPad's giant screen. However, the author of the original article doesn't stop before making many broad, indefensible claims.
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No. It is possible to bold and such. With some code to hook things up you have pretty much everything you need for a "real" rich text box.
Can you point me to an example of being able to click on the contenteditable div and make some text bold without extra code? I've never seen something like that. Thanks!
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At heart, arbitrary distinctions like that end up just being "apps that run well" vs "apps that run badly". And no matter how good the system, there will always be some apps in both camps.
> At heart, arbitrary distinctions like that end up just being "apps that run well" vs "apps that run badly". And no matter how good the system, there will always be some apps in both camps. What's "arbitrary" about the distinction? Any app that depends on CPU intensive work, with high memory overhead, that doesn't want to be interrupted by GC pauses, will be slow as web based mobile app. It's a technical distinction…
For me, it is not just that web apps feel slow. It is that they feel clunky . I can often see the UI elements being drawn one by one, the animations are rarely smooth, and the gestures (if I'm on mobile) never register as well as they do in native apps. The seams are showing. Even when native apps are slow, they can have a feeling of cohesiveness and polish that web apps lack.
This really feeds into npalli's point above. Comparing native vs. web by simply comparing JS execution performance is a red herring. The average native app doesn't really do that much app logic. I'd wager you can take almost any app in the App Store, rip its non-UI code out and replace it with JavaScript equivalents, and no one would be any the wiser. We're talking about software that needs to respond in human-time.…
In games, where you draw the whole screen for each frame, the magic number nowadays is 16ms. This gives you 60fps. For a TV-attached console, this is a good as it gets. For a PC it is just fine.
Taking longer than 16ms is not the end of the world, but noticeable lag for the gamer.