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If you read between the lines, what it seemed he was saying is what they tried to do was hybridize native and HTML, and when you do that there's always a seam between the systems. But this will take several years.īrendan Eich, the CTO of Mozilla, an organization betting on web technologies, has a different take on Facebook’s failure with HTML5, according to ZDNet: Over the next several years, these operating systems will stabilize and innovation will slow at this level, making a standards approach more feasible. The race for market share is driving a tremendous amount of change and innovation at the device operating system level.
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This dynamic is very true for the current mobile device platforms. The best apps and the most ground-breaking innovation at this stage therefore happen very close to the OS. Historically when a new OS is introduced, the capabilities are so new that the only way to exploit them is at the OS level. Mobile innovation is still moving at lightening speed, far outpacing the velocity that a ‘standards’ approach can ever achieve. In a comment for InfoQ, Nat Friedman, CEO of Xamarin, maker of tools for building cross-platform native apps, welcomed Facebook’s move: “This shift to embracing native experiences is a great thing for the entire mobile ecosystem - device manufacturers, app publishers, and most importantly, consumers.” He also noted that it is too early for mobile standards to emerge:
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Some of these issues have already been submitted to the W3C Web Performance WG. Other issues mentioned by Langel were: the GPU, which comes as “a black-box”, the need for better touch tracking support on Android, smoother animations, and better caching.
Facebook beta reactions android#
Perf issue with touch events on Android devices (latency, not enough events) which makes JS implementations of scrolling more brittle there. JS implementation end up being tailored for one OS and feels wrong on other ones (uncanny valley). Native momentum scrolling has a different feel across operating systems. GPU buffer exhaustion due to size of content and number of images. Inconsistent frame rates, UI thread lag (stuttering). Langel would like to know the memory usage for heap, objects, GPU buffers, and information on GC cycles, FPS, and other resource limits.Īnother issue with HTML5 remarked by Langel was scrolling performance, mostly done with JavaScript because “other options were not fast enough”, noting: GPU buffer exhaustion? Reaching resource limits? Something else? Hard to say. Unfortunately, it's difficult for us to understand exactly what's causing these issues. Given the size of our content, it's not uncommon for our application to exhaust the hardware capabilities of the device, causing crashes. The biggest issues we've been facing here are memory related. The lack of tooling in mobile browsers makes it very difficult to dig down and find out what the real issues are. The first problem Langel mentioned was the lack of debugging tools:
Facebook beta reactions software#
Tobie Langel, a Facebook software engineer and W3C AC Representative, detailed in a post the performance issues encountered by Facebook while building a mobile web presence based on HTML5. Zuckerberg did not say exactly what was their problem with HTML5, but he suggested the quality of such products was not good enough: “There are mobile experiences out there that are so good, that … we need to have the highest quality, and the only way is doing native.” Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has recently declared during an interview for TechCrunch that “the biggest mistake that we made as a company is betting too much on HTML5 as opposed to native because it just wasn’t there,” and “since we’ve done the iOS app we’ve seen double the amount of feeds people consume.” This article contains technical details behind FB’s move, and reactions from Xamarin and Mozilla. Facebook has decided to go native for mobile content instead of doing HTML5 as it was the plan for a couple of years.